Analysis Of Socrates 'The Socratic Quest'

‘The Socratic Quest’ is a dialogue between Socrates and Hippias that sparks a dramatic yet philosophic debate. Socrates shows the difficulty of the search for definite explanations of assertions and this is what Plato strives for within his dialogues. These dialogues allow for the existence of actual entities and this allows Plato to justify the search for their exact meaning. Plato’s dialogues are brief in the sense that they collectively propose a key Socratic question that regards the vagueness of Socrates’ claim; trying to understand the essence of something by asking for fundamental definitions. The dialogue between Socrates and Hippias is a search for the meaning of the essential defining feature while judging the commonly accepted standard.

Socrates creates a thought-provoking claim around the idea that ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful things’ are fundamentally different, however, Hippias displays a failure to appreciate this distinctiveness and continues to dispute that there is no difference in the matter. The basic question Socrates asks is ‘What is beauty?’, and Hippias addresses the essence, not by defining the feature, but by giving an example of it. Socrates repeatedly receives an example of a ‘beautiful thing’. The Socratic Quest for the definition of the essence is resulting without conclusion, not only in the discussion between Socrates and Hippias but in a number of Plato’s dialogues. Without a concluding answer, the audience is left questioning the metaphysical status that beauty

Not only can he not provide a sufficient answer to Socrates’ question, it is clear that he fails to grasp what Socrates is even asking. Hippias, however, is not the only one who fails to gain an understanding of what Socrates and, subsequently, Plato are attempting to understand. One could use Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, to describe Hippias failure to understand. Probably the best known of the many images and analogies used by Plato, the Allegory of the Cave appears in book 7 of the Republic (514 BCE –520 BCE), the monumental work in which he investigates the form of the ideal state. The detailed interpretation of Plato’s cave has been much debated, but the broad significance is clear enough. The cave represents ‘the realm of becoming’ – the visible world of our everyday experience, where everything is imperfect and constantly changing. The chained captives, which symbolize the ‘ordinary people’, live in a world of conjecture and illusion, while the former prisoner, free to roam within the cave, attains the most accurate view of reality possible within the ever-changing world of perception and experience. By contrast, the world outside the cave represents ‘the realm of being’ – the intelligible world of truth populated by the objects of knowledge, which are perfect, eternal and unchanging. In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato sets out to do more than illuminate his distinctive