Rounding into Forms
Even though I tend to disagree with just about every major point in it, Plato’s Republic holds a warm spot in my heart. For one, it’s a well-thought-out and ambitious attempt to bring metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy and other topics together into one comprehensive treatment. This is no easy task, as I’ve discovered while poring through dozens of books by John Dewey to try and connect the pieces of his thinking together. For another, it’s the first book we really delved into in the first philosophy course I took at Fordham University, and without that course I doubt I’d have majored in philosophy, pursued graduate studies, or started this site.
Hmm. Maybe it’s time to rethink that warm spot.
At any rate, there’s far too much in Republic for me to synopsize in a single article, but there are a few of Plato’s arguments and examples that have become commonplace even in non-philosophical discourse that I’d like to use to start some discussion. These instances should also help illustrate how Plato helped to set the terms of philosophical debate for literally thousands of years afterward.
Odds are, if you’ve heard any reference to Plato, it’s either the notion of Platonic forms or (less likely) the allegory of the cave, the latter of which was designed in part to explain the former. Plato looked at the world he saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted, and was none too happy with the results. Everything seemed too temporary, too unstable, too reliant on other things to give it its meaning and identity. For example, look at this set of lines:
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If I ask you if the middle line is long or short, you might say, “Well, it’s long compared to the first one, but short compared to the last one.� The middle line is long and short at the same time, which presented Plato with a contradiction he just couldn’t live with. Then there are subjective value judgments – I may think a particular object is beautiful, while some feature of that same object displeases you. Beauty and lack of beauty are inextricably linked together in the physical, sensible realm. But Plato wanted to find that which was long and nothing but long, beautiful and nothing but beautiful. Something that would never change, because it was perfect and complete. (If something changes, it’s not what it was anymore, which means it’s either added or lost some capacity or feature it didn’t have before. If it added something, it wasn’t perfect before, and if it lost something, it’s not perfect anymore. So something perfect must be eternal, permanent and unchanging.)
Plato’s answer was to theorize that there is another realm beyond the one that we perceive with our senses, a realm that we can only apprehend with our intellect. This realm is populated by the forms, pure and perfect entities that serve as templates for the imperfect copies in the sensible world. For example, the definition of a circle is ‘a set of points exactly the same distance from a central point.’ Nothing that we see and call a circle really fits that definition. They’re all more than a point wide, just for starters, and there’s bound to be some kind irregularity, no matter how small. But in the realm of the forms, the perfect circle exists, and that’s what our minds perceive when we grasp the concept of ‘circle.’
“But Plato,� you might ask, “why does there have to be this ‘form’ thing for us to understand what a circle is? Can’t we just say that we made the term up based on our observation of the world around us?� And while I think that’s a smashingly pragmatic idea, Plato would have none of it. In that case, what a circle is – what anything is – becomes dependent on our language and concepts. How can there be any order and stability in the universe when its very identity depends on us feeble humans? If there’s no real circle and no real beauty and no real truth, why try to figure this out? Once Plato sets up the link that says that the more eternally stable a thing is, the more real it is, he has to find an independent existence for everything that’s important in the search for knowledge. This is especially important because he hopes that a better understanding of the realm of the forms will help us improve the imperfect copy we sense every day. If we understand how the forms relate to each other, then we can make their sensible equivalents relate to each other in a more similar fashion.
The allegory of the cave is one of the more vivid ways that Plato describes the process by which people might gradually learn to perceive the forms. The scenario goes like this: A group of people sit facing a cave wall, chained so that all they can possibly look at is the cave wall. Behind them, other people have lit a fire and started putting on what is essentially a puppet show – they hold cardboard cutouts of trees and people and animals and all sorts of other objects from the outside world in front of the fire, projecting their shadows onto the cave wall. So when one of the people in chains talks about a tree, what they mean is what we would think of as a shadow of a depiction of a tree. Eventually, someone gets out of the chains, and after his eyes adjust to the fire he sees the tree cutout laying on the ground. Now he’s gotten a slightly better idea of what a tree is, but he still doesn’t have it down. He goes outside, and once his eyes adjust to the light he sees an actual tree. Now he’s getting somewhere. Finally, his eyes adjust enough that he can look up and see the sun, the source of light from which all his other visual experiences derive. Now, even if he goes back in the cave and starts looking at the shadows again, he’ll have a better understand of what each shadow is, and what it represents.
To Plato, the shadow and the cutout are the things we perceive in the sensible realm. At first we only have a very fuzzy idea of them, and even when we study them to get a better sense, we’re still not getting the full reality of whatever concept we’re studying. The world outside the cave is equivalent to the realm of the forms, with the tree and other objects representing most of the forms and the sun representing the form of all forms, the form of the good, the ultimate source of everything. We have to gradually move from perceiving the sensible world to the realm of the forms, but once we do, we understand even the sensible world more clearly.
It’s a pretty impressive illustration, but of course it all hangs on the validity of Plato’s theory of forms. There’s nothing in the example that proves Plato’s case – it’s an illustration, not an argument. And over the years, the theory itself has taken any number of attacks. But the mere fact that we’re still talking about it today shows how important and influential the theory is, even when that influence isn’t readily apparent.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.