"The Cave" and the "Republic": Plato's World
The tragic death of Socrates caused a great shock in the hearts of Plato (427-347 B.C.), the son of the nobility, and the political ambition that had once been his greatest ambition was suddenly extinguished, and he embarked on a career of dedication to philosophy. He was just 28 years old, an age when his mind was maturing. He was determined to carry forward the teachings of his mentor and let his mentor's fame pass on for eternity; he also destroyed the democratic system established by the "mob" and the "rabble" and replaced it with the rule of the outstanding talents. More than 50 years later, when he died peacefully, the first part of his ambition had been fulfilled with a clear conscience, and the latter part of his ambition was still stuck on paper - theoretically achieved, that is, his "ideal country". Plato's image is very different from his own teacher. He was talented and heroic, and his name came from his broad shoulders. This handsome young man, who has won a good place in the Games twice, is indeed a brilliant warrior. Such a strong and fleshy young man would not have become a philosopher. However, the encounter with Socrates changed his life. It's not so comfortable to see the teacher hit the opponent's crux of the finger with sharp questions, destroying dead dogmas and arbitrary fantasies. This gave his sensitive mind the pleasure of wisdom that could not be enjoyed in rough movement. So he took Socrates as his teacher and devoted himself to intellectual conquest and analysis of ideas, and studied for 8 years. The unfortunate death of his teacher interrupted his study. He had to leave Athens, the land of right and wrong, and traveled across the ocean, traveling all over Egypt, Italy, and even India. During this 12-year wandering, he sucked up knowledge, worshipped numerous holy places, and tried countless teachings. The experience of interacting with many nationalities and the wisdom drawn from different countries made him retreat from some of the enthusiasm of young people like fire and increase the depth of his thinking.
When he returned to Athens in 387 BC, he was no longer at the age of confusion. By this time, his chest was filled with his own thoughts, and they were rushing around in his mind, ready to come out. So he settled down, wrote books and lectures, and recruited disciples. He founded a school in a garden northwest of the city of Athens. The garden was named after the ancient Greek hero Agademus, hence the name "Academy"," which later evolved from the word "Academia"— hence the history of philosophy referring to the Platonic School as the "School of The Academy" or the "Agadimi School." When Plato traveled to Italy, he was very close to the Pythagoreans and was also quite affected, so his school was basically organized according to the Pythagorean school model, and the subjects taught were similar, mainly philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, animals, plants, etc., with special emphasis on mathematics. The school produced a large number of outstanding figures, led by Aristotle, and existed for more than 900 years until it was closed by the Roman Emperor Justinian in 529 AD. It became the predecessor of various universities that developed since the Middle Ages.
Here, Plato taught and wrote for 41 years. He never used to give lectures or notes, did not give cramming speeches, but liked to ask questions for students to answer, and then analyze and summarize them, just like his teacher Socrates. Because of his dedication to his academic career, he has always lived a single life. Of course, this practice of his is completely submissive to his theory: the good god, fearing that the whole soul will go down to chaos, divides it into two, forming a distinction between men and women, and love is the half of the soul to pursue the other half of himself; and Plato is convinced that he is a savior who is different from ordinary people, that the soul has not been divided into two, and that there is no reason to pursue a woman. To this day, the much-talked about "platonic spiritual love" derives from this statement. Plato was diligent in his writing, and wrote more than 30 kinds of books in his lifetime, most of which were written in the form of dialogue, and his style was gorgeous and varied, and the elegance and fluency of his writing were unparalleled in the history of philosophy. Fortunately, much of his writings have survived, giving interested parties a glimpse into his ideas. We know that the Analects is a masterpiece of the Chinese thinker Confucius, and it also adopts the style of dialogue, that is, the student asks, the teacher answers, and the teacher's answer is authority. This is a typical Chinese way of asking. In contrast, Plato's dialogue is a kind of debate, in which both sides are on a logically equal footing, questioning and answering each other, and not relying on the teacher as authority. This is the application of the Socratic method. The dozens of dialogues that have survived have outlined the main features of Plato's philosophical thought, and although he has no intention of creating a well-structured theoretical system, his thought still embodies a strong systematization. Today Plato is mentioned, and one cannot fail to mention his theory of ideas, in addition to the idea that he was the inventor of "spiritual love" and the advocate of the "Republic". The idea of ideas, the basis of Plato's philosophy, was illustrated by a story known as the "cave metaphor": in a deep, dark cave, lived a group of prisoners with their hands tied behind pillars, their backs to the mouth of the cave, their faces facing the cave wall, their heads unable to look back. They've never been out of this hole, and they don't know they're in it. There was a pile of fire burning behind them, and there was some puppet show between them and the fire, and the light of the fire projected the puppets and their own shadows onto the walls, and they mistook the shadows they saw for real things, and never had any doubts.
Suddenly, one day, a prisoner broke free of the rope, turned around, and saw behind him what turned out to be a bunch of puppets. After climbing out of the cave, he saw the sun and the world under the sun, and finally realized that all he had seen before was illusory and unreal. Surprised, he hurried back to the cave and told everyone what he had found. Who knows, they don't believe him at all, they mock him in every way, they say that he is stupider than before he left, because he wants everyone to believe a completely impossible fool's dream. Plato believed that we human beings are prisoners in those holes, who can only see the concrete things that the senses present to us, but do not know at all that they are not real things, but only illusory shadows of some real being, and if we are satisfied with this state, then we can never know the real world, we cannot obtain the truth.
The man who escaped from the cave represents the philosopher, who uses his intellect and thus sees the truth of the facts, and understands that what really exists is not the concrete thing as a shadow, but the idea as the essence of the thing, and it is the idea that makes things exist and acts on our senses in the form of illusions, making us believe it to be true. The task of philosophy, therefore, is to teach people to distinguish between what is a real idea and what is an illusion, and thus strive to pursue the world of ideas that represent truth, although in the beginning philosophers are often ridiculed for the situation that "everyone is drunk and I am awake". So, what is this "idea" that Plato is so important to? There are no wonders in the world, flowers blossom and fall from winter to spring, and anything individual and concrete is always changing rapidly, and is therefore imperfect, relative, and even illusory. However, there is still something in the world that exists immutable and eternal, and that is "ideas". Ideas exist as the essence of concrete things, and each type of concrete thing has its own corresponding "idea"; ideas are like paradigms, and individual things are facsimiles of ideas, which exist only because of ideas, and are always imperfect and unreliable. For example, countless pears share the common idea of "pear"; the reason why a person is a person is that he shares the universal idea of "man". Just as there are different levels of reality, ideas are also divided into different levels: the idea of concrete things such as tables, chairs, and pears is at the lowest level; on the next level, it is mathematical and geometric ideas, such as squares and circles; further up, there are artistic and moral ideas, such as beauty, justice, etc.; the highest and most perfect ideas are good, which is the embodiment of God, with supreme power, and all lower ideas are subordinate to it.
All ideas unite to form a world of ideas that is different from the world of reality (things), which is an absolutely eternal, real and perfect spiritual world, and the real world is derived from it, a fickle "shadow". Plato calls on people to abandon the illusory real world (the phenomenal world) and pursue the ideal world of truth and goodness. A person who grasps the idea of the highest "goodness" is qualified to become a "philosophical king" and act as the supreme ruler of a country. The "idea" is both independent and inaccessible to the senses, which has both commonalities and essential differences from what people usually call "concept". The concept refers to the "general" abstracted from various concrete things, (the concept of "pear" refers to the common characteristics of all pears), it is the reflection of objective things in our brain, not another kind of thing that exists independently. The "idea" has obviously gone beyond the generality of this concept, and the essence of abstraction (such as the commonality of the "pear") is reduced to an independent objective existence, so Plato's idea is essentially an objective idealism. This idealism, which combines Parmenides' existentialism, Pythagorean's number theory, and Socrates's theory of the Supreme Good, represents a static metaphysical path of the human mind in its quest for the nature of the world, a culmination reached by the rational speculation of ancient philosophy.
Plato's dual division of the real world and the conceptual world laid the ideological foundation for the dualistic conception of Christianity between this and other worlds to Be transcribed into European culture. The famous realism of medieval scholastic philosophy is a direct reproduction of Plato's theory of ideas, while Hegel's theory of absolutes is a modern variant of it. Plato further implemented the doctrine of ideas into epistemology, obtaining the epistemic theory of "soul recall". He inherited the ideas of Pythagoras and Socrates about the immortality of the soul, believing that the soul could exist on its own without the body and was an eternal and immortal thing. Before entering the human body, the soul wanders freely in the world of ideas and acquires a true understanding of ideas. However, the soul has a tendency to pursue the sensual world, which makes them fall to the ground, fall into the human body, be blinded and polluted by the flesh, and gradually forget the original conceptual knowledge. Only after some time, relying on the experience and learning of the day after tomorrow, can the lost knowledge be recalled. So learning is just a memory. He gave some examples to prove it. For example, if a person takes out a poorly crafted painting and asks you, "Is this painting beautiful?" And you'll immediately reply, "It's not beautiful at all." The reason why you can say "not beautiful" is because you already have the concept of "beauty" in your heart.
This is clearly a reproduction of Socrates' theory of the same kind, with Plato's "soul recall" becoming the precursor to modern rationalism, while another doctrine that advocates that knowledge comes from experience develops into an empiricist trend. Just as the hierarchy of ideas is strict, the soul is divided into different levels by Plato. The soul of the slave knows only obedience, the soul of the craftsman knows only how to build a house, the peasant has the soul of the ability to use the ability to farm, and only the "philosophical kings" have the mind to grasp the special knowledge of governing the country. According to this theory, Plato divided society into three classes: the first rank was the ruling class of the state, who were made of gold by The Gods, represented the noblest bloodline, were well versed in the idea of "goodness" and the philosophy of governing the country, and the philosophical kings were their highest representatives, and their virtue was wisdom; the second rank was the samurai, made of silver by the gods, whose duty was to defend the security of the country, whose virtue was brave; and the third rank was composed of peasants and craftsmen, made of copper and iron, engaged in productive labor, It is their duty to provide for the first and second levels, and their virtue is moderation. Plato excluded slaves from these three classes, for he did not regard slaves as human beings at all. He envisioned that if people of the three classes were to keep to themselves, neither overstepping their bounds nor usurping power, and keeping to their respective duties, the country would be able to realize the principles of justice, harmony, prosperity and peace. Such a state is Plato's fictional "Republic", which is both a product of Plato's philosophy and an embodiment of his aristocratic political ideals. Although it is only in the form of utopianism, it has an immeasurable impact on future generations, and people can find the shadow of the utopian utopian political and ethical model of the "republic" on many later social blueprints of utopian socialism. Together with Aristotle, Plato constituted the two pinnacles of Greek philosophy. The position of these majestic ideological peaks in the history of Western philosophy is like that of Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, who inherited and captured the ideological nutrients of their predecessors and peers, and made them a theoretical edifice that has never been seen in ancient times, leaving footprints of their exploration in almost all fields of philosophy.
Later philosophical explorers, faced with these two intellectual peaks, if they wanted to innovate, he had to climb them bravely. It is no wonder that the famous English philosopher Russell, in his two well-known books" "History of Western Philosophy" and "Wisdom of the West", has to leave the greatest space to these two Athenian philosophical masters. He said: Plato's influence on (Western) philosophy may be greater than anyone else's. This is not without exaggeration, but it is generally well-founded. No one compares Plato and Aristotle in providing development for philosophy in shaping the academic style of the Western world. Plato was an idealist, and on the surface he was in direct opposition to democritus's materialism; but at a deeper level, the two men followed a roughly similar line of thought—that is, a metaphysical path of seeking to transcend the ontology of concrete objects, which was one of the main features of Greek philosophy. Of course, when it came to what the ontology was, the two parted ways, so that Plato was so angry that he wanted to burn Democritus' writings.