The community character of Paideia (education) Greek imprinted itself on each member, being the source of action and behavior. The social structure was based on laws and norms, written or not, uniting itself and its members, being the education the result of living conscience of a norm whose purpose was the formation of a high type of man (ideal form of the Beautiful and the Good warrior), thus representing the meaning of all human effort (and this justifies the community and the individuality).
From this aristocratic ideal model to the democratic ideal, important changes were made: before it was the poets who through the myths transmitted the values that should be imitated by the Greek people. But, with the assembly, the need arises to speak in public and the good to speak was the sophistical pretension. Democracy, as the government of the people, still required elected leaders and sophists they worked on behalf of those who aspired to state posts. The word is highlighted. In the assemblies,
rhetoricians manage to persuade with their eloquence, holding the power to carry out their interests.This teaching was done privately and privately, with virtue as an intellectual aptitude aimed at the public affairs. However, teaching to speak was not enough to learn a science. Soon, the sophistical model was unmasked as the production of illusory speeches that intend to convince by convincing and not for the truth. This is where the figure of Socrates as an educator comes in.
From the questioning of the essence of man, which was identified with the soul (reason, conscience and intellectual and moral personality), the knowledge of virtue had to be reformulated: virtue or excellence it is what makes a good and perfect thing what it is or the activity or way of being that perfects each thing, making it be what it should be (the horse's virtue = speed, the dog's virtue = discipline, the soldier's virtue = temperance and courage, etc.). There is therefore a reversal of values. While the sophists preach immediacy, fame, glory, honor as external values to be achieved; the Socratic vision seeks knowledge, technique, ethics, as inner values to be carried out.
This is how you understand what is meant by the notion that error is involuntary. It is impossible to know the Good and not do it. The notion of autarchy promoted by virtue means the self-mastery of rationality about animality and happiness would be harmony and inner order in the man who has learned to control his impulses. Violence and desires are ungodly and must be educated.
Following in the footsteps of your master, Plato developed Socrates' stance by retaking myth as an expression of rationalized faith and beliefs. For him, the myth seeks clarification inlogos and this one seeks complementation in the myth. With reason at the limit, it is up to the myth to intuitively overcome these limits, raising the spirit to a transcendent tension. This is how the ultimate causes that guarantee the knowledge are the Ideas (or Forms), which are the paradigm of discursiveness and understanding. knowledge isAnamnesis, that is, recollection, remembrance that explains the possibility of science as it conditions this possibility to the presence of a intuition originating from the true in the soul. That is why it is necessary to use the dialectic to verify the relationship between opinion and science, since there is a hierarchy that depends on ascension and descent of the search, that is, the moment to think and the moment to manufacture discourses according to the models ideals. Art is a distancing from the truth, as it is a copy of the true. Hence, Plato also makes some use of rhetoric in order to overcome horizontal opinions.
That's why only the love is able to do that way. It ranges from the alogical, the irrational, the sensitive and desiring to the rational, logical and intelligible, promoting an understanding of the essence of things that for this very reason become beautiful. This is also how education in the ideal State manages to realize the concept of Justice, that is the end of political life.
By João Francisco P. Cabral
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Philosophy from the Federal University of Uberlândia - UFU
Master's student in Philosophy at the State University of Campinas - UNICAMP
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/filosofia/a-educacao-na-grecia-classica-dos-sofistas-platao.htm