Plato's virtue
... of the desire of good things and to provide the good. Meno admits that one good thing it is possible to desire is "to possess gold and silver and public honour and appointments” (Meno). Socrates inquires now whether the virtue of possession of gold and silver must be qualified so that its possession is fair and just. Meno agrees that it is not a virtue to have such possessions if they have been unjustly acquired. On the contrary, it would be a vice. Socrates rebuffs Meno for trying to talk about virtue by looking at it piece by piece and drawing into the discussion a sense of virtue that he has not yet presented. Meno agrees that it is a problem and comments on his reaction to what has gone on: Well now, my dear Socrates, you are just like what I always heard before I met you: always puzzled yourself and puzzling everybody else. And now you seem to me to be a regular wizard, you dose me with drugs and bewitch me with charms and spells, and drown me in puzzledom (Meno). Socrates’s response to Meno's description of his puzzlement is that he himself is "not clear-headed" when he puzzles others, and that he is "as puzzled as puzzled can be, and thus I make others puzzled too" (Meno). “And where can the conversation go from here?” (Meno) Socrates says, that he wishes to investigate virtue with Meno's help so "that we may both try to find out what it is" (Meno). Socrates argues that there is no such thing as teaching, only remembering. This notion of teaching comes out of Socrates’s belief in the immortality of the soul. "Then, since the soul is immortal and often born, having seen what is on earth and what is in the house of Hades, and everything, there is nothing it has not learnt; so there is no wonder it can remember about virtue and other things…" (Meno). After questioning the slave boy about geometry Socrates seeks Meno's concurrence in the proposition that the boy, shown to have been in error about geometry, is better off now, that he too is numbed but has knowledge about the limits of what he knows. By being numbed by the sting of Socrates's conversation the slave has come a step "onwards, as it seems, to find out how he stands"(Meno). Meno answers yes. Meno takes up again his original question, whether virtue can be taught, or one gets it by nature or in some other way. Socrates agrees to proceed but contends that they need a common ground as neither of them can say at this point what virtue is. Socrates has Meno agree that if virtue is knowledge then it can be taught, and if not a knowledge then it cannot be taught. Plato further develops Virtue in Protagoras, qualifying it with integrated particular parts, Virtue’s distribution in society, and how it can be taught. Virtue is made up of Justice, Piety, Wisdom and Temperance. Moreover, Plato analogizes Virtue’s parts not as equal part of gold that vary in size, but as parts of a face; nose, eyes, ears, etc.; each one having a particular function but needing to function together in order to cohere. Furthermore, Protagoras explains that Virtue is distributed to all in society, thus everyone is a teacher of it. Additionally, virtue is knowledge because Socrates through laborious argumentation concludes that Justice, Piety, Wisdom and Temperance are all the same: knowledge. He further argues that in order to accurately teach Knowledge (Virtue) students should be given a heavy foundation in the art of measuring the consequences of their acts, as this will give the right opinion to infer “True Knowledge”. The Republic, The cusp of Plato’s Dialogues, outlines the “The Perfect Polis” and underlines the Theory of Virtue/Knowledge. Plato argues “True Knowledge” is an essential component for The Polis that makes the citizen of it good and just. For Knowledge to circulate through The Polis, the arts need to be censure: expunging negative connotation of the gods, heroes and other eminent figures that would degrade their exemplary image in front of future citizen (children). Plato's Theory of Virtue/Knowledge continues with his three approaches: The Allegory of The Cave, The metaphor of the Divided Line and The Theory of The Forms. Each theory is interconnected; one could not be without the other. In Allegory of The Cave, Plato describes a group of shackled prisoners seated in a dark cave facing the wall. Chained by their necks, they can only look forward and see shadows produced by nature moving in front of a fire behind the prisoners. Plato states that for the prisoners, reality is only the mere shadows thrown onto the wall. At on point, a prisoner (philosopher) is released from his chains and comes out the cave, his movements are difficult, his eye adjustment painful. Plato then makes suggestions of the effects of the prisoner returning to the cave. The Cave suggests to us that Plato saw most of humanity living in the dark, without knowledge, and philosopher as the liberated prisoner from the cave living in the light, with knowledge and salvation away the cave (the mortal world). He put it this way, "the conversion of the soul is not to put the power of sight in the soul's eye, which already has it, but to insure that, insisted of looking in the wrong direction it is turned the way it ought to be" (The Republic). Plato's two worlds: the dark and the bright were his way of rejecting the Sophists, who believed "true knowledge" impossible because of constant change. Plato believed there was a “true Idea of Justice". The Cave showed us this quite dramatically. The Divided Line visualizes the levels of knowledge in a more systematic approach. Plato states there are four stages of knowledge development: Imagining, Belief, Thinking, and Perfect Intelligence. Imagining is at the lowest level of this developmental ladder. Imagining, here in Plato's world, is not taken at its conventional level but of appearances seen as "true reality". Plato considered shadows, art, poetry, and especially rhetoric deceptive illusions: what one sees is not necessarily what one gets. With poetry and rhetoric, one may be able to read the words but one may not understand the "real" meaning. For example, take, again, the shadow. If one believes a shadow is something "real" (it is a being) then one is in the state of imagination, which implies that one is "unaware of observation and [one] amounts to illusion and ignorance". Belief is the next stage of developing knowledge. Plato goes with the idea that seeing really is not always believing, one has a strong conviction for what one sees but not with absolute certainty. This stage is more advanced than imagining because it's based more firmly on reality; however, just because one can actually see the object and not just its shadow does not mean we know all there is to know about the object. In the next stage, Thinking, one leaves the "visible world" (the mortal world, the cave) and move into the "intelligible world" (the philosopher’s world), which Plato claims is seen mostly in philosophers. Thinking is the "visible" object, as well as the hypothesis", a truth which is taken as self-evident but which depends upon some higher truth" (The Republic). Plato wants to see all things interconnected. Nevertheless, Thinking does not give all the information craved thus one still ask "why?" For Plato the last stage of developing knowledge is Perfect Intelligence, the goal of the true philosopher. It represents "the mind as completely released from sensible objects" and relates directly to his Theory of Forms. In this stage, a hypothesis is no longer present because of its limitations. Plato summarized the Divided Line with "Now you may take, a corresponding to the four sections, these four states of mind, Intelligence for the highest, Thinking for the second, Belief for the third and for the last Imagining. These you may arrange in terms as the terms in a proportion, assigning to each a degree of clearness and certainty corresponding to the measure in which their object pose a reality" (The Republic). When discussing the Divided Line, The Forms are the highest levels of "reality". Plato conclude...