Term Paper on "Plato and Descartes"

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Plato and Descartes

Descartes and Plato

Allegory of a Cave in Book 7 of Plato's Republic

Socrates is reported to have told Plato the allegory of a cave. In this story, Socrates explains that there are people who have lived their entire lives in a cave, forced to look at the flickering shadows from the fire on the wall. The fire is inside the cave with them, and the shadows on the wall are the shadows of each of the chained prisoners. They think they are seeing real figures, for they have never had the experience of actually seeing the real world. To them, these shadowy figures on the wall make up the external world. Socrates these men are the allegories of all men; he believes that we all live our lives in a cave, ignorant of the real external world.

The cave is a metaphor for the ignorance man kind lives within. When one prisoner breaks free of his chains and leaves the cave, he essentially breaks free of his human ignorance and sees beyond what the limitations of his mind previously allowed him to see. The bright light of the outside world almost blinds the man as he travels out of the cave, showing how man is sometimes overwhelmed with the true facts of reality and the external world. Although life outside the cave is true reality, many choose to live inside the cave forever, rather than face the dangers of leaving it.

The childhood figure of Santa Claus is something that every child once believed. After age and experience draws children out of the allegorical cave, they see that there is no real Santa Claus; but rather that the figure of Santa Claus was a carefully constructed illusion which they believed real for all of their memorable lives. When an experience shatters the reality of this image, they are drawn out of the cave to see that it was their parents all along who bought the presents and ate the cookies, and also perpetuated the myth of Santa Claus for childhood fantasy.

The journey out of the cave can be both a negative and positive experience. As in the case with Santa Claus, the experience is somewhat negative.

A child finds out that his or her parents have been lying and that this magical person was all make believe. Sometimes the pain of reality is too much to bear for some people. As enlightening as leaving the cave can be, and despite all the knowledge one gains through leaving, sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Descartes' Context and Problem

Descartes was born in the late sixteenth century. He lived in an era of French religious fever and new radical ideas coming from the Renaissance. New developments in mathematics, the earth sciences, and astronomy were breaking new ground within a conservative religious society. Figures like Galileo were risking their lives to find the truth of existence. The image of the world and its existence was completely shattered. Previous thought on the construction and purpose of the world was cast aside for radical new ideas based more on science and rationalization than mythology and religious dogma. This era was one of the largest intellectual advancements the world had seen since the Romans.

Descartes was torn between his religious sentiments and his desire to find the truth about human nature. What he could not understand was how evil existed in a world ruled by an omni benevolent, or all good, and omniscient, or all knowing, God. He was also torn on the idea that each individual mind had the limitations of what it could understand; how then would anyone be able to know anything about the real world? Due to the human mind's limitations, what we believe to be real is actually an obscured version of the external world. Descartes, then, wanted to find out what was truly real and what was being distorted by the limitations of the human mind.

Descartes determined to find out the answers to his questions through meditation. He isolated himself so that he could think clearly in order to come up with ideas about the nature of reality and its relationship with the concepts of the human mind. What he found was that only two things could be truly proven as real; his own mind and God. He knew that he existed in the sole fact that… READ MORE

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