Plato’s Dualistic Philosophy: Soul, Body, and the World of Ideas
Plato’s Dualistic Philosophy
Plato is the first thinker who produced a philosophical system of a dualistic nature. A dualistic approach explains phenomena based on two irreducible principles, often subject and spirit, or matter and form. When explaining the constitution of man, this is an anthropological dualism.
The Sensible World
The sensible world is the world we know through our senses. It is composed of matter ordered in the image of ideas.
The Intelligible World
The intelligible world consists of ideas that constitute the essence of sensible things. These ideas are immaterial, eternal, immutable, and universal. Plato also advocates a dualistic anthropology, according to which the human being is a composite of body and soul.
The Body
The body belongs to the sensible world and, like other things in this world, is made of matter and is subject to change: birth, growth, and decay. The senses reside in the body and are the organs through which we know the sensible world. However, they provide us with a lower form of knowledge, mere opinion. Therefore, we cannot say that these things *are*, but only what they *seem* here and now.
The Soul
True knowledge can only be achieved when accessing the essences of things, which Plato calls ideas. We know the ideas not through the senses, but because human beings possess understanding, which is not in the body but in the soul.
The soul is a non-physical entity with a similar nature to those ideas; it is eternal and immortal. It consists of three parts:
- Appetitive Part: The part where wishes and desires reside.
- Volitional Part: The part of the soul that resides in good mood, will, and ambition for success.
- Rational Part: The part of the soul in which the capacity for full knowledge resides.
Incarnation and Reminiscence
Plato cannot be considered to give a rational explanation of incarnation and reminiscence. Instead, he resorts to allegory or myth. According to this myth, the soul originally inhabited the region above the sky, where it had the chance to see the world of sensible ideas before reincarnating in a body.
As a result of this fall, the soul forgets its knowledge of the world of ideas, which it slowly remembers again. Knowledge is nothing more than a memory or recollection of what has long been known. It follows that knowledge is innate, not born; we do not learn strictly speaking; the soul does not learn, but remembers.
The Soul’s Return
Upon the body’s death, the soul is reincarnated in another body. The soul will be finally freed from the shackles of the sensitive world and may return to the region above the sky to which it belongs.
The Dialectic
The dialectic is generally understood as a form of knowledge that allows us to build on overcoming conflicts and contradictions. Plato understood the dialectic as a process that allows us to move up from the lowest to the highest.
Plato argues that after dialectic training, understanding can grasp the ideas in an intuition, which will be a more general idea. The rise will continue until the most general idea is the idea of being or good.
Plato’s Conception of the Human Being and the Polis
The Platonic conception of the human being does not end with the description of the characteristics of soul and body. Plato believed that man is a social being and, as such, cannot be fulfilled outside the *polis* in which he lives. All of Plato’s philosophical thinking, including the development of the theory of ideas, seems motivated by the attempt to build a state fair to good and righteous citizens. And there can be no just *polis* or just people if they do not know what justice is.
The human being is fully realized when each of the three parts of his soul fulfills its function, allowing reason to guide their behavior. Man spoils those possibilities by being dominated by the concupiscible wishes born within the soul that make him creep away from true reality. The real work of politics is to educate citizens to live according to the order of ideas. So, the real rulers must be philosophers. There can only be a fair *polis* if rulers are led by philosophers.