Plato: The Essence Of Being
In this track, I explain three fundamental elements of Plato's philosophy: his theory of Forms (the core of his philosophy), doctrine of anamnesis and allegory of the cave. I also examine the context out of which they emerged (the problem Plato was responding to in formulating his theories), with particular reference to Parmenides and Heraclitus, and show how these three elements are intimately connected.
Transcript
Plato was a philosopher of antiquity who lived during the so-called Golden Age of Athens.
This was a time of great prosperity that gave rise to many of Greece's greatest thinkers,
Including Aristotle,
Who,
Incidentally,
Was a student of Plato.
Athens had risen to prominence culturally and intellectually,
And had even become the leading centre for the study of philosophy.
This was largely due to the formation of Plato's Academy,
Which laid the foundations of science,
Philosophy,
And education in the West.
Plato was a student of Socrates and was greatly influenced by him before he was executed for supposedly corrupting the Athenian youth.
His works were typically written in the form of dialogues,
Usually as a conversation between Socrates and his interlocutors.
Presumably,
Plato favoured the dialogue because it suited his dialectical style of philosophising,
Which contrasts opposing viewpoints in order to expose their implicit biases and assumptions and arrive at a superior position.
Today,
We will be looking at Plato's Theory of Forms along with his Doctrine of Anamnesis and Allegory of the Cave.
As we will see,
These three elements of his philosophy are all closely related.
But first,
Some context is needed.
Two of Plato's predecessors were the pre-Socratic philosophers,
Parmenides and Heraclitus,
Who expounded metaphysical doctrines of being and becoming respectively.
Their philosophies were developed in response to the problem of identity and change,
According to which one thing logically cannot change with time and remain the same.
Parmenides' solution to this problem was radical,
To say the least.
Because change requires something to differ from itself,
Which is a logical absurdity,
He denied its existence altogether.
He writes,
Whatever is,
Is,
And what is not,
Cannot be.
Whatever is not,
Isn't,
And cannot be.
This is a very obscure quote,
But let's break it down.
Either something arises out of nothing,
That is,
Ex nihilo,
Or something arises out of another thing.
The first claim cannot be true because nothing,
Non-being,
Is itself completely void of content,
And hence cannot give rise to a thing.
When we ordinarily conceive of nothing,
That is,
As a blank space,
We inadvertently presuppose the features of a thing onto it,
As a no-thing,
And in this way falsify it.
But nothing cannot be conceptualised,
For it does not exist.
Only that which exists is intelligible.
As for the second claim,
This also cannot be true because,
Having transitioned,
That which is would no longer be itself,
Therefore it would cease to be.
Yet,
That which is must always have been,
Since,
As we have just seen,
Nothing cannot give rise to something.
Thus,
In both cases,
The presence of change leads to contradiction.
This led Parmenides to conclude that the only thing that exists is pure being,
Being with a capital B.
But what exactly does he mean by this term?
In brief,
He's referring to that which is,
In other words,
That which exists.
Reality is one thing.
It never changes or becomes.
It is a continuous whole,
Complete unto itself,
Perfect,
Self-contained,
And undifferentiated.
It stands completely motionless for all eternity,
Beyond the alterations of space and the passage of time.
Because it is perfect,
Parmenides conceives of being as spherically shaped,
A sphere being,
Of course,
A completely symmetrical object of equal proportions.
In this way,
He anticipates the round-earth theory which has since been proven correct by science through pure reasoning alone.
Because being is perfect,
Continuous,
And unchanging,
But our senses tell us otherwise,
Parmenides claims that appearances are deceiving.
Therefore,
If we cannot trust our senses,
We must rely on reason instead to arrive at the truth.
Indeed,
If we look around us,
It would certainly seem that things are constantly changing.
Birth,
Death,
Movement,
Change.
These things seem to constitute the very essence of life.
However,
For movement to be possible,
A thing must move from its current position to an empty space.
But because Parmenides conceives empty space as that which does not exist,
As non-being,
He denies the possibility of motion.
Now,
Obviously we've come a long way since Parmenides.
We now know that space is not in fact empty,
But is composed of particles,
Forces,
Fields,
And so on.
But the fact that these discoveries are imperceptible to the human eye proves Parmenides right in his assertion that appearances can be deceiving.
Let's now move on to Heraclitus,
Who is often contrasted with Parmenides for his metaphysics of becoming.
He claimed that everything was in flux.
Always becoming,
Never being.
There is a quote often attributed to him that says,
No man ever steps in the same river twice,
For it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
However,
According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
What he actually says is,
On those stepping into rivers staying the same,
Other and other waters flow.
So he's essentially saying that the river both is and is not at the same time.
We can see why Heraclitus was called the obscure.
If a river is constantly flowing,
Then its water content is ever-changing.
At the same time,
However,
It's precisely because the river flows along its designated course that it is a river in the first place.
Paradoxically,
It's the fact that the river changes that is identifiable as a river.
We can see that even though there is constant change,
The world is not chaotic.
There is a harmony behind everything,
Which Heraclitus calls Logos.
This is a difficult word to explain,
But essentially it means order or reason.
The ancient Greeks thought of reason not merely as a cognitive faculty,
But as a divine metaphysical principle that governed the universe.
Logos was,
In a sense,
The principle of equilibrium.
This brings us to another of Heraclitus' doctrines,
The union of opposites.
This,
Along with his doctrine of flux,
Form the bedrock of his philosophy.
The union of opposites states that qualities exist in pairs,
And so opposite things form part of a unity.
That is to say,
Opposite things are not mutually exclusive,
But rather depend on each other or coexist.
For example,
Heraclitus says somewhere that the road up is the road down.
To one person,
Say the person travelling along the road,
They are moving upwards.
However,
To another,
Say someone walking in the opposite direction,
That same person appears to be walking down the road.
It's all a matter of perspective.
But even more than this,
To travel up the road makes no sense apart from its opposite.
Why?
Because if you were always moving upwards,
You would have no frame of reference from which to contrast it with.
It would just be movement,
Not upwards movement.
Perhaps this is why when confronted with a difficult situation,
We often think irrationally.
Because we are the ones going through it,
We are unable to see the direction we are heading in.
We need distance,
Literally and figuratively speaking.
This is why consulting others is often a good idea,
They offer a different perspective.
But I digress.
Because of his insistence on the union of opposites,
Plato and Aristotle claim that Heraclitus' philosophy violates the law of non-contradiction,
But this is false.
Heraclitus is not saying that A equals B,
Which would mean that opposite things are in fact identical to each other.
Rather,
He is saying that because elements merge into their opposites,
They are different moments in an interconnected process,
The process of flux.
So,
In summary,
The differences between these positions are as follows.
On the one hand,
We have Eliatic being,
With predicates such as the one,
It's an indivisible unity,
It represents permanence and it's unchanging and imperishable,
And it's a static essence.
On the other hand,
We have Heraclitan becoming,
Which represents the many,
It's a multiplicity,
Though technically the multiplicity is related by way of a unity,
It's flux,
It's changing and always in strife,
And it's a dynamic process.
Much more could be said of Heraclitus and Parmenides,
But for our purposes here we can conclude this portion of the lecture.
So,
Context aside,
Let us now move on to Plato's theory of forms.
It was in response to this debate that Plato formulated his theory of forms,
For which he is perhaps best known.
According to this theory,
The world we inhabit is not the real world but merely a false world of appearances.
The true world,
On the other hand,
Is a transcendent metaphysical realm wholly distinct from the material world.
This is where true being resides.
We can see then how Plato incorporates elements from both Parmenides and Heraclitus philosophies into his own.
On the one hand,
He accepts Heraclitus' depiction of the physical world as consisting essentially of change.
However,
He claims that if we accept Heraclitus' doctrine of flux,
The prospect of acquiring knowledge is rendered impossible.
Knowledge requires certainty,
But certainty presupposes a fixed identity which cannot exist in a world of continuous change,
Where nothing remains the same over time.
Thus,
On the other hand,
He agrees with Parmenides that there is a realm of true being that underlies this realm.
In this way,
His theory of forms might be seen as a synthesis of the two worldviews.
In contrast to Parmenides,
However,
Plato doesn't believe the world of appearances to be unreal.
For him,
Reality is becoming,
And becoming is a middle ground between being and non-being.
This means that reality is merely less real than the realm of being.
You will see why this is so once I've explained what Plato means by being and how it relates to the real world.
When Plato refers to being,
He uses the term forms.
But what actually are the forms?
In brief,
They are ideas.
Perfect,
Unchanging,
And eternal.
So,
Plato's conception of being is not that dissimilar to Parmenides' as we saw earlier.
However,
While Parmenides makes an absolute distinction between being,
Or truth,
And physical things,
Which he calls non-being,
For Plato the separation is not quite so radical.
For Plato,
Being,
Or the forms,
Are that by which things are what they are.
They are,
In other words,
The very essence of things.
It's by virtue of the forms that we can recognise the various objects of our experience,
Which Plato calls particulars.
For example,
One must have knowledge of the form of the chair,
Its chairness so to speak,
Its basic ontological structure,
To recognise the many different chairs in existence.
Thus,
Every particular has a corresponding form or set of forms by virtue of which it is what it is.
The forms exist in a hierarchy consisting of lower and higher level forms.
The lower level forms are those of phenomena,
Such as a horse or a chair,
And they derive their existence from the higher level forms which they participate in,
Hence their lower position in the hierarchy.
The higher level forms,
By contrast,
Are ideals,
Such as beauty,
Love,
And justice.
They are more general than the forms of phenomena,
Meaning more objects participate in them,
And hence they are more abstract too.
According to Plato,
The form of the good is the highest form of all,
And so it resides at the apex of the hierarchy.
The form of the good represents complete perfection,
And because every form is a idea,
They each participate in the form of the good.
So,
All particulars participate in the forms,
And all forms participate in the good,
Since each form is perfect.
In that sense,
You could call the form of the good the form of all forms.
A form is only a form by virtue of its perfection,
That is its primary characteristic,
And if something is perfect,
Its identity is unchanging.
The form of the good,
Therefore,
Makes knowledge and truth possible through its unchangingness.
So,
Because the forms are perfect,
They are the original models.
Unlike the particulars,
Whose existence is merely contingent,
That is,
They depend on the forms for their existence,
The forms,
Therefore,
Exist necessarily.
The particulars are dependent on the forms in two ways.
One,
Ontologically,
Because their identity is constituted by them,
And two,
Epistemically,
Because we could not recognise them without reference to their corresponding form.
Regarding the ontological dependency,
Particulars gain their identity from the forms,
As I've said,
By mimicking or participating in them.
It's not exactly clear what Plato means by this term,
But it doesn't matter.
The point is,
The particulars are reliant on the forms for their being,
Since these are the original models.
However,
No object or entity is ever a perfect representation of its corresponding form.
Whether apparent or not,
It will always have some form of defect.
As such,
They are merely imperfect copies of the forms,
Which they presuppose as their raison d'etre,
The cause of their being.
Yet,
This doesn't make them unreal,
But merely less real than forms.
A particular is said to be more real depending on the degree to which it participates in a form.
For example,
Suppose I draw a circle.
It is not perfectly straight,
But we can nevertheless recognise that it is in fact a circle.
We do this,
According to Plato,
By referring to the form of the circle,
Which functions as a kind of blueprint or original model.
As long as the circle is sufficiently similar to its form,
It is still a circle.
As for the epistemic dependency,
The forms allow us to recognise the many different objects of our experience.
Because they are perfect and unchanging,
They function as objective truth criteria which ground our possibility of knowledge.
They are,
In other words,
Unchanging truths.
We can see then how Plato's metaphysics is inseparable from his epistemology.
Knowledge would not be possible without the presupposition of the eternal forms.
So,
Plato's theory of forms is both a condition of the possibility of knowledge and a solution to the problem of identity and change.
Now that we have examined Plato's theory of forms,
We are in a better position to understand his doctrine of anamnesis.
For,
In solving the problem of identity and change,
Plato's theory created a new problem.
We saw how Plato introduces a distinction between the false world of appearances and the real world of being.
However,
We have not seen how this metaphysical dualism has negative consequences for his epistemology.
Since the forms are in a transcendent metaphysical realm beyond our comprehension,
How is it that we can come to know them?
Particular things might participate in the forms,
But how can we recognise them without reference to the forms in the first place?
One must know what,
For instance,
Are horses to recognise subsequent horses in existence.
The possibility of knowledge in general,
Therefore,
Presupposes knowledge of the forms,
But the forms are not of this world.
So,
Plato has created a chasm or gulf between the two worlds which needs bridging.
This problem led him to develop his doctrine of anamnesis.
This doctrine goes by many names – anamnesis,
Remembrance,
Recollection,
Reminiscence – but essentially,
It is the recollection of a supposed previous experience.
Plato believes we have an immortal soul with knowledge of the forms,
Ideas,
Etched into it from its previous wanderings in the afterlife.
But when our soul is reincarnated in the physical world,
We identify with our senses again and lose touch with this innate knowledge.
However,
Through anamnesis,
The mind is able to recollect these forgotten ideas and use them to discern objects.
Once recollected,
We can use the forms as truth criteria to discriminate against entities and determine whether they are legitimate or false copies,
Which Plato calls simulacra.
At this point,
We're starting to get into the territory of Plato's dialectic,
But I will discuss this at some other time.
For now,
Let's examine the consequence of Plato's theory of anamnesis.
If,
As Plato claims,
One is merely recollecting forgotten knowledge,
Then whatever you know,
You know all along.
Therefore,
Strictly speaking,
There is no genuine learning,
There is only remembering.
When you recognise a chair as a chair,
You are simply recalling what a chair is,
Which your soul already knew.
This makes Plato a rationalist since he believes we have innate knowledge within us.
This is very different to the empirical method we are familiar with,
The method employed by science,
Which derives its knowledge from direct experience and sensory perception.
The empirical method has become so important in our western culture that we seldom question its authority.
However,
Other cultures,
Such as the ancient Greeks,
Had very different ways of understanding knowledge.
And this brings us to the final part of this lecture,
Where we will discuss Plato's allegory of the cave.
In order to help explain some of his ideas,
Plato created a metaphorical story.
He asks us to imagine some slaves chained up inside a cave,
Facing a wall.
They have been there since birth and have never seen the outside world.
Somewhere behind them,
The light from a fire is shining onto the wall ahead of them.
People occasionally walk by the fire carrying objects,
Whose shadows can be seen on the illuminated wall.
The slaves,
Unable to see the objects behind them,
Mistake the shadows for the objects themselves.
Eventually,
One of the slaves is freed and goes outside to the real world.
He realises that the shadows are mere reflections of objects,
Which are the true cause of their being.
At first,
He finds the light blinding and struggles to adapt,
But with time,
He adjusts.
Eventually,
He returns to the cave in which he was once enslaved,
And,
Encountering the other slaves,
Tries to enlighten them about the outside world.
The slaves,
However,
Believing the man blind from the light,
Refuse to listen and even violently oppose him.
They cannot accept what the freed man is telling them,
For the shadows are all they have ever known.
There are many different ways of interpreting Plato's allegory,
But the most common reading is that it is a metaphor for the struggles of a philosopher trying to educate the masses.
The slave entering the outside world is clearly analogous to the philosopher who,
After entering the so-called real world,
Contemplates the forms for the first time.
Plato tends to use light to represent truth,
So it makes sense that the once ignorant man would,
Upon realising his beliefs were false,
Find the light of truth blinding and disorienting initially.
His return to the cave and subsequent mockery might represent the philosopher's humiliation from the public,
Who,
In their ignorance,
Refuse to accept the truth of being.
The slave's violent refusal to the truth shows how people would rather remain ignorant and comfortable than know the truth,
But in so doing have their peace turned upside down.
The death of Socrates is proof of this.
Socrates was executed for his ideas,
As was Galileo more than a thousand years later.
It seems the ignorance of man knows no bounds.
And with that,
We've reached the conclusion of this lecture.
I hope you've enjoyed this introduction to Plato.
I have a lot of interesting content planned,
Including a video series on Nietzsche,
Another on Kant's magnum opus The Critique of the Eurydice,
And many more,
So stay tuned and thanks for listening.
