Plato was considered a religious thinker. But even if we consider his philosophy to be religious (which is often done only with a great stretch), then in all school textbooks we read that ancient religion and mythology are the deification of the forces of nature.

And if this is taken seriously, then it is obvious that Plato's religious philosophy will have to be greatly reduced and will no longer be a philosophy of the spirit. In that case it would be a philosophy of nature, or even of matter, rather than a philosophy of pure and absolute spirit.

Plato's philosophy was also often associated with slavery, in the depths of which it was born. But slavery is again a very earthly and very corporeal socio-historical formation. After all, the slave was understood as a domestic animal, as an instrumentum vocale (which, of course, was not always the case, very sporadic and conditional, and which at present can only be spoken of with great reservations). However, if the traditional doctrine of the slave as a domestic animal, which is still widespread in public circles, contains at least some truth, then a philosophical doctrine that has arisen on such a limited socio-historical soil can by no means have broad horizons, and even the most absolute Platonism can in no case be a philosophy of pure and absolute spirit.

We would like to depict Plato as a purely ancient thinker, as a pagan thinker, and as a thinker deeply connected with the thousand-year-old worldview of his people. This task is enormous and requires a large number of voluminous studies. Here we can only make a few hints, which, of course, will require both a fundamental verification and an exhaustive review of all other Platonic materials related to this.

2. General statistics of Plato's philosophical and aesthetic terminology

First of all, we would like to draw attention to the current state of terminological studies relating to Plato's doctrine of ideas. Terminologically, the doctrine of ideas is very poorly recorded in Plato. If we use all sorts of conjectures, hypotheses, and conjectures, then the general modern result of the centuries-old study of Plato's terminology is that Plato, properly speaking, does not even have any doctrine of ideas.

In fact, the very motley and ill-formed semantics of the two basic terms which are usually regarded as central to Plato's doctrine of ideas, namely, the terms eidos and idea, are striking. Attention is also drawn to the surprising rarity for the entire Platonic text of those cases where the term idea is used. There are only 96 such cases for all of Plato's authentic dialogues. This is an amazingly small figure. But there are also not so many texts containing the term eidos, namely only 408. These two figures alone, before any consideration of each text separately, make us suspect that these terms are hardly technical for Plato in the philosophical sense of the word. But it seems even more striking that even among this small number of texts which point to the "idea," the vast majority have no specific meaning in Plato.

The statistics of these terms were once studied by Konstantin Ritter. Ritter's research is not the only one. Personally, when I was young, I decided to revise all these statistics of K. Ritter in their entirety, introducing various new principles of Plato's research for that time, and I believe that K. Ritter's theoretical attitudes are too abstract and formalistic. I will now quote some data from this old study of mine,* but I do not at all think that my qualification of each particular text of Plato is absolutely infallible, and I admit a wide possibility of other interpretations. On the contrary, many of Plato's texts are now interpreted quite differently by me, and I consider my former statistics to be generally outdated. It can only be a question of putting forward the most general semantic lines.

* A.F.Losev, Essays on ancient symbolism and mythology, vol. I, Moscow, 1930, pp. 135-281.

3. External, internal, external-internal meaning of terms

With an external-sensory meaning, according to my calculations at that time, there are from 63 cases to 99, with a more probable figure of 83, that is, 16.5% (of the total number of 504). It is very characteristic that both of our terms refer for the most part to a living body, denoting either its figure, or its frame, or some of its other physical properties. Of the 27 texts with an externally sensual eidos, 21 refers to the human and animal body, four are about the beautiful body of a boy (Charm. 154 d, 159 e; Lys. 222 a; Phaed. 73 d), two texts on the appearance of Socrates (Men. 80a; Conv. 215 b), two texts on the appearance of the androgyne (189e), one text each very expressively on the flexible body of Eros (196 a), on the Hippocentaurs and Chimeras (Phaedr. 229 d), on the physical constitution of one of the horses of the soul (253 d), on the appearance of people in the sky (R. P. X 618 b; Phaedr. 249b), on the state of the soul in the body (Phaedr. 73a, 87a, 92b), two texts simply about the naked body of man (Prot. 352a; Theaet. 162 b). The remaining six cases with the external-sensual eidos refer to mathematical figures (sensual, R. P. VI 510 d), to stones and animals (Theaet. 157 bc), to chiaroscuro (Soph. 266 c), to the "eidos of the part" (Tim. 30 c), to the appearance of the temple (Critias. 116 d) and the country (118 a). Of the 14 cases with idea in the external-sensory sense, 11 also refer to the body (Charm. 157d, 158a, 175d; Prot. 315 e; R. P. IX 588 c; Politic. 291 b; Alcib. I 119c and partly Tim. 70 c, 71 a). Of these, about the boy in Charm., about Chimera and Scylla in R. R., texts with an external-sensible idea - about the appearance of the earth (Phaed. 108 d, 109 b) and about the coin, seal, etc. (Politic. 289 b). At present, it seems to me surprising that many researchers take very little account of this huge factor in Plato's terminology. If these two terms are really specific to Plato's doctrine of ideas, then, in any case, the texts already quoted do not say so at all. Here we have in mind the most ordinary physical body, predominantly alive and animate, and predominantly in one respect or another surprising or remarkable. However, I cannot find any "doctrine of ideas" here.