(Image: From Plato's Cave. Barry Mack. I personally find this image simply beautiful. If I were to come out of a cave for the first time, I would be overwhelmed by the soft, shimmering glow that the Sun radiates early in the dawn and twilight.)Discussion topic: Plato.
There was not much for us to add in our discussion since Plato and Socrates were the main lecture topics on 09/13/11, but we did find a consensus in how all of us found Plato's authoritarian "good society" quite ridiculous. Though we commend Plato for uplifting the intelligent - or, more specifically, philosophers - the hierarchical organization of classes would perhaps be taking society two steps back, instead of forward. How would Plato's suggestion for the good society work in the real world?
I am a little astonished that he didn't take a little bit more of a comparative view. True, the whole world wasn't discovered by then and there were little means of learning about foreign cultures and governments, but I'm at least pretty sure that the surrounding Greek areas had, to a certain degree, a different form of government than Athens. Here again, Plato uses his philosophy of the ideal world to shape his own government. The idea of philosopher-kings was ridiculed even back then when he first suggested it. There was no model on which this could have been tested upon to see if his hypothesis would actually work; he just assumed that that ideal society was one in which philosophers had authority. This brings us to the practicality of Platonic philosophy.
By being in the world of becoming, is there really such a way that we can even conceive of the forms? Plato states that we can picture what is "perfect" by projecting that picture from our minds (Dr. Oliver's in-class example of the coffee mug is an example of this.) However, as most of us acknowledged in discussion, we disagree with Plato but still respect him. It seems more evident to us that we get the picture of what is "perfect" by using our past experiences as a base, instead of a simple projection.
At least that's how I take it.
The notion of government operated systems under the jurisdiction of philosophers is both elitist and hedonistic. Plato is seen to be quite different from his mentor ,Socrates, and later his pupil Aristotle. It is an interesting hypothetical question to ponder ,though: would the rule be that of extremes or that of mercy.
ReplyDeleteHmmm... good question at the very end of your statement, Ryan. However, I don't think it would be either. The point of the philosopher is not to take extremes (even though their viewpoints in themselves may be.) And mercy can also be an extreme, accordingly to its usage.
ReplyDeleteAs Immanuel said, there isn't much more to be said about Plato because he was covered at such length in class.
ReplyDeleteI want to focus more on the image Immanuel provided us and the overall "cave" idea. I'm curious as to how everyone else thinks they would feel after "coming out of the cave." Personally I would feel entirely overwhelmed. Can you imagine if everything you thought was reality was only a pathetic fraction of true reality? Are there colors we cannot see? Are there conceptions of time and space that we cannot even begin to fathom? Is there, perhaps, another world or another life form somewhere far from Earth that is even grander than ours?
Often, we do not appreciate what we have. The human body is incredibly complex; Have you ever stopped to think how you manage to do simple things such as walk or think? To discover that all the complexities of life here are nothing compared to the "perfect" or "ideal" life elsewhere would be overwhelming. It's no wonder that the cave-dwellers did not want to hear of it.