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... brain. A true philosopher is characterized by his love for the truth. Plato defends his theory of a philosopher making the best king by writing, "a good ruler must have a good character as well as a good mind; he must always be truthful, high-minded and disciplined, and never mean, petty, or cowardly. " A philosopher will satisfy these requirements.
For example since the philosopher loves truth he will always be honest. Money or possessions will not matter to him. Thus he will rule for the good of the state and try to better the society. Plato take about the Theory of Form at book V. It is here that he compares knowledge and belief.
Socrates points out that to know is to know some thing; thus, knowledge must have objects. Likewise, to believe is to believe something; therefore, belief also must have objects. But knowledge is different from belief in that knowledge is infallible. Knowledge also involves the fact that the thing known exists. The objects of knowledge are also unchanging and eternal. Belief, on the other hand, may be true or false and the objects of beliefs may or may not exist.
The distinction between actual objects and ideal objects are also discussed in Book V. Actual objects are the objects of opinion and sensation and the ideal objects are the objects of knowledge and intellect. This distinction is crucial to Plato's Theory of Forms. There are forms of things and forms of thought, and it is the forms of thought that the philosopher is concerned with.
An example of a form of thought is beauty. The man who sees beauty itself has knowledge and the man who sees only beautiful things has mere belief. A person who sees a rose may believe that the rose is beautiful, but they do not really understand the nature of beauty itself, they are only basing their opinion on the image of the rose. However, philosophers realize that the ordinary things of life, such as the rose, are nothing but fleeting and changeable images of what is truly real (the forms).
Therefore, only philosophers can be said to have knowledge. Images, such as the rose, can be beautiful one day, but, over time, may become less beautiful or not beautiful at all, such as shriveled, dying roses. But the idea of beauty never decays and is eternal. Plato says that the reason that the Forms are truly real is because only something that never changes is real in the fullest sense. The ordinary objects around us a "real" only in a secondary sense and these are "images" or imperfect copies of the Forms. Socrates's Allegory of the Cave describes how most people are trapped in their own little world, oblivious to what is really going on around them.
The story is basically made up of five parts, the shadow, the fire, the common man, the ascending man, and the descending man. The shadow represents what is perhaps Plato's most difficult philosophy to understand. The idea of "forms" was an original idea of Plato that has held up under the scrutiny of many until even the present day. According to Plato, things you can see, feel, or touch for example, a chair, are not a genuine article, but merely a shadow of the real thing. He believed that these forms existed in parallel somewhere, and had was the essence of the real thing. For example, the form of a chair exists somewhere, and embodies everything that all chairs have in common.
It doesn't mean that we can describe it, because not all chairs have four legs, or any legs for that matter. Not all chairs are meant to be sat in, or have arms. What does every chair have in common? No one can fully answer that question.
When stated like this it can easily be understood, but when someone asks what all chairs have in common, or what all windows have in common, the idea of this "form" becomes cloudy because these questions can not be answered. The same can said about a truly just decision, or an action. He believed the same about ideas, such as truth and justice. For example when I perform a just act, it is just because it conforms to the ideal form of justice. The idea of forms is carried on to earth by the fact that all things such as ideas, and objects have a tangible existence. We act out these ideas, and make chairs, therefore they are tangible.
The second idea in the Allegory of the Cave is the common man. According to Plato, they represent all people before they are fully educated. The common man sees nothing but the shadows on the wall of the cave. These shadows represent everything that we have ever seen, and since they are the only things we have ever seen, they constitute all that is real to us. Being fully educated involves the ability to see everything, including all that is outside the cave. The third part, the fire, is merely there to shed light on the forms, casting a shadow into the cave.
Thus creating the only reality that the common man sees. The fourth part is the ascending man. This is the one man who manages to emerge from the cave that shelters the common man. Once he comes out, he finally understands the forms, and becomes fully educated.
He sees that the shadows only hinted at the truth of reality. The fire can give you a vague idea of what the reality of things are, but until you surface, then you only see the "shadow" of reality. The final part is the descending man. He's the person who came out of the cave and became enlightened. He's on his way back to tell the others what he's learned, and try to get them to understand that there really is more to life than the shadows that everyone sees. The story that basically tells us of Socrates trial by his "peers" because of what he saw that they could not.
The man in the cave tried to return to the cave after being released, so that they might experience some of the beauty that he was allowed to view. He was murdered for his attempts to persuade. Truly in our times we have many freedoms including that of free speech. But our taking advantage of those freedoms, not using them for positive thought, puts us in that cave. The only way to release ourselves from the malaise or bonds of everyday lives, is to attempt to see every situation or thought as valuable in some way. We owe it to philosophers to at least give their beliefs an honest evaluation without condemning them.
We all know what exists outside the cave. The people in the cave however, truly believe that the man allowed to leave was psychotic when he told them of what he had seen. .".. all the customary rules of religion and moral conduct imposed on the individual by social sanctions have their origin in human intelligence and will and always rest on tacit consent. They are neither laws of nature nor divine enactments, but conventions which man who made them can alter, as laws are changed or repealed by legislative bodies.
It is assumed that, if all these artificial restraints were removed, the natural man would be left only with purely egotistic instincts and desires, which he would indulge in all that Thrasymachus commended as injustice. " Plato continues his discussion of Forms later on. Socrates is trying to convince his companions why a philosopher would make the best king. On reason is that being a philosopher, the king will have knowledge of the Forms, and therefore have true knowledge. It is very important to Plato for a ruler to have knowledge of Justice and Goodness, so that he may administer justice and act for the good of his people.
The Form of Goodness is the highest and most important of all the Forms, it is not on a level with the other forms, for the other Forms derive their truth and reality from Goodness. Socrates goes on to use an analogy of the sun to explain the highest for of knowledge, Goodness. Light is what makes things visible and the best source of light is the sun. The sun is not the same as visible things, but it is what makes vision itself possible.
Similarly, the good is not the same as the objects of knowledge, but it is the source of knowledge. To see requires sun, to know requires reason. The analogy can be stated as, the idea of good is to reasoning as the sun is to seeing. Also in this book, Pluto expands on his distinction between knowledge and belief.
He divides them into four kinds of "objects." There are two degrees of knowledge and two degrees of belief. The highest degree of knowledge is Goodness, followed by the other Forms. The first degree of belief are physical objects, as the second degree of belief are shadows and images of the physical objects. In the last book, Plato criticizes poetry and the fine arts. Plato feels that art is merely the imitation of the imitation of reality, and that poetry corrupts the soul.
Socrates says that artists merely create things. As an example, if a painter draws a couch on his canvas, he is creating a couch. But the couch he creates is not the real couch, it is nothing but a copy of an ordinary, physical couch which was created by a craftsman. But the ordinary, physical couch is nothing more than an imperfect copy, or image of the Form of Couch. So, the couch on the canvas is nothing but a copy of a copy of the real couch and is therefore three times removed from reality. Socrates then goes on to explain that an artist's knowledge is also third-rate.
If an artist is painting a picture of a table, for example, he is copying a table that has been manufactured by a furniture-maker, and this furniture-maker has more knowledge of the table than the painter does. But there is someone who has ever more knowledge about the table, the person who wants to have the table made. He is the one who gives the furniture-maker instructions to follow when making the table, according to its purpose for the buyer. So, the buyer of the table knows more about the table than the furniture-maker, and the furniture-maker knows more about the table than the painter.
Socrates believes that only philosophers have the first-hand knowledge of things, since they believe in The Forms. Socrates also denounces Homer. Socrates feels that in his writing, Homer has pretended to be people he is not, such as a politician, general, businessman, teacher, and philosopher. Socrates feels this is wrong because Homer is claiming to be able to perform these functions that he has written about, but never really performed himself. He feels that Homer is abandoning "reality." Plato feels that poetry has no place in his Ideal State, and should be banished until it can show itself to be a friend of philosophy. Socrates also mentions about the existence of an immortal soul.
With this concession, he makes the point that good is that which preserves and benefits. Justice is good, so it therefore preserves and benefits in this life as well as the next. Therefore, even though a man may wish to behave badly when no one is looking, as with the myth of the ring of Games, in fact, behaving justly will have the most rewards. The Republic was Plato's ways of expressing his Theory of Forms and Justice.
The main idea perhaps is to make people understand that there can be no justice within a society whose people are not "just" within themselves. There needs to be an internal justice, within the people, and within each person, in order to bring peace to the society. From reading the Republic, I realized that some issues he mentions are very clear, and some are not clear since I live in a different society and time. Plato does not describe his ideal society in great detail since he is considered with the ideal idea itself, and it is hard for me as a materialist to understand without seeing. One thing that is clear is that Plato tries to defend his theory all along and lets us, "the unacknowledged, " experience a glimpse of the good.
Plato's belief seemed that life was to involve a movement upward toward the good, as this was a movement of the Soul. Bibliography: Plato. Republic Penguin Books, NY 1987
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Research essay sample on Theory Of Forms Allegory Of The Cave
