The Genesis Of Philosophy And It’s Limitations

There are mainly two different kinds of cultures on the earth, namely,oriental culture and European-American culture. As regards westernculture, it’s more than one high culture but comprehensive ones with itsdiversities. It is the very western philosophy underlies the whole westernculture. Platonic philosophy, being the source of western philosophy,dominated the whole range of the culture scene. Arche is equal to physis,for it prefigures the future, and it also embraces all the transformationonwards. There will be no generation without arche. In a sense, it’sessentially important to look into Platonic philosophy before approachingthe nature of western culture.Socrates, the main character in Platonic Dialogues, deserves thecredit for the part he played in inspiring and founding the western culture.After the contemporary crisis was diagnosed by Socrates in Plato’s works,the prescription is the western philosophy, which branded the wholeculture onwards. Public life is the nub of human being’s issue, and beforeSocrates, who paid much attention to nothing but political philosophy, nobody contemplated the issue that whether the form of public life couldunderlie a city’s civilization or not. Certain it is that there should be somelimitations to political life, and that the philosophy should be the owl ofMinerva which begins its flight in the dusk. This paper intends to discussfirstly the double parable of the cave. In this part, it elucidates the natureof the philosophers, the contradiction between the philosophy andphilosopher-king, in other words, it’s the crisis the philosopher meet. Therelationship between philosophy and soul that follows covers the secondpart. It’s the argument on soul’s justice places philosophy in anappropriate station. The arguments of soul addresses themselves to thesubject of philosophy earthly and intellectually, exhibiting thesignificance and the dignity of the soul, and inspires the mortal toconfront death without scariness and panic.Platonic philosophy discriminates itself from the former epictradition, religion convention onwards, Chinese Daoism andConfucianism, and Indian Buddhism. To a large extent, any kinds of thought can be classified into intellectual ones,but the ancient Greek philosophy is the best of the bunch: thephilosopher-king implies a regime which ruled by philosopher. The bestregime is monarchism, which is by no means an accustomed regime, buta monarchism submits to philosophy and transforms it into public life.The regime of a philosopher-king’ city, consequently, is not a simplemonarchism regime. There is a resemblance between them, and the cityof Plato’s philosophy-king lies somewhere between city and non-city,between monarchism and non-monarchism.Plato’s republic, the city of the philosopher-king is the best regime,which exceeds almost other forms. This regime exists at the borderbetween the mortal and immortal world. As Plato refers in Book5ofRepublic that that regime couldn’t be realized, he discusses it for noreason but for coercion.