Objective idealism of Plato and his role in the development of the theory of knowledge

Plato was a disciple of the ancient Greek sage Socrates, and in his philosophy took a lot from the teacher. The latter called his own method of cognition by the maewtika, which can be roughly translated as "obstetrics". The obstetrician helps the mother to give birth to a child. The child's body is already formed, and the midwife only helps to bring it into the world. In application to cognition, the truth appears on the child's place, which is known to us in advance, because she is from the world of ideas. But since our soul is under the influence of material reason, we need an effort - and suggestive questions of the "obstetrician" sage, so that the human mind "gives birth," but actually recalls what he already knew. Objective idealism of Plato proceeds from the Socratic doctrine of the Maevtic and develops it.

First of all, the philosopher formulates the doctrine of the realm of ideas, primordial and primary in relation to the material world. Before you do, for example, a table, the master already has in mind the idea of some thing having a flat horizontal surface towering above the ground. And it does not matter which item the master will make (lame, small, large, simple or beautifully encrusted, about four legs or on one). The main thing is that anyone who looks at this subject, said that this is a table, and not a lamp, an amphora, etc. That is, Plato's objective idealism presupposes the primacy of ideas over concrete things.

In the mountain world, entities are forever. They are there before they find the incarnation in amorphous matter, become things, and after these things grow old and decay, they fall into oblivion. No matter how hard it is for us to imagine that the essence of the iPod or nuclear reactor existed before their inventors, Plato's objective idealism asserts that it is so: "eidos", entities, simply incarnate when we are "ready to give birth" to them. Therefore, they are objective, indestructible and immortal, whereas things are only emanations, imperfect and perishable shadows of true reality.

Man, according to Plato, a duality. On the one hand, his body is part of the material world, and on the other hand, he is a subject and spiritual entity born of a higher kingdom. Looking at an object, we first of all fix in mind its "eidos". Looking at the two cats, the human mind immediately perceives their ancestral similarity (in spite of the fact that one is small and black, and the second one is big, red and in general, not a female, but a cat). In our minds, as stated by Plato's objective idealism, forms and concepts have been preserved with the help of which people recognize the essential among a mass of disparate concrete objects.

The teachings of Plato found their followers in philosophy and the theory of knowledge, not only in the ancient world, but also in the Middle Ages and even in the New Age. The sensible method of comprehending the material world was considered by Plato as not genuine, because the perception of a concrete thing by sensations does not convey to us its essence. To judge something on the basis of ideas, it's like blind people to feel the elephant: one will say that it is a column, the second - that the hose, the third - that the rough wall. It is necessary to descend from the general to the particular, and such a method is called deduction. Therefore idealism in philosophy presupposes the presence of the primary Spirit, which generates the visible material world, that is, a certain universality that creates the concrete.

Thus, true knowledge is working with ideas. Operating with entities and establishing interrelations between them by comparison and analogy was called "dialectics". Plato used this image: a man sits in front of a wall and watches as someone carries behind him some objects. He tries through the shadows cast on the wall, to guess what it is. This is our knowledge. The philosopher believed that the objects of the material world are untrue, that they are the "shadow" of the entity, because the substance in which this essence found its embodiment distorted it. It is best to comprehend with the mind the eternal, but invisible to the eye of the idea, than to be based on the study of single objects. Since then, every idealist philosopher is (in the perception of the general public) a person far from true realities, soaring in the world of his own fantasies.