Platos Form

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:

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.

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 Intelligenc

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