Is the mind capable of producing a pure thought? I think not. We live in a world influenced by power, prejudice, and greed among other things. It is a world where people inheritably accept the values and morals of their society. As a product of our environment we cannot help to be overcome by the fears, wants, and desires that flow through our world so readily. It is these very things which make us incapable of pure thought. Our thoughts are and always will remain impure as long as our body produces these opinions; the very poison that contaminates our thoughts.

In Phaedo, a fictionalized account of Socratese, Plato speaks of the separation of the soul and body. He speaks of pure knowledge and reasoning without the use of the senses, a facet we find so necessary in almost any earthly task.

"Then he will do this most perfectly who approaches the object with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging in any sense perception with his reasoning, but who, using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from eyes and ears, and in a word, from the whole body, because the bod

ue view of the world, everything slightly duller because our thought can never be truly pure.

The world as we know it will never theoretically be the world, as we know it, that is, until our body and soul are separated. What our body perceives and what our soul perceives are two separate entities. One goes through life with the precognition that they understand their surroundings. That when we view a beautiful painting we fully understand the essence of beauty and the aspects, which attribute to that painting being beautiful. A beautiful summer day may seem beautiful because it is comparable to that of other summer days. But what truly makes it beautiful? Perhaps it is really ugly, yet we know it as beautiful because that is what society has told us. We cannot fully comprehend what it is to be beautiful because our body poisons our thought. "It fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense, so that, as it is said, in truth and in fact no thought of any kind ever comes to us from the body"(Phaedo, 66c). It causes us to have an opaq!

What exactly constitutes pure knowledge is not easy to define. Plato interpreted it as knowledge without use of the senses. It is a wisdom that can only be experienced when the soul is separate from the body, after death or perhaps before life. It is a theory that is open to interpretation and possibly each individual has their own conception of what it is to acquire absolute knowledge. There is one aspect of pure knowledge that is not open to interpretation; it must be perfect in every a

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Approximate Word count = 1059
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)