A rchive Date
[ 10-12-2002 ]
Category
[ Philosophy ]
sub-Categoy
[ Greek ]

http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/plat.htm

Platonic Forms

Plato began his philosophical career as a student of

. When the master died, Plato travelled to Egypt and Italy, studied with students of

, and spent several years advising the ruling family of Syracuse. Eventually, he returned to Athens and established his own school of philosophy at the Academy. For students enrolled there, Plato tried both to pass on the heritage of a Socratic style of thinking and to guide their progress through mathematical learning to the achievement of abstract philosophical truth. The written dialogues on which his enduring reputation rests also serve both of these aims.

In his earliest literary efforts, Plato tried to convey the spirit of Socrates's teaching by presenting accurate reports of

the master's conversational interactions

, for which these dialogues are our primary source of information. Early dialogues are typically devoted to investigation of a single issue, about which a conclusive result is rarely achieved. Thus, the

Euqufrwn

(

Euthyphro

) raises a significant doubt about whether morally right action can be

defined in terms of divine approval

by pointing out a significant

dilemma about any appeal to authority

in defence of moral judgments. The

Apologhma

(

Apology

) offers a description of

the philosophical life

as Socrates presented it in his own

defense before the Athenian jury

. The

Kritwn

(

Crito

) uses the

circumstances of Socrates's imprisonment

to ask whether an individual citizen is ever

justified in refusing to obey

the state.

Although they continue to use the talkative Socrates as a fictional character,

the middle dialogues

of Plato develop, express, and defend his own, more firmly established, conclusions about central philosophical issues. Beginning with the

Menwn

(

Meno

), for example, Plato not only reports the Socratic notion that

no one knowingly does wrong

, but also introduces

the doctrine of recollection

in an attempt to discover whether or not

virtue can be taught

. The

Faidwn

(

Phaedo

) continues development of Platonic notions by presenting the doctrine of the

Forms

in support of

a series of arguments

that claim to demonstrate

the immortality of the human soul

Among the middle dialogues is Plato's

Politeia

(

Republic

). It begins with a Socratic conversation about

the nature of justice

but proceeds directly to

an extended discussion

of the

virtues

(Gk.

areth [aretê]

) of

justice

(Gk.

dikaiwsunh [dikaiôsunê]

(Gk.

(Gk.

), and

(Gk.

swfrosunh [sophrosúnê]

) as they appear both in

individual human beings

and in

society as a whole

This plan for the ideal society or person requires detailed accounts of

human knowledge

and of the kind of

educational program

by which it may be achieved by

men and women alike

, captured in a powerful image of the possibilities for human life in the

allegory of the cave

. The dialogue concludes with a review of various

forms of government

, an explicit description of the ideal state, in which

only philosophers are fit to rule

, and an attempt to show that

justice is better than injustice

. Among the

other dialogues

of this period are Plato's treatments of human emotion in general and of love in particular in the

(

) and

(

Plato's later writings often modify or completely abandon the formal structure of dialogue. They include a critical examination of the theory of forms in

ParmenidhV

(

Parmenides

), an extended discussion of the problem of knowledge in

QeaithtoV

(

Theaetetus

), cosmological speculations in

TimaioV

(

Timaeus

), and an interminable treatment of government in the unfinished

LegeiV

(

Laws

)

The word 'Form' is used to translate Plato's Greek word idea, which is sometimes transliterated into English as 'Idea'. From an etymological point of view the Greek word means the look of a thing, but it was commonly extended to mean a sort, kind, or type of thing. (Compare the Latin word species.) What is called Plato's theory of Forms (or Ideas) is a theory about sorts, kinds, or types, and its main claim is that a type exists independently of whether or not there are things of that type. It appears that Plato was led to the theory in the first place by considering such types as the type of person who is virtuous, but he then extended it to many other types.

Our apprehension of reality occurs in different degrees, depending upon the nature of the objects with which it is concerned in each case. Thus, there is a fundamental difference between the mere

opinion

(Gk.

doxa [dóxa]

) we can have regarding the visible realm of sensible objects and the genuine

knowledge

(Gk.

episthmh [epistêmê]

) we can have of the invisible realm of the Forms themselves. In fact, Plato held that each of these has two distinct varieties, so that we can picture the entire array of human cognition as a line divided proportionately into four segments. (

Republic 509d

)

At the lowest level of reality are shadows, pictures, and other images, with respect to which

imagination

(Gk.

eikasia [eikásia]

) or conjecture is the appropriate degree of awareness, although it provides only the most primitive and unreliable opinions.

The visible realm also contains ordinary physical objects, and our perception of them provides the basis for

belief

(Gk.

pistiV [pístis]

), the most accurate possible conception of the nature and relationship of temporal things.

Moving upward into the intelligible realm, we first become acquainted with the relatively simple Forms of numbers, shapes, and other mathematical entities; we can achieve systematic knowledge of these objects through a disciplined application of the

understanding

(Gk.

dianoia [diánoia]

Finally, at the highest level of all, are the more significant Forms—true Equality, Beauty, Truth, and of course the Good itself. These permanent objects of knowledge are directly apprehended by

intuition

(Gk.

nohsiV [nóêsis]

), the fundamental capacity of human reason to comprehend the true nature of reality.

Suppose two or more judgments have the same form "A is

," "B is

," etc., where

is any value predicate, such as 'just' or 'beautiful.' In such judgments we

classify

the entities or actions which we might substitute for the variables 'A,' 'B,' etc. as exemplifying a common quality: being just or beautiful. Philosophers have called concepts which sort entities or actions into an identical class 'class concepts' or '

universals

.' Grammarians similarly distinguish between 'proper' and 'common' nouns, the former designating some individual, or '

particular

,' the latter some class, or a '

universal

Forms as class concepts.

If A is a certain woman and B is a certain statue and both "A is beautiful" and "B is beautiful" are true statements, one might be tempted to think of the woman and the statue as

participating

in or sharing some common property--beauty, despite their being otherwise quite different. This is the way Plato thinks, and he calls the common property 'beauty itself,' as distinct from the particular beauty of either woman or statue (unfortunately, translators often feel compelled to turn Plato's 'beauty itself' into "ideal beauty" or "absolute beauty").

Much can be said in favor of this way of thinking. How can we intelligently say that some particular objects are beautiful unless we have a

prior

acquaintance with beauty itself, so that we can identify it in those objects? Or, looking at the situation just in terms of our classifying some objects as beautiful, must we not

first

understand the class concept if we are to use it to sort various things, such as women and statues, into those which are beautiful and those which are not beautiful? Knowledge of 'the beautiful itself' is a prerequisite for knowing whether 'A is beautiful' or 'B is beautiful' are true statements.

Of course we find ourselves saying things like 'This woman is beautiful' and 'That statue is beautiful,' long before we have thought about--if we ever do--what 'the beautiful itself' (or 'beauty') is. The same must have been true of Plato. So the sense of 'prior' or 'first' in the preceding paragraph cannot be

temporal

. Philosophers talk of

conceptual or logical priority

as distinct from

temporal

priority, and it is this sort of firstness which is at issue here. If an understanding of

is necessary for an understanding of

, then

is conceptually or logically prior to

. It would seem that, if we are to understand what we are saying when we say 'This woman is beautiful,' we must understand what 'beautiful' means. Nor can we know whether that or any other statement is true (i.e., is an item of

knowledge

) unless we understood what the statement means. What then is the status of all those statements, constituting the vast majority of our assertions, which we make before we have established a clear understanding of the terms the statements contain? Plato would say that they must be

opinions

only, since they clearly cannot be instances of knowledge.

Forms as standards.

Consider another kind of judgment we commonly make and express in statements of the form "A is more

than B," for example, "This woman is more beautiful than that statue." Everything which has been observed above still applies, but there is an additional complication. The predicate

serves not merely to classify or sort entities or actions but also to

rank

them. Plato thinks of this fact in the following way. Neither the woman nor the statue of our example, nor any other concrete sensible object, is perfectly beautiful, for each of these objects is many things (for example, woman, red-headed, slim, graceful, with a wart on her left hand, etc.) and not just this one thing--beautiful. Only "the beautiful itself" is just beauty uncompounded with any other properties. The beautiful woman "participates in" or "shares" this beauty with all other beautiful things, but both she and all those other things can only be beautiful in certain respects and

to a certain degree

. The concept of beauty, or what Plato calls "the beautiful itself" or "Beauty," provides a

standard

with which to judge individual objects as being more or less beautiful. Because they are the patterns or ideal models to which we compare individual things or actions in order to determine

how

beautiful, just, or whatever, they are, he also refers to them as '

Forms

' or '

ideas

.' For this reason, Plato's view has been called

idealism

Our knowledge of Forms.

It is clear that we cannot apprehend Forms by our senses. We see the beautiful person, but beauty itself is not something we can see or hear. We would say that we 'have an idea' or 'have a concept' of beauty; Plato talks of apprehending Forms 'with the mind' rather than with the senses. We do hear beautiful pieces of music and see beautiful objects, but Plato's point is that we are able to do so only because we have some idea of what beauty itself is. Even if hearing a sound is entirely an affair of the sense organs, hearing that sound

as beautiful

is to mentally classify it as having satisfied those ideal conditions which would be specified in a definition of "beauty." Some would say that our concepts are constructed by the mind by a process of selective abstraction from sensible experience--that, in effect, we make our ideas.

This view has sometimes been called

nominalism

, because concepts are nothing more than

names

by which we conventionally designate certain sensible properties or patterns of sensible properties. Plato does not agree with this view. He thinks that our ideas are not like artefacts, but rather like perceptions. That is, just as visual perceptions are of objects which exist outside us, our concepts are mental perceptions of non-sensible realities which likewise exist independently of us. This view has sometimes been called

realism

, because it takes mental objects to be objectively

real

. Of course, concepts may be more or less adequate, just as visual perceptions may be more or less accurate; but conceptual adequacy is measured by the degree of conformity to a naturally and independently existing conceptual reality as perceptual accuracy is measured by the degree of conformity of visual experience to the properties of the visible object.

Thinking this way, it makes perfectly good sense to say that 'Beauty really exists' and that it will be whatever it is regardless of how you or I may think of it. Plato thinks that if Beauty and Justice were only names and not realities then all our aesthetic and moral judgments would only express conventional prejudices and that none of them could be true. How would this consequence follow? Because, as Parmenides had argued, knowledge is apprehension of what really is. If 'beauty' or 'justice' are not realities, then statements such as "Symmetry is beautiful" and "Paying debts is just" couldn't be evaluated as either true or false, because there would be no non-arbitrary, natural, standard, meaning of 'beautiful' or 'just.' Further, there is an obvious difference between perception and knowledge. Knowledge is mental or conceptual, not sensible, experience. If knowledge is the correct apprehension of what truly exits, and if Forms did not exist, there would not be anything to know, for the only existing objects would be sensible, rather than conceivable, realities.

Reality.

If Plato is right, we are not entitled to think of reality in the conventional commonsense way, that is, to assume that that which is sensible is most real. That which really exists is to be apprehended only through thinking--by constructing and testing theories. Sensible objects could not possibly be real; they could at best be "

copies

" or "

images

" (as Plato calls them) of underlying realities which can be thought about but which cannot be perceived. In short, what we usually call "the real world" is not that at all, but is rather just a world of

appearance

seeming

. Only the Forms really exist, for they are the "causes" (in the sense of archetypal standards) of whatever intelligible properties are discernible in those sensible things which seem to be most real. If we don't know what beauty, or equality, or justice is ideally, how can we recognize particular instances of these?

Interestingly, this means that the examples we began by considering--statements such as "This woman is beautiful"--cannot ever be cases of knowledge, because the subject expression designates a sensible, rather than an intelligible, object. We could never be certain of more than that "This woman

seems

beautiful," because this opinion relies on observational experience which would always be changing and incomplete. The only statements which could express genuine knowledge would be those whose subject terms, as well as their predicate terms, designated Forms. In logical jargon, knowledge can be expressed only in universal propositions, not in singular propositions (propositions whose subject refers to some particular thing rather than to a Form). Scientific statements are not about particular objects but about univerals.

Cross-Indexed:

The Philosophical Life: Socrates

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