In this paper I will argue that sensation does not impede human knowledge.
In this case I will show that sensations do not completely impede human but rather affect the way humans learn through sensations.
PART I: Explanation of sensations and knowledge in Phaedo’s arguments
Phaedo is one of Plato’s classical dialogues which takes place between Socrates and his friends in the prison on his last day of life in 399 B.C. Phaedo is a conversation which focuses on many different aspects such as afterlife, forms, knowledge, perceptions, immortality of soul etc..
Plato sees the acquisition of knowledge, which he commonly refers to as recollection rather than learning as a process that begins with perceptual experience. In Plato’s Phaedo the ground is a little different. Here any perceiver can have, as a result of his perception, some knowledge of the Forms involved in that perception.
Accordingly, the true philosopher will 'as far as possible leave the body behind, rid himself of eyes and ears, and seek truth with reason alone, knowing that the senses, one and all, are deceptive (Phaedo 65b1-7) and that one can never apprehend reality and attain truth and wisdom with the eye (Phaedo 65a9-66a10).
In the beginning of Phaedo (Phaedo 63e-66e), before recollection is mentioned, Socrates explains to his companions about why a true philosopher will face death cheerfully. He begins by stating that the body is an obstruction and a distraction from reason. It is a distraction from reason because the pleasures of the body interfere with reason, and it is an obstruction to reason because the senses through which the body must apprehend things are deceptive. Philosophy is as close as we come to freeing the soul from the body while we are alive. But since death separates the soul from the body, it alone will allow us to gain real knowledge if anything does. Socrates' conclusion at (Phaedo 66e5-6) is that either we can never attain knowledge or we can do so only after death.
Perception impedes knowledge to the point that knowledge cannot be gained through perception (which is the only vehicle embodied souls have for accessing anything). When we dissociate the soul from the body by practicing philosophy, we come closest to knowledge (67 A 2-3) but that is as far as we get. Plato has Socrates state that it is impossible to come to know anything during our mortal lives. Philosophy helps, but it just gets us close.
In the Phaedo, we get a thorough explanation of the proposition that knowledge is inaccessible to human beings because they are limited and distracted by their bodies. Socrates dwells on this in most of what he says in 63b-67b. He asserts, "But indeed [the soul] reasons best whenever none of these things bothers it, neither hearing nor sight nor pain nor pleasure, but it is as much as possible alone by itself and takes leave of the body and, as much as it is able, avoiding all interaction and contact with the body, it reaches out toward reality" (65c5-8).
The same understanding of Plato's thought emerges from his discussion of knowledge and sense-perception in the Phaedo. Here, after mentioning such forms as the just, the beautiful, and the good, he says, I am speaking about all things, such as size, health, strength, and in a word, the substance of all other things, what each being is. Is what is most true of them contemplated through the body ?…He would do this most purely who above all goes toward each by understanding itself, not bringing into his understanding any sight, or drawing any other sense-perception along with reasoning, but using pure understanding itself by itself, tries to hunt down each of beings pure, itself by itself..,(Phaedo 65d-66a).
Taking our knowledge of Equality as an example, Socrates maintains that we know it, and that we derive our conception of it from no other source – indeed, to do so is impossible – than from sight or touch, or from some other one of the senses (74a9-75a7). In such a case, Socrates argues, we recognize the sensible equals, e.g. equal sticks, equal stones, etc., as striving to be like Equality, but succeeding only imperfectly, and it is impossible for us to do so unless we had previous knowledge of the Form Equality. Thus, since we begin to see, hear and enjoy the use of all the other senses as soon as we are born, our knowledge of Equality must have been acquired before then, and lost at birth However, later on, by using our senses, we recover the knowledge which we previously possessed. A process of learning rightly called recollection (75a 11-76e 8).
First, Plato does explicitly have Simmias agree (at 76b5-7) that if a person knows things, he can give a logos of the things which he knows. But Socrates does not identify such knowledge as knowledge of the Forms, nor does he say that recollective learning leads directly and immediately to that kind of knowledge. Still there is reason to think that sensory-in- spired recollection does not lead directly to full-fledged knowledge. The proposal that knowledge requires the capacity to give a logos is accepted by Simmias as part of a Socratic effort to exploit a dilemma – that either we know the Forms from birth or only learn of them later.
He proposes a further alternative – that the original knowledge comes at birth. But this is only a legitimate alternative if there is a sense in which a new-born can be said to know. And Socrates seems to agree that there is, since his rejoinder is not that new- born cannot provide logos but rather that coming to know and forgetting cannot occur simultaneously. Secondly, at 75b4-c6 Socrates brings the core of the argument to a close by saying that we must have had knowledge of the Forms before we began to see and hear if we are going to refer our sense perceptions to the Forms.
In practice, however, during this life the best we can do is try to be dead (Phaedo 64 A5-6) we are inevitably subject to sense-experience, in so far as we cannot wholly detach ourselves from the body. Socrates goes on to suggest that we are the more tied to the body the more we treat its information as real.(Phaedo 81b) But plainly it is the senses that are responsible for our initial assumption that what we encounter empirically is the most real. It is simply an unfortunate fact of life that we invariably start like that. Thus in our present life we cannot begin, as we should, with the Forms, but must first turn from our attachment to the particular, learning the habit of attention to what is real, the attention that is elsewhere described by Plato as a kind of love.
PART II: My argument to show sensation does not impede human knowledge
At first glance this looks like a strong assertion of dualism between sense and intellect4. But a closer consideration reveals the continuity that Plato is describing here. The activity of the mind is to "hunt down" the substance, the reality, of the natures which appear in sense-perception, to understand what is that very reality which the senses are perceiving. Strength, health, beauty, and so on, are intelligible natures which "show up" as instances in our experience of strong, healthy, or beautiful bodies. The mind seeks to understand what we are experiencing, to identify the content that is given in sense-experience. Here again, therefore, sense and intellect do not have two separate sets of objects, but are rather lower and higher ways of apprehending the intelligible natures which make up reality.
In sense-perception, forms are always seen not simply as themselves, as what they are, but as instances or appearances, bound up with particularizing conditions extraneous to the natures themselves. Consider, for example, the "equal sticks" of (Phaedo 74b). The equality we become aware of in perceiving these sticks is, necessarily, the equality of the sticks, equality qua belonging to these sticks, in this experience, recognized only in connection with the sticks and conditioned by the respect in which they are equal, e.g. length or weight. But the intelligible nature equality itself, what-it-is-to-be-equal, is not so confined or conditioned. The purpose of the passage is to establish this distinction between a form and its instance, not to indicate that the sticks are not truly or precisely equal. However we interpret the vexed passage at (Phaedo 74b) , the conclusion Plato wishes to draw from it is not that the sticks are not really equal, but simply that, although they are equal, they are not equality itself: "These equals, and the equal itself, then, are not the same" (Phaedo 74c). When he indicates that the instance "lacks something" in relation to the form (Phaedo 74d), its deficiency lies not in its being less than equal, but simply in its being an instance of equality rather than equality itself. Even a perfect instance would still be an instance, not the form itself, and in this sense "deficient". An instance, simply as such, exhibits an intelligible nature only in connection with particularizing conditions which are extraneous to that nature. In seeing the sticks we are taking in equality together with differentiating features other than itself. Therefore, what we recognize through sense-perception alone is not the intelligible nature equality itself, but only one of many possible appearances of that nature. It is indeed the form that is appearing, but the senses apprehend it only as it appears.
The argument in the Phaedo for the theory of recollection, using the example of the equal sticks, does not in fact justify the conclusion that the soul knew the form of equality before (temporally) it entered the body. What it does succeed in demonstrating is that the knowledge of the equal is prior to sense-experience, not chronologically, but in the sense that it cannot be derived from it and is a necessary condition for our recognition of the sticks as equal. The knowledge of the forms has a logical and epistemic, not a temporal priority, to the interpretation of sense-experience.
in the Phaedo, the "separation of the soul from the body" cannot mean either a spatial separation (since the soul, like the forms, is not a spatial entity) or death in the merely biological sense, the soul's ceasing to animate the body, for it "travels" to the forms while it is still doing so : "Does purification not turn out to be this…: to separate, as far as possible, the soul from the body, and to accustom it to gather and collect itself together completely apart from the body, and to dwell, as far as possible, both in the present and in the future, alone by itself, released, as it were, from the bonds of the body?" (67cd). Later in the Phaedo, Plato makes this even clearer, distinguishing in purely epistemological terms between the soul's "using the body to investigate something, whether through seeing or through hearing or through any other sense-perception", and its "investigating itself by itself", in which case it "passes into the pure and ever-existing and immortal and same" (79cd). Here there is no reference to death at ail, and Plato is using the spatial metaphor simply to describe different modes of cognitive activity. The death which philosophy practices, the "separation" of the soul, then, is not biological death, but a way of understanding and living in reality. The ascent of the soul to the vision of the forms is not a passage from one world to another, but rather the understanding of reality in terms of the universal principles, the intelligible structures and natures, which appear and are exemplif”ed in sense-experience
Thus the necessity of starting with perception, I would suggest, is not a consequence of what it is to know or to learn, but a contingent and practical requirement of our present situation. The role of the senses cannot be deduced from an analysis of what we mean by knowing or learning, but only from observation of what is, in practice, available to us in our bodily life. This, however, leaves room for the possibility, even within this life, of some progress or learning that is not directly prompted by sense perception.
Sense perception does give us access to Forms because we encounter objects as examples of Forms: we encounter equals, and we learn to call them equals. There is no access to objects other than under a description that assimilates them to others and reminds us of the Form that is named by that term. It would therefore be wrong to think of Plato as rejecting the senses altogether. As far as it goes, perception is perfectly reliable: it does indeed tell us of things that truly fall under the Form equal, that genuinely and properly appear both equal and unequal on various occasions. The examples of equality can remind us of the Form because they do indeed reflect it in their own contextual way.
Perception is therefore not misleading, except in its tendency to monopolise the attention: it forms a successful basis on which we first apply concepts such as equal, and it is experience that allows us to notice that the Forms are independent of context in a way that particulars never are. I do not want to exchange a mistakenly empiricist account of Plato for a wholly anti-empiricist or sceptical one. Both would be out of keeping with the story told in the Phaedo. For it should be remembered that we first come to the doctrine of recollection by seeing an example of it happening, and then learn the same truth by a process of reasoning. The second approach turns its attention to the very conceptual framework within which we view things, while the first simply looks from within that frame- work at another particular example; but as regards the conclusion that we once were free of the body, both seem to reach the truth. Nothing could make it more clear that for Plato, given our present situation bound up in bodily life, sense perception is a perfectly sound starting point from which to begin the task of escape.
Plato means by "recollection" is not a Substitute for our rational power, but rather the act of reasoning itself. Recollection or reasoning, the process by which we come to know the forms, consists in recognizing what is one and the same in sense-experiences which are many and different.”y observing the sameness in different experiences, reason recognizes what they are experiences of. Reason understands the content of sense-perception by seeing the patterns, the structures of sameness and difference, the intelligible natures, which appear in it.
We can thus see that when Plato says in this argument that we derive our conception of the Form Equality from no other source than from sense- experience, he is not really enunciating something that is at variance with what he says in other dialogues. He is expressing a view that derives from his conception of the nature and the present condition of the human mind. As we have seen, throughout this argument, Plato makes it clear that he thinks of recollection as being identical with the thought or reasoning that is prompted by sense-experience. With this in mind, let us now proceed to examine the present argument tending to prove that we acquired our knowledge of the Form Equality before we were born. Plato's argument may be outlined as follows: (1) It is from the senses and only the senses that we derive our conception (or form the thought) of the Form Equality (75a5-10). (2) It is also through the use of our senses that we come to think that all sensible equals strive to be like the Form Equality, but that they fall short of it (75a9-b2). (3) Thus, we must have acquired our knowledge of the Form Equality before we ever began to use our senses (75b3-6). (4) But we began to enjoy the use of all our senses as soon as we were born (75b 10-12). (5) Thus, we acquired our knowledge of the Form Equality before we were born (75c1-3).