‘The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.’ While undoubtedly more pithy than true, the fact that a philosopher of the stature of A.N. Whitehead could make such a claim points to the astonishing awe in which later philosophers have held Plato, a citizen of Athens who was born nearly 2500 years ago.
‘The chief error in philosophy is overstatement,’ Whitehead pointed out earlier in his Process and Reality (1929) – ironically, at least in relation to the above-quoted remark, which is manifestly an exaggeration. But while Whitehead may fail to give subsequent Western philosophy its due, it is unquestionably true that Plato cast a huge shadow over later thinkers and that many of them developed and refined their ideas in creative interaction with or reaction to those of Plato.
In the course of some 35 dialogues, written over half a century, we see a range of doctrines – ethical, political, aesthetic, among others – evolving and maturing, and the term ‘Platonism’ may refer to some or all of these ideas. At the core of his philosophy, however, is a strikingly original metaphysical theory that assumes the existence of a realm of eternal and unchanging realities, distinct from the shifting world of everyday experience. These entities are both the cause of everything and the source of all value and meaning, and exploring their transcendent nature and the manner in which we gain knowledge of them is the most distinctive part of Plato’s philosophy. Accordingly, it is this aspect of his work that can most precisely be called Platonic, and it is by extension from this peculiar conception of ultimate reality that the name ‘Platonism’ is sometimes applied to other theories that are realist (idealist) in character. These typically assert that abstract entities, especially mathematical ones, exist outside time and space, independently of our perception or experience of them.
The theory of Forms The motivation for Plato’s extreme realism is dissatisfaction with what purports to be knowledge of the world around us, where everything is imperfect and changeable. How can we know what tallness is when a tall person is short next to a tree? Or what redness is when an apple that appears red in daylight looks black in the dark? Such things, Plato concludes, are the objects not of knowledge but of opinion or conjecture. What is known must be perfect, eternal and unchanging, and since nothing in our everyday experience (in the ‘realm of becoming’) fits this description, there must be a transcendent ‘realm of being’ where there are perfect and unchanging models or paradigms. These are what Plato calls ‘Forms’ or ‘Ideas’, and it is by virtue of imitating or copying them that things in our experience are the way they are. So, for instance, it is by copying the Form of Justice that all particular just actions are just.
And how, we may wonder, do we gain knowledge of these transcendent Forms, if all that is available to us through our senses is poor imitations or copies? Plato’s surprising answer is that we must have come to know the Forms when we were in some earlier state and that what we are engaged in now is a process not of learning but of recollection. On this basis Plato develops a thoroughgoing dualism, in which our immortal souls exist prior to occupying physical bodies. It is the process of embodiment that encumbers the soul and causes it to forget the knowledge that it gained from previous direct contact with Forms in the realm of being.
‘We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise.’
Plato, Theaetetus, C.369BC
The problem of universals Plato’s theory of Forms may seem far-fetched, but one of the chief problems that it seeks to address – the so-called problem of universals – has been a dominant theme in philosophy, in some guise or other, ever since. In the Middle Ages the philosophical battle lines were drawn up between the Realists (or Platonists) on one side, who believed that universals such as redness and tallness existed independently of particular red and tall things; and the Nominalists on the other, who held that they were mere names or labels that were attached to objects to highlight particular similarities between them.
The same basic distinction still resonates throughout many areas of modern philosophy. So a realist position holds that there are entities ‘out there’ in the world – physical things or ethical facts or mathematical properties – that exist independently of our knowing or experiencing them. So, on this view, the business of (say) mathematics is not devising proofs involving entities that are in some sense constructed in the minds of mathematicians; rather, it is a matter of discovering truths about preexisting entities. Opposed to this kind of view, other philosophers, known as anti-realists, put forward proposals in which there is a necessary and internal link or relation between what is known and our knowledge of it. The basic terms of all such debates were set up over 2000 years ago by Plato, one of the first and most thoroughgoing of all philosophical realists.
the condensed idea
Towards transcendent reality