When it comes to Western thought, it is absolutely impossible to avoid Plato, after all, Plato's position in the history of Western thought is beyond doubt, and if you want to understand Plato, you must first start from the Republic. So what is Plato's ideal state really talking about?
Why is Plato the source of the whole of Western philosophy? Why Whitehead says that the history of Western philosophy in 2000 is nothing more than Plato's footnote. Let's start with the cave of one of the three great mirrors in the Republic,
In the cave map, Plato compares the world to an underground cave where man is a prisoner who is tied up in a cave by birth, unable to walk, unable to turn his head, and only looking at the wall in front of him. There was a pile of fire behind them, and behind the fire there was a wall, and behind the wall were hidden the people who controlled them, and they were holding all kinds of props.
So the prisoner could only see the illusion of being projected on the wall by the light of the fire. This is the projection of the cave mapped onto the wall, the fire behind the visible world. The world outside the cave is the knowable world, plato compared the sun to the absolute idea, is the source of the world, from the visible world to the knowable world, reflecting the process of human understanding of the world. What he wants to convey is that the vast majority of people are prisoners of the illusion of the wall all their lives, and if a prisoner is freed from the shackles, can stand up and turn his head, he can see the thing itself, but the prisoner thinks that the truth is the illusion, and the illusion on the wall is the reality. And if someone takes a prisoner out of a cave and sees that the sun prisoner will not see anything because of the stimulation of the light, he will hate the person who brought him under the sun. Doesn't it look very familiar? It seems to have been seen somewhere, yes, Plato's cave laid the whole Western perspective on the world, countless excellent film works from this cave, the Matrix, 12 monkeys, 13 floors, Truman's world and so on! Their ideas are all built on the cave map, which for the first time puts forward the concept of seeing the unreal, revealing an important perspective, the real world is not the world you see, and hidden behind the illusion is the world you need to explore. So what does another famous metaphor in the republic, the sun metaphor, mean, and we'll talk about it next time.