In Plato's thought, the Logos is the sun that illuminates the true world, and the human being is logocentric. This means that whatever is a spark of the truth of the world also exists within the human being; in this way the human being is connected to the Logos—the truth of the world—and this quality distinguishes humanity from other beings.

To say that, in Plato's view, we are beings oriented toward transcendence means that we are intrinsically drawn toward transcendence because we possess the capacity to understand the world beyond the structure in which it presently exists. There are things within the structure of human consciousness that are absent in other beings. We can understand the world not only as what it is, but beyond that, as what it can become. We see the ocean and the flight of birds as beautiful without any obvious evolutionary utility for us, because we are inherently drawn toward transcendence.

For the human being to be logocentric means that the truth of the external world also has an inner manifestation within us. In the Platonic view, the sacredness of the human being arises from the idea that humanity has the capacity to bear within itself a manifestation of truth.

Aydin Areta