What Was Plato's Philosophy

The following essay will talk about was about, what his philosophy was looking for and what was his definition of political philosophy. Philosophy for Plato was a way of overcoming, it was the seek of human perfection. His political philosophy is considered the means to make men more virtuous. His book, The Republic, is a guide of education for men, I consider that not only educates men, I think that The Republic is a manual for human education from which I think we can all learn and appreciate something.

Plato, in his book, looks for the idea of justice that is exactly what makes his book so meaningful. Platon thought that society was divided into three social groups: The artisans were those who were responsible for production; the guardians whose main virtue was value and were those who were responsible for caring for and protecting the order and law of the polis and then we have the rulers, who were able to think about the best laws for the city.

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I read that some of the characteristics of the polis and one of them was that poets and playwrights were forbidden, therefore.

The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer were forbidden to be read, Platon used to say that these texts incited evil through characters who did evil. I don’t share the same opinion as Plato because from my point of view, both texts marked a before and after for Greece and Plato was Greek so it’s kind of weird to me that despite the fact that he was Greek he didn’t support or move through the heroic epics of his homeland, regardless of the fact that Homer's existence is still questioned today, all Greeks began to study these texts, keeping them as the best heroic epics of ancient Greece till the date.

Now I want to talk about the myth of the cave, Plato, wrote in his book this myth that I would like to interpret more as a metaphor. Basically this myth is a representation of human life, in which it talks of several men placed in a cave from the day of their birth, without any knowledge of the outside world, bound by feet, hands and heads, so that they cannot move or turn their heads to any direction, they can only see a wall in front of them, behind is a small wall and behind the wall there is a bonfire, people from the outside world sometimes walked in front of the bonfire carrying with them all kinds of objects, so that fire causes their shadows to be reflected in the wall in front of the prisoners. As they don’t know anything else, they believe that these shadows are the real forms of the world, until one of the prisoners is released and taken to the outside world, then this prisoner goes back to the cave and he describes the rest of the prisoners what the outside world really looks like.

But they refuse to hear him thinking all he’s talking is a lie the prisoners also refuse to be freed, they would rather stay in a cave forever than to become an “idiot” as their friend. This story is an allegory of the lives of those who seek a truth and finally find it. I see the prisoners as representatives of all those ignorant people, people without hunger of getting any knowledge. I am of the opinion that we are all born in the 'cave' and our responsibility with ourselves is to discover how to get out of the cave and break the paradigms that are the ones that chain us to it. Leaving the cave means opening our minds to new perspectives, experimenting with the new and learn from the diversity of the world around us.