Plato's Republic, Sections 507b-517c

Posted by Patti Clark on February 26th, 2021

Plato’s Republic Cognition Principles

Plato won universal acclaim as the most widely read and studied philosopher. His level of thinking and reasoning was way ahead of his time. Plato is most well-known for his theory of forms or ideas, and I find his theory of Knowledge based on the example of the cave and the divided line awesome. He compares a person’s cognition process with transitioning from darkness to light in a figurative sense. In my view, Plato successfully implements the two theories in the Allegory of the Cave. He amply uses metaphors making the picture weird and haunting at the same time. The paper makes an attempt to search how the doctrines conform to one another taking into account the Plato’s truth of knowledge https://bestwritinghelp.org/

The Divided Line signifies the cognition process as gradual divisions. Plato shows the line cut into four segments. Its segments differ in length displaying the levels of comprehension. The shortest segment represents images, reflections and shadows the people witness. All this distorts real objects, but allows for conjectures and inaccurate guesses. The next bigger section represents a cave person’s knowledge as he sits beside the fire and gradually understands that the figures passing in front of the fire cast shadows. This time the source of knowledge includes real objects. The next segment represents mathematical understanding. This type of cognition is inherent in a more knowledgeable man among the cave prisoners who gets out of the cave and perceives sunlight for the first time. Let’s take a ball as an example; one regards it as the concept of a perfect sphere that people hold in their heads when they think about a ball. The final segment consists of philosophical understanding. At this stage, a philosopher understands the most abstract concepts such as justice, goodness, and truth. The real world he reveals at the top outside the cave has to do with the idea of the good. Once he sees the goodness, he desires nothing else.

The theory of ideas or forms is another cornerstone of Plato’s belief system. According to Socrates, there are two kinds of intellectual activities. He tells about provisional thinking based merely on guesses and hypotheses - this goes on in mathematics. Then he specifies a strict speculation that uses suppositions as base points to understand actual truths (forms). Thus, one can divide the intelligible world into two categories: 1) mathematical surmises and 2) forms.

In summary, let’s get back to the Allegory of the Cave Plato created. People are sitting inside the cave facing the back wall. Someone tied them down so that they may not move or look backwards. They can see nothing but the back wall of the cave. They are sitting behind the fire, and figures are passing in front of the fire forming shadows on the wall. These people in the cave know nothing except for these shadows. They lack knowledge of the outer world. According to Socrates, the story of the cave is not so somber, because that is how all the people live. It is a good allegory of all the people living in ignorance. The so-called prisoners’ stages of understanding conform to the segments on the divided line that Plato invented. The divided line represents two parts - the visible world and the intelligible world. While the prisoner is in the cave, he is beyond doubt in the visible realm that receives no sunlight; then, he comes outside facing the intelligible realm.

In Plato’s view, the majority of people should strive to achieve lofty goals and attain a state of true knowledge. One can make a conclusion that our entire life is an ordeal that one can compare with the cave life Plato depicted. All in all, humans should acquire understanding of the good - the cause for all right and beautiful things.