Critique of Plato's Divided Line by Ejezie Bernardino Ugoo

INTRODUCTION

Like every other discipline, Philosophy is not devoid of problems. These philosophical problems are not issues that can be solved once and for all. The fundamental problems of philosophy are perennial problems. They are basically problems of conceptualization which cannot be solved in a dogmatic manner as in religion. One of these problems is the problem of knowledge. The issue of knowledge is really a thought-provoking one and it has been reflected upon and discussed through the ages and it still persists to our own day. Plato in his Metaphor of Divided Line discussedthis problem of knowledge in a metaphysical view. He presents it as a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon.  However, this work is an attempt to give from my perspective, a critical critique of Plato’s Divided Line; but before I delve into the work, I wish to give a rundown of Plato’s analogy of Divided line which will serve as a requisite for better understanding of this work.

PLATO’S ANALOGY OF THE DIVIDED LINE 

Explaining the world in which we live has been the essential pursuit of Philosophy since the beginning. Plato’s “Divided Line” is one of the most studied and famous explanations of the world. It not only explains its essence but it discusses the theory of knowledge. This ideology is demonstrated through a line, which separates four metaphysical models of knowledge and the world.

  OBJECTSYMODES OF THOUGHT

THE GOOD   [FORMS]	KNOWLEDGE
MATHEMATICAL OBJECTS	THINKING
THINGS	BELIEF
IMAGES	IMAGINING

INTELLIGIBLE WORLD

           [KNOWLEDGE]

VISIBLE-WORLD

[OPINION]
X

The line divides reality into two unequal fields; opinion and knowledge, or the visible and intelligible world, respectively. This unequal division symbolizes the lower degree of reality and truth found in the visible world as compared with the greater reality and truth in the intelligible world. The visible world is perceived by the senses and subject to change. The intelligible world cannot be perceived by the senses, but only known and understood. This world is not subject to change, but rather is eternal and within it holds universal ideas. These two fields are then divided once more; Opinion is divided into “Imagining” and “Belief”. Knowledge or the intelligible world is divided into “Thinking and “Knowledge”. These models are more or less arranged in form of ladder which journey from Ignorance to True Knowledge. Recalling the allegory of the Cave,we can think of this line as beginning in the dark and shadowy world at X and moving up to the bright light at Y. Going from X to Y represents a continuous process of the mind’s enlightenment.

IMAGINING: This model maintains the lowest level of reality. The mind at this level only confronts images. Here, imagining for Plato means the sense experience of appearance which is taken as true reality but is only mere illusion. Obvious examples of these are; shadows, images and words used in rhetorics and by poet. Plato considered these things to b deceptive. Imagining, however, implies that a person is not aware that he is observing an image and might have misconceived this image to be the reality. However, imagining amounts to illusion and ignorance.

BELIEF: As beings that exist within the sphere of the visible world, we tend to feel a strong sense of certainty when we observe visible and tangible things. In other words, there is a degree of certainty that “seeing” gives us but not absolute certainty anyway. “Seeing” however, constitutes believing. For Plato, belief based upon “seeing” is still in the stage of opinion because it is devoid of reasoning. However, belief maintains the second level of reality within the visible world because here, we believe things without investigating it through the exercise of the mind (rationale).

THINKING: The movement from believing to thinking is the movement from visible world to intelligible world or rather from the realm of opinion to the realm of knowledge. In this model, Plato illustrates the kind of mental activity engaged here by referring to “The Mathematician”. The mathematician deals with abstract concepts by using visible signs such as triangle, circle etc. in other words, the visible objects are more or less used as symbols. By using a triangle, a mathematician goes beyond the visible triangle to think of the intelligible triangle. However, this requires that we “let go” our senses and rely instead upon our intellect. Thinking therefore represents the power of the mind to abstract from visible object, “the core of the object” or “the object as such”

PERFECT INTELLIGENCE: The mind is never satisfied with abstracting the core of objects but it seeks for perfect knowledge which would require that the mind should grasp the relation of everything to everything else which is the unity of the whole of reality. Thus, the universal can be apprehended here. In this model, the mind is completely released from sensible objects; it is dealing directly with the forms. However, perfect knowledge means the synoptic view of reality and this for Plato implies the unity of knowledge.

Furthermore, Plato explains a situation in which there are human beings, kept chained, facing a cave wall since childhood, who have never seen the light of the sun and cannot see each other. Between the people and the mouth of the cave is a fire, in front of which men pass carrying statues shaped like animals and other objects. The people in chains can only see the shadows cast from these objects. If one of the people were released and allowed to see the objects that had cast the shadows his whole life, he would then have a new knowledge of the realty of the images he had been seeing. If he were to look at the fire itself, he would certainly be blinded momentarily, but once used to the light he would be able to understand that the fire was the source of the shadows. Thus, moving from believing the shadows to be the reality; to believing that the objects and fire casting the shadows are the reality.Imagine further that the man were to be let out of the cave all together. First he would be blinded, as with the fire inside the cave, and would take a while to acclimate to this new reality. After adjusting to such illumination, the man would be able to see clear objects of the world as reality. After this, the man would be able to look at the sun, and realize it is the source and reason for all he is seeing.

In other words, the life inside the cave represents Plato’s idea of the visible world. The shadows cast on the cave wall and the prisoners knowing only those shadows represent the majority of humans. Most people go through life only seeing imitations of the truth, or reflections, but not the real thing. The man set free to see the objects and fire causing the shadows transcends from the subset of illusion to the subset of beholding the material objects, while still residing in the visible world. The latter is a better cognitive state to be in, rather than merely seeing shadows of true objects. The progression from visible to intelligible world takes place when the man exits the cave and steps into blinding sunlight. The intelligible world is that in which true understanding begins. The initial segment people enter into in the intelligible world is that of mathematical theory and reasoning. In this world, conclusions are made from axioms; only true conclusions and valid reasoning exists in this division of the intelligible world.  This is where abstract and metaphysical ideas would live.Such ideas include; the Pythagorean Theorem or the Quadratic Equation; something that holds true in any situation. 

CRITIQUE

Plato had his allegory of the cave before he wrote on the divided line. In his idea of the cave, he opines that reality as a whole exists within two spheres; the world of forms and the physical world. He holds also that the human soul (which is his definition of man) exists previously in the world of form and is now being caged in the human body. In the same line of thought, he notes that we cannot know anything in this physical world that we can only remember the things which we knew previously in the world of forms where our souls formerly existed. For Plato, our perception of images in this world helps us to recall these things which we already knew. However, contrary to his position in the Allegory of the Cave, Plato in the lowest level of his Divided Line maintains that our perception of images leads us to illusion and ignorance and that these images are deceptive. To drive home my argument, I think Plato’s work at this point lacks some clarity because he elaborated in his Allegory of the Cave that the images in the physical world help us to recall the things we knew before while in his later work; Divided Line, he holds a counter view that images lead us to ignorance and illusion.

Again, it is quite obvious that Plato based on his ideas on divided line is more or less a rationalist as par dealing with the sources of knowledge. In other words, his position is in opposition with that of the Empiricists. However, it is on this note that I stand to observe that there are many sources of knowledge depending on what is to be known and the context within which the knowledge is to be acquired and no knowledge is absolutely certain to the extent that it cannot be invalidated. Nonetheless, Plato’s Divided Line is a serious effort made towards the problem of knowledge which seems to be a hard nut to crack and it facilitates sincere dialogue among critical minds.

CONCLUSION            

Plato’s metaphysical and epistemological doctrines are difficult to completely separate. He explains the metaphysical or abstract concepts of knowing by asserting that they belong to the intelligible world rather than the visible world. The purpose of Plato’s Divided Line is to demonstrate the levels of knowledge a human can and should aspire to attain. It seems that majority of people spend their lives living in the world of illusions, only seeing traces of truth in their lives. Humans desire the Good, and if they wish to attain it they must transcend from one world to the next, namely from the shadow world to the material world, from that to the world of mathematical reason, and finally to the world of the Forms. In a nutshell, the Divided Line is a journey of no return. Once you know and understand the next world, you cannot revisit your earlier ignorance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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