College Essay: "Plato and Descartes on the question "What is man?""

Hi everyone. Another essay here on answering the question"What is man?" with definitions from Descartes and Plato. This was done in second year so I hope it helps!


The tradition of western philosophy began in ancient Greece with the Presocratic philosophers. These Presocratics had an immense curiosity in having an understanding on what the ultimate nature of reality consisted of. It wasn’t until the Sophists began their teachings that this line of philosophical inquiry moved from focusing on the cosmos and the world around us to looking at the importance of the human being. This can be seen clearly in the famous statement by the sophist Protagoras in his claim:

“Man is the measure of all things, of things that they are, that they are, and of things that they are not, that they are not”.

This shift in philosophical focus was to be the teaching which Socrates, and later his student Plato, would reply to in their own teachings. The prime focus of human beings was on the soul, which Socrates believed was the source of all truth. It was Plato, however, who made the distinction between the soul and the body and this was the beginning of the concept of dualism. This concept has been accepted, modified and tweaked by scholars and philosophers all throughout the years in the western philosophical tradition and it has played a key part in the study of Philosophical Anthropology. In discussing this dualism, it is not uncommon to pair Plato with Rene Descartes as they were two of the most eminent dualists of the western tradition. Both philosophers attempt to answer the question “What is man?” by arguing that we consist of something incorporeal, whether one calls it 'mind' or 'soul', which for the time being is somehow united with a body that is part of the physical world. Both identify the self, the `I', with the incorporeal member of this combination. Both hold that the mind or soul will survive the demise of the body. Both may be understood as holding that the mind or soul can exist altogether independently of body, though Plato may have changed position on this point, as I will discuss later. Both are concerned with the immortality of the soul. In this essay I shall focus on the separability of mind or soul from body to answer the question mentioned previously, “What is man?”, in Plato's Phaedo and Phaedrus and Descartes' Meditations.

Before I go much further, I shall give a word on some of the terms used. Several times already I have used the words 'mind or soul' as if the words meant the same, which of course they do not. Plato consistently speaks of the soul, but not so with Descartes. In his preface addressed to the theologians at the Sorbonne in his Meditations, Descartes claims that he will prove the immortality of the soul.# He is using the church's label for the doctrine, but it is doubtful that what he thought he could prove is what the church means by the phrase. In a more philosophical context, Descartes explicitly distinguishes mind from soul, reserving 'soul' for that which animates the body. In this sense of 'soul' he either denies that any such principle exists or reduces it to a physical configuration.

In the question posed, “What is man?”, Descartes’ philosophy basically labels man as a thinking thing. I shall now describe how Descartes came to make this claim.

As a philosopher, Descartes sought to know only truths which are absolute, unquestionable and indubitable. To discover a firm foundation of absolute certainty upon which to build a new system of knowledge, Descartes chose a method of methodological doubt, which is to doubt everything. This requires that anything which has the slightest ground for doubt be accepted as cancelling out any claim of certainty.

To do this, he began by assessing all the previous knowledge gained by humans but quickly realised that it would be a near-impossible task to analyze all the knowledge of mankind, so instead, he opted to examine how all this knowledge was gained. He arrived at the conclusion that all human knowledge and supposed “truths” had been obtained empirically (through the senses). In other words, everything we know, we have learned through the senses.

However, as Descartes was well aware, the senses are not infallible. The senses can be tricked by illusions, be they optical, auditory or otherwise, and according to the rules of his methodological doubt, this is grounds enough for cancelling out all knowledge gained by them as absolute truth or certainty. In one clean swipe, Descartes labelled all prior human knowledge as untrustworthy.

At this point in his Meditations, Descartes felt he had gone too far by essentially saying that nothing exists, or at least, we cannot be sure of anything’s existence. However, it is here that Descartes made a claim that there must be at least one thing he can be certain of, one absolute truth from which others may be derived. Descartes’ claim here was that he existed, or more famously put: “Cogito ergo sum.”

In this doubting, Descartes can only say that that which is doing the doubting is what exists and for him, it was obviously the mind. Now that Descartes has discovered a certainty in selfhood, he has identified his self to rationality (this is because of the possibility of doubting the body exists but one cannot doubt the mind exists, therefore they are one and the same), or as Descartes sometimes calls it, as I’ve previously said, in a more religious context, the soul. Here, we finally arrive at Descartes’ definition of what man is. As the only certain aspect of  a human is their mind (as opposed to the dubitable body), Descartes is calling man a thinking thing.
Despite the similarities between Plato and Descartes’ philosophies regarding the soul, and it’s importance in describing what man is, there are differences also. Where Descartes equates man with the intellect, or the soul, Plato claims that man is composed of two entities: The soul and the body.

In his argument, Plato claims that the body is a physical thing, being from this world and that the soul is spiritual, from some other-worldly plane of existence. Since the physical world around us is mutable and imperfect, there must also exist a perfect place of the Good or the Forms as Plato calls them.

Souls originate and pre-exist in the world of the forms and as they are eternal, they have lived through an infinite number of lifetimes and have the all the knowledge in the world.

Plato had definite ideas explored in Phaedrus on how the soul enters the body. It is for him an end of a journey, a journey which begins with the procession of winged charioteers being drawn by two horses (the souls of the gods and mortals) travelling to reach the absolute truth.

The gods naturally effortlessly pass on through to this realm, while we mortals experience great difficulty. Those among us unable to glimpse the wonders of this realm in its full truth and glory lose strength in their wings and plunge unhappily earthwards, to be trapped into a body, forgetting what they had learnt.

This body is the human body in the first incarnation, however if one is not sufficiently enlightened by the end of the physical body’s life to be worthy enough to ascend to the World of the Forms, then the soul keeps reincarnating in various bodies until they finally reach the fullness of the truth. These can include animal form as well as human.

Plato describes the soul as having three elements: Reason (or the intellect), the spirited and the appetitive. As an aid to describe the nature of the soul, Plato uses the analogy of a charioteer with two horses, one white horse on the right and one black horse on the left, with each of these three representing a separate element of the soul.

The appetitive element, which includes all the myriad desires for various pleasures, comforts, physical satisfactions, and bodily ease. There are so many of these appetites that Plato does not bother to enumerate them, but he does note that they can often be in conflict even with each other. This element of the soul is represented by the ugly black horse on the left. The spirited, or hot-blooded, part, i.e., the part that gets angry when it perceives (for example) an injustice being done. This is the part of us that loves to face and overcome great challenges, the part that can steel itself to adversity, and that loves victory, winning, challenge, and honour. (Note that Plato's use of the term "spirited" here is not the same as "spiritual." He means "spirited" in the same sense that we speak of a high-spirited horse, for example, one with lots of energy and power.) This element of the soul is represented by the noble white horse on the right. Lastly, the intellect, our conscious awareness, is represented by the charioteer who is guiding (or who at least should be guiding) the horses. This is the part of us that thinks, analyzes, looks ahead, rationally weighs options, and tries to gauge what is best and truest overall.

As we have seen in both Plato and Descartes, in their search for the meaning and definition of what man is, they have both brought the philosophical enquiry to focus on the concept of the soul. Both philosophers claim that the soul is seperable from the body. I shall end by comparing some of the wider purposes of their arguments. Plato offers the argument of the Phaedo as, inter alia, an  example a way of thinking that loosens the human soul's attachment to its body. “Since the attachment reflects the soul's misunderstanding of the true nature of happiness, the Phaedo argument, for those who enter into it, is an exercise in soul-saving.”
By contrast, what Descartes discovers when he discovers his reasons for declaring the mind separable from the body is entirely different from the intellectualization he himself undergoes in order to reach the proof. And he cannot overtly, even if he is inclined so inwardly, claim this refinement as a sort of soul-saving without running foul of the religion of his time.

Although their philosophies are similar, there are differences. The key difference however, from which all others follow, lies in Plato's acceptance and Descartes' rejection of the assumption that the soul (or the intellect) is identical with what animates the body.

College Essay: Comparing the views of Plato and Kant with regards to the topic of appearance vs reality

Hey guys. This is just an essay I wrote in first year of college on appearance vs reality in Plato and Kant. Go easy on it, I was 19 and was merely weeks into studying philosophy. I hope it's helpful to someone out there anyway!


Philosophers have long debated the difference between appearance and reality. One who has no prior experience in the topic philosophically may be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that what we see is, in fact, what is real. In this essay, I will discuss and compare the views of Plato and Kant on the topic of appearance and reality. This will include their own views, similarities and differences in opinion, strengths and weaknesses in argument.

“If ‘real’ is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” This quote, taken from The Matrix, gives a very minimalist explanation of what reality is. It states that reality is the immediate world around us, built upon sensual experience. It is this very view of reality which is abolished in Kant’s “Critique Of Pure Reason”.

In “Critique Of Pure Reason”, Kant holds the view that not all knowledge stems from sensory experience. Kant holds that there are two different kinds of things: Things as they appear (called “Phenomena”) which are within the confines of the empirical world around us and things in themselves (called “Noumena”) within a world which cannot be observed via the senses. It is the latter which Kant claims is reality. Even  the term “Pure Reason” has come to refer to knowledge not gained by the senses but inherently from the structure of the mind.

Kant argues that knowledge cannot be gained from sensual experience in the world as these experiences are  separate and unreliable. For example, if a person were to pick up a tennis ball and acknowledge that it is round, yellow and fuzzy, they cannot know that everything that is round, yellow and fuzzy is, and always will be, a tennis ball. In this particular example, the sensations of a small, round, yellow, fuzzy and bouncy ball are attributed with the name “Tennis Ball”. This is, according to Kant, the coordination of senses into objects and applying them to space and time.

Kant professes that we cannot constantly acknowledge the bombardment of the senses by each individual experience and so this is why we attribute unique groupings of sensual experiences to objects.
According to Kant, since the real world is not accessible to the senses, it is unknowable. If it were possible to observe this real world empirically, it would fail to be independently real anymore.

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, there is a similar distinction between appearance and reality. The following is taken directly from Plato’s The Republic, Book VII:

“Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.”

In the above allegory, the fire casts a shadow from the “puppets” onto the wall before the prisoners. As the prisoners have been there since childhood, the prisoners see the shadows as their reality as they know nothing more. As the allegory progresses, the situation is considered where a prisoner is allowed to escape from the cave. The prisoner in question would view the actual objects whose shadows are on the wall. The actual light from the fire and outside is enough to cause pain to this person’s eyes but they can now see what is real and what is illusion. This process of leaving the cave is interpreted as a philosopher’s ability to stop employing their senses in the search for a true reality.

This instantly strikes up a similarity with Kant’s “Critique Of Pure Reason”. Both philosophers appear to hold the view that the senses alone are not enough to obtain true knowledge of reality. In the allegory of the cave, Plato may have implied that it is possible to get an idea of reality by observing the images (or shadows) cast on the wall as they would be a two-dimensional image of their “real” counterparts. The shadows in Plato’s allegory can be equated to the things as they appear in the world mentioned in Kant’s “Critique Of Pure Reason”. This leads us to the conclusion that both philosophers certainly held the same view that empirically observing and studying the world which is immediate to us will not assist in gaining an understanding of reality.

This is where both part company on the subject. Kant, as discussed above, holds the view that the real world is “unknowable” and cannot be known or experienced with the senses. However, in the allegory of the cave, Plato maintains that it is possible to obtain knowledge of the real world by ceasing the use of our senses and by using intellect alone. If we were to obtain knowledge of the real world, according to Kant’s view, the real world would cease to be independently real.

As we have seen, both philosophers handle the topic of appearance and reality quite similarly. Both Kant and Plato hold the opinion that there is an absolute difference between the two but where Plato claims that reality can be understood through enlightenment via the use of intellect, Kant maintains that this is not possible. Not only is it not feasible, according to Kant, but it is also undesirable as an understanding of the perfect, real world, would result in it lacking perfection and in turn, empirical independence.