Today I want to share with you another short cautionary tale I made, which will serve as a companion to the topic I am going to touch on here, namely, on knowledge.
Without further ado, here's the story, and after that, let's get right to the heart of the matter.
Once upon a time there was a town with no dogs. A traveler once passed through and was surprised by the absence of these and because no one even seemed to know what a dog was.
In gratitude for the lodging, the traveler decided to make as a gift to the town a sculpture of such animal so that everyone would know what a dog looked like. Unfortunately, the traveler was a bad sculptor.
The statue looked nothing like a dog, yet if you asked them, everyone in that town agreed that this is what a dog looked like.
So, one of the most common mistakes that I personally think people make when reading the Platonic dialogues is to believe that the purpose of the text is to clarify definitions. This is a mistake that even experienced readers make, I believe. In these dialogues you often see questions such as "What is knowledge?", "What is justice?", "What is beauty?", etc. And if you are clueless, you may believe that Plato's point in these dialogues is to know the definitions of these words. But it is not so, because we don't intend to make a dictionary, the purpose of these questions is not to know the definition of a word, but to know the being that corresponds to it.
Things are not their definition.
The root of the problem lies perhaps at the very core of how we conceive of knowledge. What is knowing? For many people knowing is simply having the definition of something. This may not be true of all things, but it is especially true when we speak of immaterial objects, such as justice for example. Someone might argue that you know what justice is, if you know its definition. You could read a book about it, and come away with a very clear idea of what justice is.
However, if you go to a dictionary and look up the word justice, you will not be looking at justice itself, but only at words.
This can be seen more clearly with an example. It is evident that every word in the dictionary seeks to refer to a reality external to the dictionary itself. If I look up the word "ball", there is a definition of ball that only makes sense if it faithfully represents the object outside the dictionary that we call a ball. However, the ball is not the definition. The actual ball and the definition are two different things. So, we could argue that a person who has never seen, touched, or perceived by any other means a real ball, but has read the definition, does not really know what a ball is, he only knows its definition. These are two different things. And while this is a rather rare case, one might say, it is not when we think of other objects.
Let's go back to the case of justice. If I read the definition of justice, but don't contemplate justice itself - the immaterial object that necessarily resides outside the book - , then I don't know what justice is. In fact, I depend on the person who wrote that definition having perceived justice himself for this definition to be valid. If that person has not perceived justice itself, or if that person has perceived it but does not know how to faithfully represent these impressions in words, the definition of justice that I will have will not be accurate. Basically we will be copying our homework from someone else.
Now, on the contrary, if someone would like to know what beauty is, and this time instead of looking for a dictionary we show him an object that is beautiful, perhaps a poem, perhaps a person, or whatever, this person will have a clearer and more precise idea of what the beautiful is, because he will not have seen words, but the object itself. And after having seen the beautiful, which reminds him of beauty itself, this person will be able to create his own definition that explains his experience. That is, someone who perceived the real object can define the object, but someone who only knew the definition cannot know the real object to any extent.
Noetic knowledge.
For Plato, knowledge of these immaterial objects called ideas (justice, beauty, wisdom, etc.), is only possible through something we can call intuition, that is, direct perception of the object without the intervention of reason. It is like the action of seeing. When you see, you perceive directly without reasoning.
You need to see justice, beauty, etc., to know what they are. You can't read the definition somewhere, because then you won't be experiencing the object directly, and then, you won't know what it is. This is possibly one of the reasons why in the Platonic dialogues most of the definitions given are refuted, and the dialogues end in aporia, that is, in seemingly irresolvable paradoxes. If someone wanted to read a dialogue to learn the definition directly, they would completely miss the point.
Reason simply cannot grasp the idea, it is not something you can invent through the mind, but on the contrary it is something you must contemplate more and more through intuition, in order to have a clearer perception of the object.
Drop the knowledge.
One might ask, what is the point of reading the Platonic dialogues if through them we will not gain direct knowledge of our object of inquiry? And I would argue that, the most important thing here is not to acquire "knowledge", but to drop it. Through philosophy, the dialectical exercises presented in the dialogues, and all the back and forth, we actually manage to get out of misconceptions we have in our heads. Letting go of false knowledge we had, and in fact, gaining a deeper understanding of the subject. This understanding is not to be undervalued.
In fact, after having inquired, one can often realize that what prevents one from really knowing an object in depth is precisely the "knowledge" we have of it. The "knowledge" we have of something may not allow us to see that same object, because we don't adjust ourselves to see the object as it is, but modify it to see it as we believe it to be. And sometimes we even come to believe that knowledge is the thing itself, because we believe that the object itself is only in our mind.
So, contrary to what many might think, that it is always about the accumulation of knowledge, one could also opt for another way in which knowledge is dropped, questioning everything you thought you knew, and gaining in this process wisdom. And after all, philosophy is precisely the love of wisdom.