Built
Parthenon
Instigated
direct democracy
Peloponnesian
War
In
this context Socrates and Plato taught.
(Plato’s
cave)
Socrates
thought that questions of truth were directly related to how one should live
one’s life and how the polis was to be run.
What
is reality like? What is true? Is everything one unchanging eternal whole,
like Zeno argued, or is everything made up of atoms constantly moving and
changing?
His first task was to answer the Sophists and Skeptics. What can we know for certain? This is different from facts (there is a desk in my room); it means those things that are eternally true and never change.
The model—Pythagoras.
The same model of truth. That which is true is relational and
proportional.
Man
must have a balance in life, the passions (Hubris: remember the anger of
Achilles) must be controlled by reason.
This is the proper relation within human beings, to avoid Hubris (self pride, arrogance,
passions).
The
Pythagorean theorem plays right into this idea of
knowledge. Recall that a true
rectilinear triangle is not something physical or drawn, but something
substantiated by a mathematical relationship, a relational statement. It is
immutable. We can distinguish between
the drawn triangle and the true form of the triangle. True form suffers no change and should be the
proper focus of the soul.
This
means that true and eternal things are not found in the physical world, but in
the world of forms.
Horse Black Beauty
Perfect imperfect
copy
Eternal changing
We
become wise by thinking about the forms; they are more important than the
material world. This means that being
able to think properly is more important than experience; experience only gives
us information about the particular, imperfect things, not about truth
itself. Thus experience is not that
important.
What
is to be avoided at all costs is a slavish adherence to experience, as if
experience can lead us to perfect truth.
Experiences flood in by the thousands each day, yet the world is full of
villains and fools, all of whom have had experience. You cannot make a distinction between the
wise and the foolish based on who has had more experience. If this is true, then the fact that three
people constitute more collective experience than one counts
for nothing. Self-deception is not
eliminated by multiplying the number of those deceived. “It is not majorities that establish
truth. It cannot be majorities that cut
the path to knowledge.”
In
the context of the defeat of