Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Philosophers, Intellectuals, Novelists and Musicians

Plato [1]

Plato says [according to Weber, p. 86]: “The world of sense is the copy of the world of Ideas, and conversely, the world of ideas resembles its image; it forms a hierarchy.... In our visible world there is a gradation of beings.... The same holds true of the intelligible realm or the pattern of the world; the Ideas are joined together by means of other Ideas of a higher order; ... the Ideas constantly increase in generality and force, until we reach the top, the last, the highest, the most powerful Idea or the Good, which comprehends, contains or summarizes the entire system.” I think he is nearly on the verge of a mental understanding of the Overmind.

He was trying to express in a mental way the One containing the multiplicity which is brought out (created) from the One — that is the Overmind realisation. Plato had these ideas not as realisations but as intuitions which he expressed in his own mental form.

There are many such thoughts in Plato’s philosophy. Did he get them from Indian books?

Not from Indian books — something of the philosophy of India got through by means of Pythagoras and others. But I think Plato got most of these things from intuition.

8 October 1933