Plato's Theory Of Knowledge And Form example essay topic

Plato's theory of knowledge and form are expressed with three approaches: his allegory of The Cave, his metaphor of the Divided Line and his doctrine The Forms. Each theory is interconnected; one could not be without the other. In The Cave, Plato describes a vision of shackled prisoners seated in a dark cave facing the wall. Chained also by their necks, the prisoners can only look forward and see only shadows. These shadows are produced by men, with shapes of objects or men, walking in front of a fire behind the prisoners. Plato states that for the prisoners, reality is only the mere shadows thrown onto the wall.

Another vision is releasing a prisoner from his chains, how his movements are difficult, his eye adjustment painful and suggestions of the effects of returning to the cave. The Cave suggests to us that Plato saw most of humanity living in "the cave", in the dark, and that the vision of knowledge and the "conversion" to that knowledge was salvation from darkness. He put it this way, "the conversion of the soul is not to put the power of sight in the soul's eye, which already has it, but to insure that, insisted of looking in the wrong direction it is turned the way it ought to be". Plato's two worlds: the dark, the cave, and the bright were his way of rejecting the Sophists, who found "true knowledge" impossible because of constant change. Plato believed there was a "true Idea of Justice". The Cave showed us this.

The Divided Line visualizes the levels of knowledge in a more systematic way. Plato states there are four stages of knowledge development: Imagining, Belief, Thinking, and Perfect Intelligence. Imagining is at the lowest level of this developmental ladder. Imagining, here in Plato's world, is not taken at its conventional level but of appearances seen as "true reality". Plato considered shadows, art and poetry, especially rhetoric, deceptive illusions, what you see is not necessarily what you get.

With poetry and rhetoric you may be able to read the words but you may not understand the "real" meaning. For example, take, again, the shadow. If you know a shadow is something "real" then you are beyond the state of imagination which implies that a person is "unaware of observation and amounts to illusion and ignorance". Belief is the next stage of developing knowledge. Plato goes with the idea that seeing really is not always believing we have a strong conviction for what we see but not with absolute certainty.

This stage is more advanced than imagining because it's based more firmly on reality. But just because we can actually see the object and not just it's shadow doesn't mean we know all there is to know about the object. In the next stage, Thinking, we leave the "visible world" and move into the "intelligible world" which, Plato claims, is seen mostly in scientists. It stands for the power of the mind to take properties from a visible object and applying them. Thinking is the "visible" object but also the hypotheses, "A truth which is taken as self-evident but which depends upon some higher truth".

Plato wants us to see all things as they really are so we can see that all is inter-connected. But thinking still doesn't give us all the information we crave and we still ask "why?" For Plato the last stage of developing knowledge, Perfect Intelligence, represents "the mind as it completely releases from sensible objects" and is directly related to his doctrine of Forms. In this stage, hypotheses are no longer present because of its limitations. Plato summarized the Divided Line with "now you may take a corresponding to the four sections, these four states of mind, intelligence for the highest, and thinking for the second, belief for the third and for the last imagining. These you may arrange in terms as the terms in a proportion, assigning to each a degree of clearness and certainty corresponding to the measure in which their object pose a reality". When discussing the Divided Line, The Forms are the highest levels of "reality".

Plato concludes here that the "real world" is not what we see but what we understand or feel in an "intelligible world" because it is made up of eternal Forms. The Forms take on the explanation of existence. They are "changeless, eternal, and nonmaterial essences or patterns of which the actual visible objects we see are only poor copies". Plato uses a person discovering the quality of beauty to explain this, "he will abate his violent love of the one, which he will... deem a small thing and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the next stage he will consider that there beauty of the mind is more honorable that there beauty of outward form. Drawing towards and contemplating the vast see of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere". There are many Forms but not everything has a Form, if this were so then there would be a parallel world.

Forms are not something we can touch but something we hold in our minds, Plato described them as "real existence, colorless, formless, and intangible, visible only to the intelligence". (Forms do not exist; they just are but can't be touched.) Plato said, "the Forms are the cause of the essence of all other things, and the One is the cause of the Forms". Therefore they cannot simply exist. Plato said Forms are related to things in three ways: cause, participation and imitation. But in relation to Forms and it-self Plato stated, "we can have discourse only through the weaving together of Forms". Plato doesn't mean to say that all Forms are related to each other only that significant things use some Forms and that just knowing that includes understanding the relationship between Forms.

Plato says there are three ways to discover Forms: recollection, dialectic and desire. Recollection is when our souls remember the Forms from prior existence. Dialectic is when people discuss and explore the Forms together. And third is the desire for knowledge. Plato's Theory of Knowledge leads us down many roads but we see the same theme through out: light to dark; ignorant to educated; reality to really real. In The Cave we move from the dark of the cave to the light of outdoors, we even see a glimpse of how knowledge can affect us.

The Divine Line took us from the ignorance of Imagining to the educated Perfect Intelligence. The Forms showed us that even though we can see something does not mean we can see all of it and just because we cannot see something does not mean it does not exist. All three link knowledge as the key to all, if you have knowledge there is nothing you cannot have.