Plato’s philosophical pessimism contains two dimensions: one epistemological and the other cosmological. From the epistemological aspect, Plato realises that the method of dialectic extant in the early Socratic dialogues, and any method connected to words and language as in the Cratylus, fall short of providing true knowledge; eventually, in the Phaedo, he reaches the overall point of view that, due to the corporeal obstacles, human beings could not gain true knowledge in this world. In this way, Plato’s pessimism refers to the obstacles associated with the body and the corporeal world, a vision rooted in Orphic dualism. In some of his dialogues, under the influence of Hesiod, he draws a pessimistic perspective of the phenomenal world and human life in it, while in his other dialogues, he considers the world as totally beautiful and orderly; however, it seems that even in these works, he takes the corporeality as the source of evil, presuming the soul’s tending towards the corporeal as the source of moral evil, and the shortfall of the body in accepting the Form as the source of ontological evil.
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