Plato's philosophical contributions and enduring influence

Philosophy

Plato lived a century after Pythagoras, though he also studied the idea of the Pythagoreans and accepted some, notably in terms of their ideas on mathematics. Plato has been considered a disciple of Pythagoras, but he should not be seen as a Pythagorean because he followed his own thought processes and developed his own view of the nature of the world. Plato learned about logic and ethics from his direct teacher, Socrates, who would also question much of what the Pythagoreans accepted.

The idea of the eternal forms is one of those concepts Plato either developed himself or adapted from Socrates, for it is not always possible to tell where Socrates ends and Plato begins in the dialogues. In examining the world and the relationship of the human mind to the world, Plato found that ideas, as he used the term, are not only something in human consciousness but something outside it as well. Platonic Ideas are objective and do not depend on human thought but exist entirely in their own right. They are perfect patterns that exist in the very nature of things. Such an idea is not just a human idea but the idea of the universe itself. It is an ideal that can be expressed externally in concrete form or internally as a concept in the mind. The Idea is the foundation of reality. Plato is classified as an idealist in his philosophy, basing his view of the world on the idea that there are forms embodying this world in a state of perfection and that what we perceive in this world are only shadows of the ideal. Central to Plato's thought is the power of reason to reveal the intelligibility and order governing the changing world of appearance, with the purpose of creating, at both the political and the individual level, a harmonious and happy life.

The way Plato adopted Pythagorean ideas for his eternal forms came in the idea of numerology, with the number Two represented the world of the eternal forms, a world of duality in which there is an Ideal world and a world of the sense, only the latter of which can be accessed directly, while the former is only accessed through philosophy.

The ancient Greeks considered the nature of the universe and whether it was permanent or not. Heraclitus stated that it was not possible to step into the same river twice, thus indicating his belief in the prevalence of change all around. Heraclitus believed that stability was an illusion. Parmenides thought that motion was an illusion. Plato offered a compromise in his view of a dual world, one unstable and transient and the other permanent and unchanging.

Protagoras tried to explain the ideas of the human mind "psycho-genetically," declaring that the entire psychical life of the human being was such that it consisted only in perceptions. This was a form of sensualism, and Protagoras believed that the world could only be perceived through the senses. This was also related to ideas of motion, and it was on motion that perception rested, as does every process by which things come to be or occur in the world. This idea was accepted by most of the philosophical schools of the time, including the Atomists.

Plato took quite a different approach and found that ideas, as noted, and saw idas as existing outside of human consciousness. Plato's doctrine of recollection holds that learning is the remembering of a wisdom that the soul enjoyed prior to its incarnation, another aspect of the idea that there are ideal forms "remembered" by the soul in this world, and this is actually a mythical statement of this view that neither reason nor the intelligible order that it reveals is alien to the human soul. The soul is seen as existing before life here on earth and as remembering the ideals it knew before birth. Protagoras would not have engaged in this sort of argument, jus as he avoided arguments about the existence of the gods as being outside of sensory experience.

3. Plato's ideas are similar to some of the Asian philosophies regarding the nature of life and the structure of the universe. The idea of a duality is found in many of these philosophies, and Plato was clearly a source for some of the teachings of Islam and related doctrines. The idea of an eternal realm is common in many religious doctrines and so can be seen as having some relationship to the Platonic view of eternal forms, though not in just the same way. Lao-Tzu contributed to the development of Taoism, seeing Tao as a choice between being and non-being, and this original polarity is found in force throughout the world. Non-being is emptiness, or what is not, and it has as much significance as does being, the fullness of things, or what is. In this way, Lao-Tzu captures and reforms the earlier Chinese concept of Yin and Yang, the polarities running through all things. Duality links Plato to the Asian philosophies, though how they envision the duality of the world will differ.