mployed, realistically, in todays society with out a huge change in modern thinking. Nowadays money is too important, it held above the acquiring of "truth". So this is already one way I could not fulfill the Platonist ideal. Because man is a social animal what he will become is influenced by his social environment in such a way that it is difficult to decide whether he makes his own environment or is made by it. There are two existences: unseen = unchanging, seen = changing. A soul is in the body it is dragged through the changeable world, and therefore influenced by it. This is where Plato's Circular dogma is employed. He believed that the sphere is the most perfect of all geometric forms therefore the cosmos is modeled around this, leading to the idea that life too is modeled after this. There is a harmony in the motion of the spheres, which can be related to the life cycle of man. A man is born, he then goes through his life, leading it as he wishes, one day he will die, and then will be born again; A cycle that continues until the soul has reached a level of enlightenment that it is given "wings" and joins the gods. "That the living come from the dead, just as the dead come from the living; and if this is true, then the souls of the dead must be in some place out of which they come again". Plato suggests that all things do not exist as individual entities but as continuing themes. The soul would move through the unchanging world into the changing one, in a cycle until it reaches the heights of enlightenment. "every body which derives motion from without is soulless, but that which has its motion within itself has a soul, since that is the nature of the soul" (Phaedrus 246a) The cycle must have a starting place and would therefore end at the same place, and would also therefore be indestructible (see Hackforth, Plato's Phaedrus, p. 64, n.3). There are a number of things needed to be understood and appreciated before one can appr...
