The successor to one of the most prominent philosophers of historys’ prestige also rings true and perpetuates throughout the ages in the utmost esteem, he is none other than Plato. This philosopher, in conducting his ideology, predicated much of his work on Socrates’ thoughts. This however was hard to do since as few may not know, Socrates ceased to write anything down for the defense of the mind. He believed that the mind harbored all his worthwhile information and that writing them down would be not only futile, but a shame to his own.
Plato believed that everything in this world is a shadow of its ideal form in the world of ideas. The world of ideas is foreign to the senses, thus, limiting our paradigm in such a way that does not allow us to see the true form of a thing, just its mere undertones. Plato poses an analogy by the name of ‘Allegory of the cave’ where people find themselves in a cave watching shadows via the fire sprung above, believing it to be reality, when in fact it's far from it. Once the people managed to escape the cave, reality isn't what they have known it to be, coveting for their life in the cave once more. We in fact are naive to the world of ideas and the ideal image of objects we think we know to be.
How the senses come to recognize the objects are such is because in a formative life, we have indeed seen and dealt with these said objects, allowing the senses to be primed to identify them respectively. Alas, the material world may be subject to change, however the world of ideas is immutable. Ponder this: If you were exposed to the world of ideas being perplexed by the nuance of it all, would you revert back to the world of the senses, the comfortable and known domain, irrespective of what the capital ‘T’ truth is?
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