Plato, whose real name was Aristocles, was born in Athens, in 428/427 B.C., and there he died in 347 B.C. Plato is a name that, in accordance with some authors, it derived of his physical vigor and of the breadth of his shoulders (platos means widht). He was son of a wealthy family, with famous politicals and others important persons, that it doesn't frighten that the first passion of Plato has been the politics.

Initially, Plato seems to have been pupil of Cratilus, follower of Heraclitus (Heraclit), one of the great philosophers pre-socratics. Later on, Plato enters in contact with Socrates, and becoming his pupil, with approximately twenty years of age and with the objective of getting ready better for the political life. But the events would end for guiding his life for the philosophy as the purpose of his life.

Plato had about twenty-nine years when Socrates was condemned to drink the hemlock chalice (a poison very strong). He had accompanied his master's process closely, and he tells us it in his Apology of Socrates. The fact of Athens, the most illuminated of the Greek city-states, to have condemned Socrates to the death, he " the more wise person and the more exactly of the men " - as had spoken in a mediunimic way the oracle of Apolos, in Delphos - left in him very deep marks that would determine the lines masters of all its philosopher activity.

We believe that almost whole, or a good part of the work of Plato arrived to us. Besides letters and his Apology of Socrates, Plato wrote about thirty Dialogues that always have invariably Socrates as principal protagonist. In these exceptional works, Plato tries to reproduce the magic of the socratic dialogue, imitating the game of questions and answers, with all the intrigues of the doubt, with the fleeting and unexpected revelations that impel for the truth, without, however, reveal it in a direct way. The reason for which its works arrived us practically intact resides in the fact of Plato to have founded a school that became himself famous, and that was dedicated to the hero Academos. So is the name Academy.

Plato was the responsible person for the formulation of a new science, or, to be more exact, in a new way to think and to notice the world. This fundamental point consists of the discovery of a supply-sensitive causal reality, non material, before just sketched and not very well delineated by some philosophers, although it has been a little more chiseled for Socrates.

Before Sócrates, it was common to try to explain the natural phenomenons starting from physicals and mechanicals causes, like nowadays. Plato observes that Anaxágoras (one of the pre-socrátics) had hit upon for the need of introducing an universal Intelligence to get to explain the reason of the things, but he didn't know how to take very ahead this its intuition, continuing to attribute preponderant weight to the physical causes. However, wondered Plato, will it be that the causes of physical and mechanical character represent the " true causes " or, to the opposite, do they represent simple " concauses ", that is to say, do you cause the service of higher causes? Would not thet visible fruit of something more subtler?

To find the answer to this doubts, Plato undertook wich he called in a simbolical " the second sailing ". The first sailing would be the course of the naturalistic philosophy. The second sailing would be the metaphysical orientation of a spiritualistic philosophy, a philosophy of the intelligible. The sense in is second sailing is clear in the examples gived for own Plato. If one wants to explain why a thing it is beautiful, a materialistic one would say that the physical elements as the volume, the color and the very proportional healthy cutting and they cause a greatiful sense and you pleased to the senses. Plato would say that all this would just be qualities that would still evoke a memory of something more beautiful, seen by the soul in a spiritual plane, but that is not directly accessible to the physical plan. The object would just be an imperfect copy, for being material, of a " Idea " or model in a pure way of something that is beautiful in itself.

Let us see another example:
Socrates is arrested, awaiting his condemnation. Why is he arrested? The explanation mechanicist would say that is because Socrates possesses a stout body, composed of bones and nerves, etc, that facilitate them to allowed and to move him about to here, in the prision, and it makes him move for all lifetime, until that, for having he made some mistake, he have driven to the prison, where they are puts him them. Now, any person knows the great simplification that is this type of argument, but is exactly as soon as they talk everybody who believes in a materialistic-mechanics explanation about the life, and so speaks the science until nowadays.

A doctor, for example, will tend to explain everything starting from his physiologic knowledge, as a person will tend to believe that a world is just reduced to the area framed by his small window. But this explanation type doesn't offer the true " reason ", the reason for which Socrates is arrested, just explaining the middle for which cannot a person to be put in a jail due to his body. It just explains the act, describing it, and you don't sweat the real causes, in the same way as the mechanics science of our time great part. The true cause for the which Sóocrates was prisoner is not of mechanical and material order, but superior order, in the same way that a computer doesn't execute a complex mathematical calculation for the action of its components in itself, but due to something of superior and more abstract order: it is the program, the software. Socrates was condemned due to a judgement of used moral value the pretext of justice to hide resentments and the people's political maneuvers that hated it. Him, Sócrates, decided to accept the verdict of the juízeses and to submit himself to the law of Athens, for believing that was the correct and the convenient, because he was citizen from Athens, same aware of the injustice of its condemnation. And, in consequence of this, of that choice of moral order and spiritual, he, soon after, moved the muscles and the legs and went to the jail, where he let to be prisoner.

The second sailing, therefore, it takes to the knowledge of two levels or plans of being: one, fenomenic and visible (at level of the hardware, as we would say in computation language); other, invisible and metafenomenic, (at level of the software), intelligible and comprehensible for the reason and for the intuition.

We can affirm, as they speakst Reale & Antiseri, that the platonic second sailing constitutes a conquest and it marks, at the same time, the foundation and the most important stage of the history of the metaphysics. The whole western thought would be conditioned defintiviamente by that " distinction " among the physicist (the hardware) and the causal (the software, the implied order that causes the explained order), so much in the measure of its acceptance as of yours non acceptance through the history. If she is not accepted, the person that doesn't accept will have to justify his non acceptance, generating a polemic that dialeticaly will continue to be conditioned to the fact that exists - at least phylosoficaly - something that calls her metaphysics.

Only after the platonic " second sailing " is that one can speak about material and spiritual. And it is to the light of those categories that the physicists previous to Socrates, and many modern physicists, they can be censured and materialistic, but now the nature more it cannot be seen as the totality of the things that exists, but as the totality of the things that appears. As will say the Physician David Bohm, the explicit order would say it is just consequence of an implicit order, superior and invisible. The " true " to be it is constituted by the " intelligent " and " intelligible " reality that is transcendent.

The Myth of the Cave

Is the own Plato who gives us an idea it magnifies on the subject of the implicit and explicit order in its celebrated " Myth of the Cave " that meets in the center of the Dialogue The Republic. Let us see what tells us Plato, through Socrates' mouth:

Let us imagine some men that live in a cave whose entrance one opens for the light in all its width, with a wide access lobby. Let us imagine that this cave is inhabited, and its inhabitants have the legs and the tied of such way neck that cannot move of position and have of looking at just for the fund of the cave, where there is a wall. Let us imagine although, well in front of the entrance of the cave, exist a small wall of the a man's height and that, for behind of that wall, move men carrying on the shoulders statues worked in stone and wood, representing the most several types of things. Let us also imagine that, for there, in the high, shine the sun. Finally, let us imagine that the cave produces echoes and that the men that pass behind the wall are speaking so that its voices echoe in the fund of the cave.

If it went like this, certainly the inhabitants of the cave nothing could see besides the shades of the small statues projected in the fund of the cave and they would just hear the echo of the voices. However, for they have never seen another thing, they would believe that those shades, that were imperfect copies of real objects, were the only and true reality and that the echo of the voices would be the real sound of the voices emitted by the shades. Let us suppose, now, that one of those inhabitants are gotten to loosen of the currents that arrest him. With a lot of difficulty and frequently feeling dizzy, he would go back to the light and it would begin to arise until the entrance of the cave. With a lot of difficulty and feeling lost, he would begin habituating to the new vision with which came across. Habituating the eyes and heard them, he would see the statuettes they move her for on the wall and, after formulating countless hypotheses, he/she would finally understand that they possess more details and they are much more beautiful than the shades that before saw in the cave, and that now seems them something unreal or limited.

Let us suppose that somebody swallows it for the other side of the wall. Firstly he would be obscured and scared by the light in excess; then, being habituated, he would see the several things in themselves; and, last, he would see the own sunshine contemplated in all the things. He would understand, then, that these and only these things would be the reality and that the sun would be the cause of all the other things. But he would be sad if its companions of the cave were still in theirs obscure ignorance concerning the last causes of the things. Thus, he, for love to his brothers, would return to the cave in order to free his friends of the judge of the ignorance and of the chains that they arrested with them. But, when he returns to the dark cave, he is received as a lunatic that doesn't recognize or not more adapts to the reality that they think to be the true: the reality of the shades. And, then, they would despise it....

Any likeness with the life of the great geniuses and reformers of all the areas and of every time of the humanity it is not mere coincidence.

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João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil, in 12-28-1996

Translated in 07-10-1997

Copyright (C)1996 by Carlos Guimarães

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