Plato was a student of the ancient Greek sage Socrates, and in his philosophy he took a lot from the teacher. The latter called his own method of cognition maevitika, which can be roughly translated as "obstetric aid." An obstetrician helps a mother give birth to a child. The child’s body is already formed, and the midwife only helps to ensure that he was born. As applied to cognition, in the place of the baby stands the truth that we know in advance, because it comes from the world of ideas. But since our soul is influenced by material reason, we need effort - and leading questions of the sage “obstetrician”, so that the human mind “gives birth”, but in fact remembers what it already knew. The objective idealism of Plato proceeds from the Socratic doctrine of Maeutics and develops it.
First of all, the philosopher formulates the doctrine of the eternal and primary in relation to the material world kingdom of ideas, essences. Before making, for example, a table, the master already has in his mind an idea of some thing having a flat horizontal surface that rises above the ground. And it doesn’t matter what kind of object the master will make (lame, small, large, simple or beautifully inlaid, about four legs or on one). The main thing is that anyone who looks at this subject should say that it is a table, not a lamp, an amphora, etc. That is, the objective idealism of Plato implies the primacy of ideas over concrete things.
In the highland world, entities abide forever. They are there before they find embodiment in amorphous matter, become things, and after these things age and decay, they fall into non-existence. No matter how hard it is for us to imagine that the essence of the iPod or the nuclear reactor existed before their inventors, the objective idealism of Plato claims that it is so: "eidos", entities, are simply embodied when we are "ready to give birth" to them. Therefore, they are objective, indestructible and infinite, while things are only emanations, imperfect and perishable shadows of true reality.
Man, according to Plato, is a dual being. On the one hand, his body is part of the material world, and on the other, he is a subject and spiritual being from the higher kingdom. Looking at a subject, we first of all fix its “eidos” in the mind. Looking at two cats, the human mind immediately comprehends their generic similarities (despite the fact that one is small and black, and the second is large, red and in general, not a female, but a cat). In our mind, according to Plato's objective idealism, the forms and concepts with which people recognize the essential among the mass of disparate concrete objects have been preserved.
The teachings of Plato found their followers in philosophy and the theory of knowledge, not only in the ancient world, but also in the Middle Ages and even in the New Age. Plato considered the sensual method of comprehending the material world to be non-authentic, since the perception of a particular thing by sensations does not convey its essence to us. To judge something on the basis of ideas is like feeling blind people an elephant: one will say that it is a column, the second - that is a hose, the third - that a rough wall. It is necessary to descend from the general to the particular, and this method is called deduction. Therefore, idealism in philosophy implies the presence of the primary Spirit, which gives rise to the visible material world, that is, a kind of universality that creates the concrete.
Thus, genuine knowledge is working with ideas. Operating with entities and establishing relationships between them through comparison and analogy is called “dialectics”. Plato used this image: a man sits in front of a wall and watches as someone carries some objects behind him. He is trying to guess what it is from the shadows cast on the wall. This is our knowledge. The philosopher believed that the objects of the material world are untrue, that they are the “shadow” of an entity, since the substance in which this entity has found embodiment has distorted it. It is best to comprehend with the mind eternal, but invisible to the eye ideas, than to be based on the study of single objects. Since then, every idealist philosopher is (in the perception of the general public) a person far from the true realities, soaring in the world of his own fantasies.
