philosophy question please?
what does socrates also plato mean by teaching? how does this understanding of teaching relate to the Allegory of the Cave? Also, how does it appear in the principle socrates used to draw up a curriculum of studies for the Guardians?
Teaching is facilitating "under-standing," Plato's coined word for this process being "hypo-thesis."
There are levels of learning, hence, levels of teaching. Rote, memorization, analogy, doing, are some examples.
The proposition Socrates and Plato put forth is that Ideas and Mind are connected with people's souls, and that awareness of Ideas and Mind is promoted by proper questioning, tutorial.
People in the Sunlight of Truth are like souls before they embody and "forget." These souls are now living in the cave of materialism. The reluctance of many people to "remember" and receive the Light is why the "cave people" remain materialistic, gross.
Plato's Guardians are the few who are used by the Republic to guide and rule it. "The Giver," Lois Lowry, is a good storybook about this.
However, in the "Republic," the Guardians labor under the awareness of Void, or the Kierkegaardian distance separating "I and Thou." For the ruled, there are comforting "myths." For the Guardians, they must confront the Goedelian truth that no reasonably descriptive system is totally susceptible of proof. For Plato's average citizens, the "cloud of unknowing" is simply too awful to deal with, so it is kept from them.
The Guardians are given the perspective which Muslims call "fana," or the Void, as known in Buddhism and in the philosopher Tanabe. The Light is the Goedelian light, which presumes one either intuits God, or one does not.
The Republic is Plato's best-case goverance scenario. In other writing, Plato notes one of the basic and major goals of philosophy is to "know God." Presumably some among the Guardians would master Void, aka have soulfield coherence and awareness sufficient to know God. (This is the level at which Plotinus worked: "One Mind Soul" reflects the dynamic of God, in which Soul-individuation occurs per the provision of Mind's Ideas, a kind of Socratic "I-Thou" dialogue.)
"A Philosophy of Universality," O. M. Aivanhov,
"The Master of Lucid Dreams," Dr. Olga Kharitidi,
"The Reincarnation of Edgar Cayce?", Free and Wilcock, and
"The Path of the Higher Self," Mark Prophet.
All described on http://www.amazon.com books.
Animated Allegory (of the cave)
