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Comparing Plato's The Republic And The Symposium

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The Republic and The Symposium In Plato’s writings, The Republic and The Symposium, he describes his theory of two worlds, through the examples of love. Plato uses Socrates in his dialogues to explain the difference between the world of the being and the world of becoming and the effect that the difference between the two worlds has on the search for knowledge. The symposium begins with several men discussing love. They all give speeches declaring what they think of love, then it is Socrates’ turn. Socrates begins by asking Agathon if he can ask questions of him about love. Socrates begins by asking, “Is love of something or is love of nothing?”(199e, Symposium). By this he means does love need to be of something, such as love of a friend …show more content…
The allegory of the cave is an explanation of the difference between the difference between the world of being, i.e. the world of the forms, and the world of becoming, the world where we all live in. In the allegory, Socrates depicts a scene where people are bound in a cave and the can only see the shadows of things moving past the mouth of the cave on the cave wall in front of them. They take these shadows to be real life and accept them at knowledge about the world. The people are later unbound and forced out of the cave and realize that the dark cave is not the real world and that it is just a bad representation. In this story, the people in the cave stand for the people who do not study philosophy, while the person who forces the out of the cave is a philosopher. The shadows represent the things in the realm of becoming, while the real object represents the world of being. The sun, the light by which the objects in the world of being can be seen represents the good. Socrates says, “Consider this too. If the man this man went down into the cave again and sat down in the same seat, wouldn’t his eyes- coming suddenly out of the sun like that- be filled with darkness” (516e, Republic) This means that the men who are coming back down to help liberate the people still chained in the world of becoming who have already seen the world of being have issues helping the people who have not yet seen the …show more content…
He uses the example of a painter and states, “it seems then that were fairly well agreed that an imitator has no worthwhile knowledge of the things that he imitates, that the imitation is a kind of game and not something to be taken seriously,[...] are as imitative as they could be?” (602b, the republic) By this, he states that the things in the realm of becoming are just mere imitat0ns of the things in the world of being. He goes on to divide everything into what is intelligible and what is visible. The things that are visible are things like paintings of objects, or the memories of the object, and closer to the realm of the intelligible are the objects that the representations are depicting. The realm of the intelligible objects is the realm of the forms, where the form of the object, the true essence exists. All things that are in the realm of the visible have counterparts in the realm of the intelligible. Above the realm of the intelligible is the realm of “the good”. The good shines a light on the realm of the being and allows man’s soul to be able to see it when they seek it. Plato’s concept of the two-worlds theory, the theory that states that there are two realms, the realm of the being and the realm of becoming gives us insight into how he says we should seek out knowledge. The path to seeking out knowledge is through the participation in dialectic, and

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