We Still Live in Plato's World

The Cornford edition (1973) is the one I used

I first opened Plato's Republic in eighth grade, tackled it again in high school, and spent over a month on it in college. A half-century later its popularity persists :

Plato’s most far-reaching work is today his most widely read, indeed the most widely assigned text by any author at America’s top universities (according to a 2016 study by the Open Syllabus Project, a non-profit group that surveys college curricula). That’s surely what Plato hoped to achieve as he composed his “Republic.” From stylistic clues we can tell that he kept revising the work through most of his adult life (that is, through the first half of the fourth century B.C.), far longer than any of his other 30-odd dialogues.

An ancient Greek anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, holds that just after his death a tablet was found on which, in his last hours, he had been reworking the opening sentence of the “Republic.”

In my humble opinion we--at least those of us in the West---still live in Plato's world. We assume that Forms exist, though none of us have seen them in reality (we know what the Form of a "dog" or a "chair" is, though none of us have seen perfect specimens of either).

Many, including your humble blogger, believe that our perceptions of the world are like Plato's shadows in the cave. There is an underlying truth that our senses alone do not grasp; do not mistake the shadows for reality.

And the current disenchantment with education is not so much a turning away from Plato's path to virtue as it is disappointment about what education has actually become: a tool for blinkered indoctrination into identity politics and tribal grievances. Education, as it is today, is as far removed from the Socratic method and free inquiry as a paint-by-numbers manual teaches art.

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” ― Socrates