Samayasara

Author(s): A Chakravarti
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

Page 20

SAMAYASARA
more about human personality and its nature.
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Plato, a disciple and friend of Socrates, was the most illustrious figure of the school. In fact all that we know about Socrates and the conditions of thought about that period are all given to us by Plato through his immortal Dialogues. He systematized the various ideas revealed by his master, Socrates. He constructed a philosophical system according to which sense-presented experience is entirely different from the world of ultimate ideas which was the world of Reals. He illustrates this duality of human knowledge by his famous parable of the cave. According to this parable, human being is but a slave confined inside a cave chained with his face towards the wall. Behind him is the opening through which all-illuminating sunshine casts shadows of moving objects on the walls of the cave. The enchained slave inside the cave privileged to see only the moving shadows which he imagines to be the real objects of the world. But once he breaks the chain and emerges out of the cave he enters into a world of brilliant light and sunshine and comes across the real objects whose shadows he was constrained to see all along. Man's entry into the realm of reality and realization of the empty shadow of the sensepresented world is considered to be the goal of human culture and civilisation by Plato. Instead of moving in the ephemeral shadows of the sense-presented world, man ought to live in the world of eternal ideas which constitute the scheme of Reality presided over by the three fundamental Ideas-Truth, Goodness and Beauty. This duality of knowledge necessarily implies the duality of human nature. Man has in himself this dual aspect of partly living in the world of realities and partly in the world of senses. The senses keep him down in the world of shadows whereas his true nature of reason urges him on to regain his immortal citizenship of the ultimate world of ideas. On the basis of this conflict of reason and the senses, Plato builds up a theory of ethics according to which man should learn to restrain the tendencies created by Senses through the help of Reason and ultimately regain his lost freedom of the citizenship in the world of Ideas. The two worlds which he kept quite apart, the world of ideas and the world of sense-perception, brought into concrete relation with each other by his successor Aristotle who emphasised the fact that they are closely related to each other even in the case of concrete human life. Human personality is an organised unity of both reason and sense and hence the duality should not be emphasised too much to the discredit of the underlying unity in duality.
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A few centuries after Socrates, we find the same metaphysical drama to be the chosen enacted in the plains of Palestine. The Jews who believed people of Jehovah claimed the privilege of getting direct messages from Him through their sacred prophets, the leaders of the Jewish thought and religion. On account of this pride of being the chosen people they maintained a sort of cultural isolation from others whom they contemptuously called Gentiles. A tribe intoxicated with such a racial pride had the unfortunate lot of being