Education Quote by Plato

Plato is drawing a hard border around the one thing most people treat as a destination: having an opinion. For him, "opinion" (doxa) is not a badge of identity or a democratic virtue; it is a holding pen. The line works because it demotes our favorite mental possession into a kind of epistemic purgatory, suspended between the clarity of knowledge (episteme) and the blankness of ignorance. "Medium" is doing the heavy lifting: opinion isn’t merely weaker knowledge, it’s a different substance - a permeable, unstable element that can be shaped by rhetoric, habit, and desire.

The subtext is political as much as philosophical. Plato watched Athens run on persuasion: courts, assemblies, charismatic speakers winning crowds. Opinion is the currency of that world, and he’s warning that a society governed by doxa is governed by what seems true, not what is true. It’s an argument for why sophists are dangerous and why philosophy has to be more than clever talk; it must be a discipline that transforms the mind’s relationship to evidence and reason.

Contextually, this sits behind the Republic’s distrust of popular judgment and its obsession with education as moral formation. Plato isn’t claiming opinions are useless; he’s insisting they’re transitional. They can be the start of inquiry, but they’re also where inquiry goes to die when people confuse feeling certain with being correct. In one tidy sentence, he diagnoses a culture that mistakes confidence for comprehension.