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Plato's Tripartite Disunion Of The Soul

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Parmenides and Plato used mythological metaphors to clarify their ideas of being and the soul (Clements). Parmenides portrays the appearance of a charioteer that is pulled by two horses and starts a voyage to study the truth about the nature of the world (Clements). Likewise, in the Phaedrus, Plato employs the allegory of a charioteer pulled by two horses to clarify figuratively his idea of the tripartite disunion of the soul, first expressed in the Republic (Clements). Like Parmenides, Plato fashions a mythological story rich with imagery to explain his image of the soul.
Plato’s allegory of the chariot can be interpreted on a number of levels – as symbolic of the path to becoming godlike, spiritual transcendence, personal progress and attainment …show more content…

When you take a car apart and lay the pieces out it will longer be a car. It would just be known as individual parts. This means a car only exists when all of its parts are put together. The car would be known as the originated object, and the parts are the base of the originated object. In the allegory of the chariot, the chariot drops from the heavens when the horses do not obtain sufficient nourishment from the Forms, or when the horses rebel and the charioteer does a poor job of guiding them. They lose their wings, and must stay on earth until they regrow – a process which is hastened by remembering what one saw before the fall …show more content…

His philosophy may be interpreted literally as saying we had a preexistence before this life. But it also has meaning in a more figurative sense. We get off track in becoming the men we wish to be when we succumb to vice (being overpowered by the dark horse), and we tend to succumb to vice when we forget who we are, who we want to be, and the insights into those two pieces of knowledge we have already attained and experienced (McKay). Doing things that remind us of the truths we hold dear keeps us “in flight” and progressing with our

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