Sitting at my desk in front of Plato’s Republic, I came across his image of the “divided line” for the first time. The Republic was my first encounter with Greek philosophy, and it exposed me to a whole new way of imagining the relationship between the ideal and the real. Previously, I had approached the process of reading as a subjective experience. However, reading philosophy redefined what engaging with a text meant to me. Through weekly Harkness discussions in my literature class, I learned to voice my perplexity with Plato’s metaphors and ideas and work through them together with my classmates. As I visualized Plato’s “divided line” and sought to grasp what each part means, philosophy became the medium by which I would transcend my personal reactions to an idea and discern its abstract, universal value.
“The School of Athens” by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino
Walking the streets of ancient Athens during my travels two years ago, I imagined Socrates conversing with people my age in another time. By touching upon the tangible markers that inspired Plato’s text, I re-construed his philosophy in its original context. I realized that Plato’s dialogues are a product of Socrates’ initial goal of inspiring conversation in public spaces with ordinary citizens to question their pre-existing ideas. My love for the humanities lies in its ability to challenge how the world is and imagine how it should be. In an age of distractions, where information is abundant but focus and empathy are scarce, sitting with Socrates demands sustained attention and a pursuit of ends rather than means.
A course I took required every participant to give a presentation on the philosophers important to our culture, I focused my analysis on Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s notion that, “Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.” Encountering his conception of love as a reflection of the soul, I couldn’t help but think back to Plato’s theory of the tripartite soul. Both philosophers, though separated by two millennia, seek the nature of the soul by examining ideals: justice on the one hand and love on the other. In comparing these texts, I realized that we can only understand ourselves by seeking to understand the ideals to which we aspire. It is through the study of the humanities that I hope to further grasp those ideals and strive to embody them myself.
Photo Credit
Photo is Wikimedia Creative Commons
Guest Author Bio
Yumeng Fan
Originally from Barcelona, Spain, Yumeng loves ballroom dance, Hispanic literature, collage-making, and the wide, tangled worlds of literature, science, poetry, and art.
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