How can reality be apprehended according to plato

In that statement he implies that truth is important for living a worthwhile life and that if the truth is unattainable one should be guided by the best truth available although it will involve the risk that comes from uncertainty. So think of life as a journey and the path that you must travel has rivers to cross.

These rivers are the challenges, the problems, the issues that you will face. You need to cross the rivers and continue on your journey. At the bank of the river you reach there are many rafts of different types that you can use to cross the river. These rafts are possible positions or answers or solutions that humans have devised. You want the best possible raft with which to cross safely. There are no perfect rafts.

No ideal rafts. You need to select the best one for crossing the river. The method is applied by Philosophers to questions or "rivers" such as :. What is knowledge?

What is truth? What is beauty? So, just what is the method? At the bank of the river you would look carefully to find as many rafts as you can and then examine each one to determine which is the best. You would select based upon the purpose it is to serve. You would not select based on which is the biggest or the most popular or the most expensive or even based on your favorite color. None of that is relevant to the purpose. Such criteria are not relevant.

You need the best raft for crossing the river and that is not necessarily the biggest or most popular or the most expensive. You need the raft that will get you across safely. It needs to have been well assembled. It should have few or no leaks or tears in the ropes that bind the logs of the raft together. You find fault with them. They have leaks. You select the one least likely to leak or come apart and most likely to get you across the river.

You must also respond to those who are selecting other sorts of rafts and using other methods of selection. They will criticize your selection. They may say you should have picked the most expensive or the biggest or the red one or the one most others have. With the dialectical process you use reason and hold your passions and emotions in check and choose the best based on reason and evidence.

Passages from the Dialogues of Plato with description of elements of the Dialectical Process of Thought. For I dare say that you, Socrates, feel, as I do, how very hard or almost impossible is the attainment of any certainty about questions such as these in the present life. For he should persevere until he has attained one of two things: either he should discover or learn the truth about them; or, if this is impossible, I would have him take the best and most irrefragable of human notions, and let this be the raft upon which he sails through life-not without risk, as I admit, if he cannot find some word of God which will more surely and safely carry him.

And now, as you bid me, I will venture to question you, as I should not like to reproach myself hereafter with not having said at the time what I think. For when I consider the matter either alone or with Cebes, the argument does certainly appear to me, Socrates, to be not sufficient. But first let us take care that we avoid a danger.

And what is that? I said. The danger of becoming misologists, he replied, which is one of the very worst things that can happen to us. For as there are misanthropists or haters of men, there are also misologists or haters of ideas, and both spring from the same cause, which is ignorance of the world.

Misanthropy arises from the too great confidence of inexperience; you trust a man and think him altogether true and good and faithful, and then in a little while he turns out to be false and knavish; and then another and another, and when this has happened several times to a man, especially within the circle of his most trusted friends, as he deems them, and he has often quarreled with them, he at last hates all men, and believes that no one has any good in him at all.

I dare say that you must have observed this. Yes, I said. And is not this discreditable? The reason is that a man, having to deal with other men, has no knowledge of them; for if he had knowledge he would have known the true state of the case, that few are the good and few the evil, and that the great majority are in the interval between them.

How do you mean? I mean, he replied, as you might say of the very large and very small, that nothing is more uncommon than a very large or a very small man; and this applies generally to all extremes, whether of great and small, or swift and slow, or fair and foul, or black and white: and whether the instances you select be men or dogs or anything else, few are the extremes, but many are in the mean between them.

Did you never observe this? Yes, I said, I have. And do you not imagine, he said, that if there were a competition of evil, the first in evil would be found to be very few? Yes, that is very likely, I said. Yes, that is very likely, he replied; not that in this respect arguments are like men-there I was led on by you to say more than I had intended; but the point of comparison was that when a simple man who has no skill in dialectics believes an argument to be true which he afterwards imagines to be false, whether really false or not, and then another and another, he has no longer any faith left, and great disputers, as you know, come to think, at last that they have grown to be the wisest of mankind; for they alone perceive the utter unsoundness and instability of all arguments, or, indeed, of all things, which, like the currents in the Euripus, are going up and down in never-ceasing ebb and flow.

That is quite true, I said. Yes, Phaedo, he replied, and very melancholy too, if there be such a thing as truth or certainty or power of knowing at all, that a man should have lighted upon some argument or other which at first seemed true and then turned out to be false, and instead of blaming himself and his own want of wit, because he is annoyed, should at last be too glad to transfer the blame from himself to arguments in general; and forever afterwards should hate and revile them, and lose the truth and knowledge of existence.

Yes, indeed, I said; that is very melancholy. Let us, then, in the first place, he said, be careful of admitting into our souls the notion that there is no truth or health or soundness in any arguments at all; but let us rather say that there is as yet no health in us, and that we must quit ourselves like men and do our best to gain health-you and all other men with a view to the whole of your future life, and I myself with a view to death.

For at this moment I am sensible that I have not the temper of a philosopher; like the vulgar, I am only a partisan.

But Cat Form has none of these qualities. Every individual cat will have some accidental traits that have nothing to do with being a cat. They are known to you only via your intellect. Were there no such thing as cat form, there could not be any cats at all. That means that:. They regulate the world of appearances. Further the only reasons particulars are the particulars they are is in virtue of embodying the form they do.

Thus the very existence of particular things is itself parasitic on thus less real then the Forms. The relationship of Forms to their particular instantiations is similar to that between me and my shadow, or me and a photograph of me. Plato refers to this as "The Realm of Becoming". Forms are themselves arranged into a hierarchy, the arch form being the Form of the Good. Realm of Material Objects The Visible. Level of reality which we experience through our senses.

Residents of the Realm of Becoming Include:. Particular things, e. Triangles Representations. Particular Good Things.

Particular Just Acts. Particular Beautiful Objects. All of these endure only for a time and then pass away. The Many can indeed be One. Fido, Rover, and Spot are all dogs because they all participate in the Form of Dog. Paying your phone bill, staying faithful to your spouse, and defending an innocent child are all just actions because they participate in the Form of Justice.

Thus the very existence of particular things is itself parasitic on thus less real than the Forms. Likewise with the photo. Regrettably, according to Plato, they are deceived and take appearance for reality. They believe the things that they see before them to be what is real when in fact it is merely an imperfect reflection of what is REALLY real. The Allegory of the Cave. Is not the dreamer, sleeping or waking, one who likens dissimilar things, who puts the copy in place of the real object?

Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall?

Some of them are talking, others silent. You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave? True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads? And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?

Yes, he said. And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? No question, he replied. To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

That is certain. In The Allegory of the Cave, Plato likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. All they can see is the wall of the cave. Behind them burns a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a parapet, along which puppeteers can walk. The puppeteers, who are behind the prisoners, hold up puppets that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners are unable to see these puppets, the real objects that pass behind them.

What the prisoners see and hear are shadows and echoes cast by objects that they do not see. Such prisoners would mistake appearance for reality. They would think the things they see on the wall the shadows were real; they would know nothing of the real causes of the shadows.

So when the prisoners talk, what are they talking about? He thinks he is talking about a book, but he is really talking about a shadow. Socrates:] And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error.

At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, -what will be his reply?

And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them, -- will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities. Plato says that we are like those men sitting in the cave: we think we understand the real world, but because we are trapped in our bodies we can see only the shadows on the wall.

One of his goals is to help us understand the real world better, by finding ways to predict or understand the real world even without being able to see it. Now, Socrates asks us to imagine what would happen if the freed enlightened prisoner were to return to the cave and tell is former prisoners of his adventures and of the true nature of reality and the distinction between reality and the mere appearances of reality.

And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable would he not be ridiculous?

Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death. We can come to grasp the true Forms with our minds. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right… and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.

Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.

The Allegory presents, in brief form, most of Plato's major philosophical assumptions: his belief that the world revealed by our senses is not the real world but only a poor copy of it, and that the real world can only be apprehended intellectually; his idea that knowledge cannot be transferred from teacher to student, but rather that education consists in directing student's minds toward what is real and important and allowing them to apprehend it for themselves; his faith that the universe ultimately is good; his conviction that enlightened individuals have an obligation to the rest of society, and that a good society must be one in which the truly wise the Philosopher-King are the rulers.

For Plato the only and proper response to the Forms once rightly appreciated is love. You see, the man who has been thus far guided in matters of Love, who has beheld beautiful things in the right order and correctly, is coming now to the goal of Loving: All of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors: First, [Beauty] always is, and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes.

Second, it is not beautiful this way and ugly that way, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another; nor beautiful in relation to one thing and ugly in relation to another; nor is it beautiful here but ugly there, as it would be if it were beautiful for some people and ugly for others.

Nor will the beautiful appear to him in the guise of a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body. It will not appear to him as one idea or one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself.

It is always one in form; and all the other beautiful things share in that, in such a way that when those others come to be or pass away, this does not become the least bit smaller or greater nor suffer any change.

Full text at:. Epistemological Ramifications of this Metaphysical View:. Since Forms are not perceived empirically , they cannot be learned through experience; we never experience to forms sensuously. Forms have no orientation in space, nor do they have a location. They are non-physical, but they are not in the mind. Forms are extra-mental ideas, meaning that they are real in the strictest sense of the word.

Because the Forms exist independently of time and space, they can be said to exist only as ideas in people's minds. The Forms are objective "blueprints" for perfection. They are considered perfect themselves because they are unchanging. For example, if we have a square drawn on a blackboard, the square as it is drawn is not a perfect representation of a square. However, it is only the knowledge of the Form "square" that allows us to know the drawing on the chalkboard is meant to represent a square.

The Form "square" is perfect and unchanging. If there is a Form for everything, and Forms know no time or space, could there be a Form for objects that don't yet exist? If there is a Form for everything that could ever exist, are there also Forms for things that people will never think of? Are there Forms that will never be realized?

The Forms are thought to be perfected ideas of things that exist independently of the actual objects. If no one has ever thought of it, then can it exist as a Form, or idea? If everything with the potential to exist does exists as a Form, where does the idea for the Form whose physical object does not yet exist come from?

Since forms don't exist in time or space, where do the forms actually exist? If they aren't in the physical world or only in our individual minds, is there some other place that humans can't even comprehend where the Forms reside?

No object is a perfect representation of the idea it represents, according to this theory. Each object in the real world is a mere flawed representation of the perfect Forms they represent. Because the Forms are perfect versions of their corresponding physical objects, the Forms can be considered to be the most real and purest things in existence, according to Plato.

Very interesting subject but did not make sense until I read the second person's comment, which made sense to me. But occasionally in my work, and these are the moments that keep one going, you do encounter something that really inspires awe in a serious way. But as a theorist, another way it really comes about is when some fact about nature, or at least a toy model of something that could be seen in nature, turns out to also have a really deep and fundamental origin in pure mathematics, which as far as I can tell is the closest thing to pure Platonic thought that we have as humans.

I hope this is'nt offensive, but this is honestly some of the simplest theory ive ever read, which lends to its beauty. However I do not understand how people do not understand this lol. DMCA All papers are for research and reference purposes only! Create a new account It's simple, and free. Email address. Login with Facebook. Details 9 Pages Words. More on Plato's theory of Ideas Forms Plato's theory of Ideas Forms.