I have begun to read about Plato. So far I understand that he was a terribly thoughtful man. He had many thoughts. Some of them I think were quite good. I like his idea of forms, this says that there is an ideal form for everything, such as a horse - even though they look very different there is something about a horse that makes it a horse, so they all come from a certain mold. I like to think of this using the gingerbread man example, if you see a row of gingerbread men in a shop even though some may be missing a limb or be slightly malformed one could make a reasonable picture in one's mind of the original mold. Plato then went one step further and said we are all born with these ideas in our soul, or something like that. I didn't like that, sounds a bit silly and rather fanciful to me.
Another thing I liked was the cave story - imagine prisoners in a cave that have been placed and tied so that all they have ever seen are shadows on the opposite wall from objects being carried through the cave. Now imagine one of them breaks free and turns around to see the actual objects, and then maybe even goes outside to see the world outside the cave. They then return to their fellow prisoners and tell them all about the things they have seen and tell them that what they can see are simply shadows of reality. The other prisoners become enraged by these wild stories and kill the returned prisoner. Bit like a witch hunt I suppose. I'm sure Plato was influenced by the death of Socrates in the telling of this story. I think Socrates was a very brave man, he stood up for what he believed in to the death, wish I could be as brave. He was ahead of his time, but if he hadn't said what he did then maybe he would have always been ahead of his time. Catch 22.
I like the cave story, I'm not sure who looks worse - the philosopher who is saying 'I have seen enlightenment and follow me and you will see it too' (maybe the whole escape was a dream?) or the plebs who killed him for it. Oops, I think I just made my feelings clear on that!!
