Terceiro

It has been really long since I blogged. Like most people I lose motivation too... So I am not motivated enough to continue writing about the "Soap Opera" (as one of my friends put it) which I has been the topic of my previous two posts. So today I am going to continue with my "Series of blogs on Philosophy"... I have decided to take my brother's advice and have decided to include 'Martin Heidegger' in the list of philosophers that I will talk about. Let me not waste time and start off right away: Plato... He was 29 years old when Socrates drank hemlock. He had been a pupil of Socrates for some time and had followed his trial very closely. The fact that Athens could condemn its noblest citizen to death did more than make an impression on him. It was to shape the course of his entire philosophic endeavor.
To Plato, the death of Socrates was a striking example of the conflict that can exist between society as t really is and the true or ideal society. Unlike the works of Socrates we believe that most of Plato's works remain in good shape. This is not in the least due to the fact that Plato set up his own school of Philosophy in a grove not far from Athens, named after the legendary Greek hero Academus. The school was therefore known as "Academy". (Since then the term has been used everywhere...)

What were the problems that Plato was concerned about?
Briefly, we can establish that Plato was concerned with the relationship between what is eternal and what is immutable. The idea that right and wrong "flowed" and are not fixed was totally unacceptable to Socrates. He believed in the existence of eternal and absolute rules for what was right or wrong. Then along comes Plato. He is concerned with both what is eternal and immutable in nature and in morals. To Plato, these problems were one and the same. He tried to grasp a reality which is both eternal and immutable.

Ok! Let us take one thing at a time. We are trying to understand one of the most influential brains that even functioned.
Plato believed that everything tangible in nature flows. Absolutely everything that belongs to the material world is made of a material that time can erode, but everything is made after a timeless mold or form that is eternal and immutable.

Do you see it? No you don't!
Ok! Let’s see... Why are Dogs all the same? You definitely don't agree that they are same at all. But there is something that all dogs have in common, something that enables us to identify then as dogs. A particular dog flows naturally. It might be old and lame, and in time it will die. But the "form" of the dog is eternal and immutable.
That, which is eternal and immutable to Plato, is therefore not a physical "basic substance".

If it still is not clear. Let me try explaining with an example.

You have a box of Lego and you build a Lego dog. You then take is apart and put the Lego blocks back in the box. You cannot expect to make a new dog, just by shaking the Lego box. How could Lego blocks of their own accord find each other and become a new dog again? No, you have to rebuild the dog. And the reason you can do it is that you have a picture in your mind of what the dog looked like. The Lego dog is made of a model which remains unchanged from dog to dog.

If you actually think how all the ginger bread men made by a baker look the same and you realize that it was so because of the same mold he used... they had a common origin. None of these men are perfect. But the mold in itself must have been perfect. And what is more you are seized by the immense desire to see the actual mold. Because clearly, the mold must be more beautiful that the copies of the ginger bread men.
Like most philosophers, Plato was astonished at the way all natural phenomena could be so alike. He concluded that it had to be because of the limited number of forms behind everything we see around us. Behind every horse, dog, human, there is an idea horse, idea dog or idea human. (Just like there is a mold for every ginger bread man)
Plato came to the conclusion that there must be a reality behind the "material world". He called this reality - "The World of Ideas"; this remarkable view is called the Plato's theory of ideas.

I hope you are following me. But must be thinking if Plato was being serious. Did he really believe in forms that existed in a completely different reality? He certainly did. Let us try and follow his train of thought...

A philosopher tries to grasp something that is eternal and immutable. It would serve no purpose for instance to write a philosophical treatise on the existence of a particular soap bubble. Partly because one would hardly have time to study it in detail before it burst and partly because it would probably be rather difficult to find a market for a treatise on something nobody has ever seen, and which only existed for only 5 seconds.

Plato believed that everything we see around in nature, everything tangible can be likened to a soap bubble, since nothing that exists in the world of senses is lasting. We know, of course, that sooner or later every human, every animal will die and decompose. Even a block of marble changes and gradually disintegrates. Plato's point is that we can never have true knowledge of anything that is in a constant state of change. We can only have opinions about these. We can only have true knowledge about things that can be understood by our reason.

Ok! Let me try to be a little clearer...
A gingerbread man can be so lopsided after all the baking that it can be quite hard to see what it is meant to be. But having seen dozens of gingerbread men which have been more or less successful, I can be quite sure what the gingerbread mold looked like. I can guess even though I have never seen it. It might not even be an advantage to see the actual mold with my own eyes as we cannot always trust the evidence of our senses. The faculty of vision can vary from person to person. On the other hand we can rely on what reason tells us, as it is the same for every person.

If you are sitting in a classroom with thirty other pupils and the teacher asks the class which colour of the rainbow is the prettiest, she will probably get a lot of different answers. But if he asks what is 8 times 3, the whole class will - we hope - give the same answer. Because now reason is speaking and reason in a way, the direct opposite of feeling. We could say that reason is eternal and universal, because it only expresses eternal and universal states.

In short we can only have inexact conceptions of things we perceive with our senses. But we can have true knowledge of things we understand with our reason. The sum of angles in a triangle will remain 180 degrees till the end of time. And similarly the "idea dig" will walk on 4 legs even if all dogs in the sensory world break a leg.

I shall stop with this today. I will continue tomorrow with Plato's ideas about the immortal soul and most importantly about "The myth of the Cave”, which I believe makes a very interesting story. I will be concluding the thoughts on Plato by writing about his ideas of Body - Soul - Virtue - State. And the analogies between these...

Until then here is a thought... it is actually a dialogue by Kamal Hasan from the movie "Kurudi Punal" (Read River of Blood)

"Dhairyam na enna teriyuma? Bhayam illada madiri nadikardu thaan"

Translation - (a bad one)

"Do you know what courage is? It is the ability to act like you have no fear..."