Plato's Divided Line

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This paper will be diving into the Plato’s structure of reality and how he has constructed his view on how a person should live and strive for. We will follow a character and or mentor know as Socrates, that Plato will use to make the arguments, both to the reader and the people Plato has seen or have been told about in this report. The divided line is broken down into 4 sections and further split in half into the visual and the intelligible. (Melchert, p. 128) This will be an argument to see if Plato was on the supposed right path to how a person should and should not live or if mankind is more than a structured breakdown hold. Please consider that Plato references “Goodness” and “Truth” as almost interchangeable terms. The divided line is one of the foundations Plato uses to prove the way a person should live. …show more content…
(Melchert, p. 131) We will look at the “lower forms” this section deals with trying to understand the 2 sections to the right of itself using “likeness” and “things”. Plato also attributes this to the scientific area’s “starting off point”. (Melchert, p. 129) So in the lower forms, we are taking a “likeness” of the picture of the now yellow cup and the actual “things” the white cup and trying to turn a white cup into an actual yellow cup in the “things” section using the picture of the yellow cup as reference. This leads us into the “higher forms” of absolute truth that he claims people should strive for. Mathematics’ is a great example for the “higher forms” subtracting three from eight gives us five. In this section that is an absolute truth of the world that each numbers just used, including its answer is and will always be that. Five, three, and eight, are just themselves no matter who you ask they will and always be the truth and is of the highest, or furthest right of the divided

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