After a number of significant political setbacks, Plato wrote the tows, in
which he described the “constitutional state” as the next-best state. He now
reintroduced both private property and family ties. Women’s freedom thus
became more restricted. However, he did say that a state that does not
educate and train women is like a man who only trains his right arm.
All in all, we can say that Plato had a positive view of women—
considering the time he lived in. In the dialogue Symposium, he gives a
woman, the legendary priestess Diotima, the honor of having given Socrates
his philosophic insight.
So that was Plato, Sophie. His astonishing theories have been
discussed—and criticized—for more than two thousand years. The first man
to do so was one of the pupils from his own Academy. His name was
Aristotle, and he was the third great philosopher from Athens.
I’ll say no more!
While Sophie had been reading about Plato, the sun had risen over the woods to
the east. It was peeping over the horizon just as she was reading how one man
clambered out of the cave and blinked in the dazzling light outside.
It was almost as if she had herself emerged from an underground cave. Sophie
felt that she saw nature in a completely different way after reading about Plato. It was
rather like having been color-blind. She had seen some shadows but had not seen the
clear ideas.
She was not sure Plato was right in everything he had said about the eternal
patterns, but it was a beautiful thought that all living things were imperfect copies of
the eternal forms in the world of ideas. Because wasn’t it true that all flowers, trees,
human beings, and animals were “imperfect”?
Everything she saw around her was so beautiful and so alive that Sophie had to
rub her eyes to really believe it. But nothing she was looking at now would last. And
yet—in a hundred years the same flowers and the same animals would be here again.
Even if every single flower and every single animal should fade away and be for-
gotten, there would be something that “recollected” how it all looked.
Sophie gazed out at the world. Suddenly a squirrel ran up the trunk of a pine
tree. It circled the trunk a few times and disappeared into the branches.
“I’ve seen you before!” thought Sophie. She realized that maybe it was not the
same squirrel that she had seen previously, but she had seen the same “form.” For all
she knew, Plato could have been right. Maybe she really had seen the eternal
“squirrel” before—in the world of ideas, before her soul had taken residence in a
human body.
Could it be true that she had lived before? Had her soul existed before it got a
body to move around in? And was it really true that she carried a little golden nugget
inside her—a jewel that cannot be corroded by time, a soul that would live on when
her own body grew old and died?
The Major’s Cabin
... the girl in the mirror winked with both eyes…
It was only a quarter past seven. There was no need to hurry home. Sophie’s
mother always took it easy on Sundays, so she would probably sleep for another two
hours.
Should she go a bit farther into the woods and try to find Alberto Knox? And
why had the dog snarled at her so viciously?