(Continued from the previous chapter)
Recall
In what way can one elevate one's knowledge from the imaginary stage to the rational stage? The process of knowing is also known as "reminiscence". The human soul originally dwells in the world of ideas and knows various ideas (truths), but after the soul enters the body, it is blinded by the temptation of the body to know the truth. Regaining it can only be achieved through memories. How to recall? - Learning. In the previous chapter in Socrates' philosophy, we mentioned that learning is learning knowledge between the known and the unknown, and that what you learn you already know, but because you forget, you have to reawaken through learning. Plato does not completely deny sensory experience, but sensory experience only acts as a medium of awakening, which is not a source of knowledge, nor does it recall concrete things, but ideas. Memories are a process of constantly turning heads and going deeper, so that each study is a further understanding of ideas and truths. Plato's "learning" is in stark contrast to the materialist "learning", for example, you have to learn the idea of "greater than", the materialist believes that after countless repetitions of experience (such as 8 is greater than 7, 9 is greater than 8), and Plato believes that countless times of empirical learning is just a sensory stimulus, which can help you recall the idea of "greater than" that your soul already has.
dialectics
From two classical theories, Plato's dialectics and political ideals can be derived.
Rationality in "line segment theory" refers to the knowledge of the purest philosophical categories, and Plato's dialectic is the logical derivation between purely philosophical categories. If the dialectic of the Elias is also a dialectic of extremes and a negative, then Plato's is a comprehensive, comprehensive, opposing, unified, positive dialectic. For two opposing things, they may not be true and false, but may also be true and false. For example, "one is", "one" contains the two concepts of "one" and "is", and the "one" behind contains the two concepts of "one" and "is", so that the last "one" is not "one", but more. How to resolve contradictions? Introduce two third parties of opposing things, which are superior to the two, so that they achieve unity in a higher dimension, that is, "universal theory". For example, the opposite of motion and static cannot be unified, and if "existence" is introduced, in the concept of "existence", the two can be combined, and existence is both dynamic and static. Here Plato's dialectics vaguely becomes the source of ideas for the negation of Hegel's negation.
The Republic
Cave theory has other connotations in addition to telling the process of people obtaining truth: for example, the vast majority of people's understanding of ideas stays in the sensory world, and due to the difference in the amount and depth of knowledge, there is also a hierarchical difference between people and people. Plato expounded his political ideal accordingly: since the majority of the people are addicted to the world of sensations and cannot know the truth, and only a very small number of people called "philosophers" can reach the world of ideas, the state should of course be ruled by the small number of people who hold the truth, so that the king of a country can only be a philosopher. In the Republic, he compares a country to the human soul, and the human soul consists of three parts: desire, spirit and reason, each of which must achieve its own "goodness", that is, the virtue of temperance, the virtue of courage and the virtue of wisdom, respectively, and a person can be considered to have attained full virtue. Plato's political ideals are based on the above ethics, the laborers in the state represent desires, they need to achieve moderation, the defenders represent the spirit (will), they need to achieve bravery, only the rulers represent reason, they need to achieve wisdom, so that a country can be regarded as a righteous state. Of course, the ancient Greek understanding of justice was different from today, and the ancient Greeks believed that justice was that every thing developed according to its own nature, performed its own duties, and the whole achieved justice. Plato believed that the unity of truth and goodness was not enough, but also the unification of power. Plato also tried to establish his ideal state in the real world, but he returned home. The theory of the Republic is indeed "ideal" enough to many people today, but his ideas such as the community of property became the source of communism nearly two thousand years later.
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Key references for this series:
Course on the History of Western Philosophy by Lin Zhao and Xiaomang Deng;
samuel enoch stumpf, james fieser, History of Western Philosophy;
Selected dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Apologetics, Kerry, Phillips, Republic, etc.;
Others are constantly growing...