Drunken mistakes

PLATO’s THEORY OF FORMS

“… so let’s just forget that this ever happened and go back to what we were – friends of a friend that hung out on occasion, strictly platonic, or nothing at all.” Naive One

The sense one gets from this is that Naive One seems to suppose that being “platonic” is located at some midpoint between reality – something that actually happened, if in this case only in the past – and the absence of reality – “nothing at all.” Central to the issue, therefore, is Plato’s concept of reality. Of what, then, for Plato did reality consist?

Plato’s concept of reality was, of course, embodied in his Theory of Forms. How, he asked, is multiplicity – the near infinite number of particulars in the universe – to be conceptualized? In the absence of some coherent and all-embracing theory, reality would amount to little more than a teeming welter of isolated particulars which woud amount to little more than chaos. If there is anything that philosophers abhor it is chaos since chaos entails incomprehensibility, the bane of the philosopher’s quest. How then did Plato solve the problem? He solved it by means of his Theory of Forms.

Take the individual common chair. It is one of an uncounted multitude of chairs many of which assume distinct forms, but nonetheless are still identifiable as being chairs. But what is it by virtue of which we call it a “chair”? What, in other words, is its nature?

For Plato, a chair is a chair because of its “chairness,” its identifying underlying Form which distinguishes it from, say, a table (which also has its unique Form). But where is this chairness to be found? What does it look like? One never enncounters such chairness on the street, for example, or for that matter anywhere else in the physical world. The reason we don’t is that for Plato the Form of the Chair (like all the other Forms) subsists at a higher order of reality. Indeed, the Forms themselves are more “real” than their “real-world” manifesttions which are little more than pale shadows of those Forms. To ask where the Form of the Chair exists would, therefore, commit a category mistake since it exists neither in time nor place. It is a transcendent and timeless “Universal”. As an indication of Plato’s influence on subsequent western culture some would say that the Forms exist in the the highest Form of all, the Mind of God.

By way of establishing that “platonic” relationship with her friend, then, I think Naive One could do a lot worse than engaging him in a discussion of Plato’s Theory of Forms.

A pleasure as always.

Cheerio!