Plato Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 2

Plato - Essay Example o that we gain the knowledge of Socrates, perhaps one of the ancient world’s most famous philosophers but what were the ideas of Socrates and which were the ideas of Plato remains a mystery today. Plato, who was a student of Socrates, pulled together the ideas of his mentor and Pythagoras to combine them with his own response to what he’d seen of the world to develop his Theory of Forms. In this theory, the ultimate goal was to progress through the levels of reality to the highest level, also known as the greatest good. According to Plato, reality is not the world of substance and things that we can see in everyday life, but is something more abstract that can only be obtained through intellectual thought (Strathern, 1996, p. 25). To help explain his Theory of Forms, Plato developed what is today referred to as the Allegory of the Cave. In the dialogue Plato presents, Socrates explains how people have been chained since childhood with their vision restricted to a giant screen in front of them. They can see the shadows of marionettes and other things dancing, but the actual colors and nature of these things cannot be perceived from such a perspective. These are the Forms of Plato’s theory. Not having known anything else, Socrates argues that the humans don’t know there’s something to miss: â€Å"To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images† (Plato 388). Because of the pain of the bright light of truth, Socrates also explains that individuals will attempt to reject the truth, the colors and textures of the real Forms, for the more comforting and familiar shadows. Eventually, they come to accept the truth, though, and are sometimes able to help others still trapped in the cave to come out and see the truth. Plato also outlined an elaborate description of utopia in The Republic. Here, he sets forth an example of a just society in which there are no possessions, children removed from their parents soon after