Plato’s Theory of Ideas: Understanding True Knowledge
Knowledge is unreliable for attaining real knowledge (science or Episteme). The reason is that, if it leads to true knowledge, one must be able to know the ideas: objects that are stable, permanent, eternal, and so on. These will serve to build the concepts of universal knowledge, which is eternal, immutable, objective, strong, and not wrong. Also recognized in the knowledge of reason, in varying degrees of Episteme, is Dianoia, discursive reason, aimed at the mathematical world, which was, according to Plato, a preparatory tool for Noesis, the next grade, whose proper object were the ideas. Noesis released people from ignorance and brought them to the knowledge of good through philosophical knowledge.
Reasons Supporting the Possibility of Knowledge
a. Dialectics: To meet the World of Ideas, the authentic reality, was a proper activity of human reason. One can rise from sensible to ideal knowledge in a continuous discourse and difficult process, for the soul, trapped in the body, tends to the sensible. This stay in the epistemological process is known as Dialectics, the supreme method of knowledge, which the wise, aided by mathematical knowledge, passed from one idea to reach the Supreme Idea that makes the other ideas intelligible. Once the Supreme Idea is reached, the wise begin a descending process (Dialectics) linked to the others. Dialectics is a bottom-up approach, from the sensible to the intelligible, from the manifold to the unity of the intelligible, from an Idea to the Supreme Idea, and a down method. Then, known ideas and relationships, that knowledge must be applied to practical life. Dialectic is the path to action, freedom, and commitment, not just the art of arguing (Sophists).
If dialectics is the process of ensuring knowledge and ending sophistic relativism and Eleatic aporia, there are two arguments that Plato used with the aim of ensuring the possibility of rational knowledge:
b. Plato speaks of love or sympathy of the human soul for ideas that it knew before, as a process of knowing Ideas, connected to Dialectics: “This is the right way to deal with love affairs, initially for beautiful things of this world, with the order of beauty itself, and, using them as ladders, move up steadily, going from a beautiful body to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies, from beautiful bodies to the beautiful rules of conduct, and from them to the fine sciences, and from parts thereof, to the science of absolute beauty, and finally get to know what is beauty itself.”
c. Reminiscence (to know is to remember): To get true knowledge (Episteme or Science) raises the issue of how humans could understand the ideas if they transcended the world in which they lived. Plato never had a clear answer. On the one hand, he said that as sensible things imitate or participate in the world of ideas, the occasion served to know them, for the soul to remember the ideas it met while living in the transcendent world, and forgot to enter into a body. For Plato, from this perspective, knowledge and learning processes were to remember (or Reminiscence, Anamnesis). By defining (defining knowledge was for Plato) one is not seeking the unknown, but the known and forgotten.
The Structure of Reality: Plato’s Theory of Ideas
The Structure of Reality (Theory of Ideas) explains the structure of reality as being, as known in the nineteenth century, an Ontological explanation, asserting the existence of two worlds (Dualism) and different realities: the physical things, sensitive, specific and changing, imperfect, a pseudo-reality.