Viveka is a priori knowledge in a higher sense. Knowledge, according to Plato, is the correspondence of thought and Reality, or Being. The universal idea of Truth, goodness and beauty, for example, must have objects or realities corresponding to them. The idea is an ideal which must be real and have an existence, independent of some thought. This highest rule or Truth is the object of genuine knowledge, different from mere opinion in regard to the world which is changing, fleeting, transient, mere appearance.
True Being is unchangeable, Eternal.
Here Plato brings Heraclitus and Parmenides together and transcends them in his higher idealism. Plato declares that knowledge of Eternal Being is true knowledge. This knowledge is identified with thought, conceptual thought, which alone is said to grasp the Eternal. True knowledge is conceptual knowledge. According to the Vedanta, lower, relative knowledge consists in the correspondence of thought and its object, but in the higher, universal knowledge there is no correspondence but identity, for, in universal knowledge the knower and the known are one.