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Plato: Knowledge
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In the Meno, Socrates uses a geometrical example to expound Plato's view that knowledge in this latter sense is acquired by recollection. Socrates elicits a fact concerning a geometrical construction from a slave boy, who could not have otherwise known the fact (due to the slave boy's lack of education). The knowledge must be present, Socrates concludes, in an eternal, non-experiential form.
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Plato's own theory of knowledge is found in the Republic, particularly in his discussion of the image of the divided line and the myth of the cave. In the former, Plato distinguishes between two levels of awareness: opinion and knowledge. Claims or assertions about the physical or visible world, including both commonsense observations and the propositions of science, are opinions only. Some of these opinions are well founded; some are not; but none of them counts as genuine knowledge. The higher level of awareness is knowledge, because there reason, rather than sense experience, is involved. Reason, properly used, results in intellectual insights that are certain, and the objects of these rational insights are the abiding universals, the eternal Forms or substances that constitute the real world.
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While Plato ... describes the liberating and empowering nature of education, he was deeply pessimistic with regard to its popularity. In the tale of the cave great emphasis is placed on the difficulties of acquiring knowledge, and on the hostility and mistrust that many people feel toward education and educated people. The ascent out of the cave and into the light is neither easy nor necessarily voluntary, and it requires a persistence and willingness to undergo changes that most people would find too strange to consider, or too painful to endure. Not only do cave dwellers dislike leaving the cozy darkness to which they are accustomed, they also hate and mistrust those who have been outside and who have come back to improve things. Most people dislike being told that they lack knowledge; disturbing gadflies like Socrates are rarely respected for their critical remarks and demanding ideas. What people basically like is having fun and being left alone.
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Plato believed that not only the democracy, but ... the oligarchy of the Thirty had gone astray because political leaders, blinded by their own self-interests, neglected the interest of the state as a whole. Political power seemed to attract persons who lacked the prerequisite qualities of leadership: intelligence, integrity and selfless concern for the welfare of the governed. Intelligence is central to the Platonic view of leadership. Qualification for the wielding of political power must be based on the possession of superior intelligence, not superior physical force. From intelligence springs a knowledge of moral truths and a correct vision of the function of political power as serving the interests of the governed. The interests of the state must have priority over the interests of any individual.
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Plato locates the origin of all states, just or otherwise, in economic need. Such economic associations are best organized if each person performs the job for which they are naturally most suited: this will result in an efficient and harmonious state in which sufficient leisure is possible to allow for civilized life. Over time this minimal state will become more complex, until eventually it divides into three classes, corresponding to three natural types: the Producers, who supply all the economic needs of the state; the Auxiliaries, who act as a combined military, executive, and police force (the state is only ideally just, not just simpliciter, and war will still be a feature of life); and the Philosopher-Rulers, whose rule is sanctioned by the fact that only they have knowledge of an abstract and transcendent metaphysical entity called the Form of the Good, which alone enables one to act for the good of the whole. Most children will naturally be of the same type as their parents, and ... will form part of the same class; if they are of a different natural type, however, then the state must remove them to the appropriate class. Justice in the state consists in each member fulfilling the class function to which he or she is naturally fitted.
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Plato's theory of Forms and his theory of knowledge are so interrelated that they must be discussed together. Influenced by Socrates, Plato was convinced that knowledge is attainable. He was ... convinced of two essential characteristics of knowledge. First, knowledge must be certain and infallible. Second, knowledge must have as its object that which is genuinely real as contrasted with that which is an appearance only. Because that which is fully real must, for Plato, be fixed, permanent, and unchanging, he identified the real with the ideal realm of being as opposed to the physical world of becoming.
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