Platonic forms

For this blog post, I’m going to look a little at philosophical essentialism and Plato’s Theory of Forms.

Essentialism in philosophy is an attempt to understand what makes a thing a particular kind of thing; it is the idea that objects have properties that are essential to them, without which those objects would be something else.

“Substance” (in ancient Greek, ousia) is the term that philosophers around Plato’s era used to try to describe it, and it is still used in essentialism. Linguist and philosopher George Lakoff says that all things have a substance that “make the thing what it is, and without which it would be not that kind of thing.” (pulled from the Wikipedia entry on Essentialism). Essentialism is basically a way to try to find out what the core of something is, which could have any number of modifiers – to make a linguistic analogy, determining what is the noun versus the adjectives.

Ousia, incidentally, has a more basic meaning of “sum.” So, when a translator uses terms like “an account of the essential nature of each thing” (such as in Republic, 534b), a more direct translation would be “the account of the sum of each thing.” It may be nothing more than a linguistic quirk, but it might also reveal Plato’s attachment to the philosophy of Pythagoras, who was credited with discoveries in mathematics and science and who was also associated with numerology.

Plato didn’t claim credit for the Theory of Forms. In Sophist, his unnamed philosopher talks about Xenophanes and others before him (“our Eleatic tribe”) as believers in the idea that “’all things’ are just one” (242c-e). And his dialogue Parmenides involves a (probably fictional) discussion between the eponymous old philosopher of that Eleatic* school and a young Socrates about flaws in the Theory of Forms.

In Republic, Plato goes into some depth on the Theory of Forms. I already discussed the analogies or allegories in Books 6 and 7 of the sun, the divided line, and the cave, in which Plato describes the realm of ideas as the underlying reality of the world, and the physical world as only a reflection or shadow of that.

In Book 10, Plato takes this further by using the concrete example of the bed. While a painter produces an image of a bed, and a carpenter can produce a particular example of a bed, only a god could create the Form of Bed or real Bed-in-Itself, of which only one could exist (Republic, 596d-597d). These three types of artisans and their works also correspond to the shadows, reflections, and truth Plato describes in the analogy of the cave. And the Forms, being the sources of the shadows and reflections of things in the physical world, whether they be beds or beauty, are eternal and immutable.

While reading Plato, I did wonder to what extent he bought into essentialism as philosophers understand it, versus seeing the Forms as a rudimentary taxonomy system (such as how to distinguish a bed from a chair, bench, sofa, or stool) or as a way to describe abstract ideals or something along those lines. Perhaps the best insight into whether Plato thought of the actual existence of the Forms comes from Sophist, in which his unnamed visiting philosopher talks about that which is:

“It’s enough if they admit that even a small part of that which is doesn’t have a body. They need to say something about what’s common to both it and the things that do have body, which they focus on when they say that they both are… I’m saying that a thing really is if it has any capacity at all, either by nature to do something to something else or to have even the smallest thing done to it by even the most trivial thing, even if it only happens once. I’ll take it as a definition that those which are amount to nothing other than capacity.” (Sophist, 247c-e, trans. Nicholas P White)

In this sense of having an impact on the world, then, Plato seems to consider that the Forms have an independent reality. And in thinking of the Forms as having such an independent reality to them, Plato seems to intend the Theory of Forms as going beyond creating a taxonomy or some abstract ideals. And it may, perhaps, be a useful way to sometimes think about intangibles and ideas, that their affect on the world renders them real.

It’s also worth noting that Plato didn’t get hung up on terminology. He used multiple words that now get translated as “Form,” for example. Then in his dialogue Cratylus Plato takes a whirlwind tour through contemporary etymology before agreeing with Cratylus’ opponent Hermogenes that words don’t have an intrinsic relationship with the things or ideas they describe (“No name belongs to a particular thing by nature.” Cratylus, 384d, trans. CDC Reeve). Which also happens to dovetail with his Theory of Forms, in that words are likenesses of what they describe, and not the things or ideas themselves (Cratylus, 438d-439b).

The Theory of Forms is basically an attempt to describe the nature of reality. It has some internal flaws, which Plato explores in Parmenides (I would only recommend reading it if you’re really into the ins and outs of the Theory of Forms). And like any premodern natural philosophy, it suffers from the lack of understanding of chemistry and physics gained after the development of the scientific method.

In philosophy, there are a lot of critics of essentialism, including well-known writers such as Kirkegaard, Marx, and Sartre. And for those who don’t like essentialism, Plato often takes the blame for coming up with it. In my surfing around the net to see whether there is much contemporary discussion on it (spoiler: there isn’t), I did come across an essay by one Laurie Wastell, “Essentialism: the Logical Fallacy Plaguing Us Since Plato,” which has a particularly negative take on Plato and the Theory of Forms.

Wastell draws heavily on Karl Popper’s book, The Open Society and Its Enemies. I’ve not read it yet, so it is hard to tell what is Wastell and what is Popper, but Wastell writes, “This is a philosophical method best characterised as the worship of language. An empty scholasticism, essentialist thought has stifled our reason since antiquity due to its overwhelming intellectual obsession with language itself, thereby failing to recognise that language is simply a tool we use to represent reality, nothing more.”

Having read a few of Plato’s works, this strikes me as a highly inaccurate way of describing Plato’s philosophy, especially since Cratylus ultimately rejects the idea that words in themselves have anything to offer when it comes to the study of the Forms. Wastell’s association of essentialism with tribalism and with contemporary lines of thinking (in Wastell’s case, Critical Race Theory) suggests a confusion between philosophical essentialism and psychological essentialism.

In my (admittedly brief) perusal of what psychological essentialism is, it appears to be something important to developmental psychology. According to the article on essentialism at Psychology Wiki, psychological essentialism refers “not to an actual claim about the world but a claim about a way of representing entities in cognitions.”

One researcher, the article states, “outlined many domains in which children and adults construe classes of entities, particularly biological entities, in essentialist terms—i.e., as if they had unobservable underlying essences which can be used to predict unobservable surface characteristics.”

The possibly innate human tendency to think in essentialist terms can, as the article notes, be misapplied. “Prejudiced individuals have been found to endorse exceptionally essential ways of thinking, suggesting that essentialism may perpetuate exclusion among social groups…. This may be due to an over-extension of an essential-biological mode of thinking stemming from cognitive development.” In other words, bigots essentialize not humans generally, but different groups of humans; they mistake adjectives for nouns.

To circle back to Wastell, it seems silly to blame Plato for a mode of thinking that may be innate to our species, particularly when the criticism is based off an incorrect or incomplete reading of Plato. It would be fair to say that Platonism’s reliance on rationalism over empiricism may have had a negative impact on the development of scientific thinking, though. But in a stroke of irony, Platonism rears its head in Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres when the astronomer put the sun at the centre of the universe. Amid a discussion of the mathematical proof of a heliocentric universe, Copernicus wrote, “At rest, however, in the middle of everything is the sun. For in this most beautiful temple, who would place this lamp in another or better position than that from which it can light up the whole thing at the same time? For, the sun is not inappropriately called by some people the lantern of the universe, its mind by others, and its ruler by still others.” (De Revolutionibus, chapter 10, link). In this weird way, Platonist rationalism was used to bolster empirical observations and mathematical calculations.

This rounds out my current ruminations on Plato, the Theory of Forms, and essentialism. Next up will be Plato on the ideal state and the question of what justice is.

It’s been a while since I’ve written my last blog post on Plato’s Republic, but I’ve continued reading, not merely the Republic but several other dialogues that might have some bearing on some of the ideas in Republic that I found interesting. This has included Symposium, Hippias Major, Ion, Parmenides, Cratylus, and Sophist. For Republic, I’m sticking with the Penguin translation by Desmond Lee; for the others, I went to my distinctly less portable Plato: Complete Works.

For this post, I’ll stick mainly to Republic, which considers the question of what justice/righteousness is (same word in ancient Greek, dikaiosyne), and whether the just are happier than the unjust (spoiler: they are). He starts with trying to find justice in the individual, and when that proves difficult, he then takes another tack by trying to discover its nature in the state (369a). To a Greek of his era, that would be the polis or city-state, and Plato creates a thought experiment of what such a state would look like if it were built around the concept of justice.

Education is a subject Plato tackles in Republic, and a large section of the work is dedicated to outlining the education of a philosopher ruler, someone who truly understands the Forms, particularly the Good and Justice. The end goal is to produce rulers who care more about justice and good government than their own power and wealth: “The indispensable condition is that political power should be in the hands of one or more true philosophers. They would despise all present honours as mean and worthless, and care most for doing right and any rewards it may bring; and they would regard justice as being of paramount importance, and, throughout their reorganization of society, serve and forward it.” (540d-e)

To that end, Plato presents a rough curriculum to foster the progression of abstract thinking. That curriculum starts with arithmetic and moves from there to geometry (plane, then solid) to astronomy to music and finally to philosophy. Intertwined with mental training is the physical training required for soldiers; in Plato’s outline of the ideal state, rulers are chosen from the protector or guardian class.

Plato’s primary teaching method involves “dialectic,” a back-and-forth discussion or rational argument – what we generally call now the Socratic method (and not to be confused with “Hegelian dialectic”). “So when one tries to get at what each thing is in itself by the exercise in dialectic, relying on reason without any aid from the senses, and refusing to give up until one has grasped by pure thought what the good is in itself, one is at the summit of the intellectual realm, as the man who looked at the sun was of the visual realm.” (532a-b).

Dialectic is slightly later in Republic described as the method which “sets out systematically to determine what each thing essentially is in itself.” (trans. Lee; the Paul Shorey translation on Perseus translates this as “attempts systematically and in all cases to determine what each thing really is.”). Basically, dialectic is the method by which you pare away the things that are extraneous to a particular thing – or to put it another way, to determine what all the modifiers are to the noun.

It’s important to note that Plato was very much a rationalist who disdained empiricism – it is through reason alone, not study of the physical world, that one gets closer to the truth. To refer to a quote I used in my last blog on Plato, “If anyone tries to learn anything about the world of sense… I don’t reckon that he really learns – there is no knowledge to be had of such things.” (529b-c).

To Plato, education is really a life-long exercise. Some subjects are best started in childhood, such as arithmetic. Philosophy, however, is something he would reserve only for mature minds; Plato considered dialectic a powerful and potentially destructive intellectual tool. “It fills people with indiscipline,” he wrote (537e).

Building on that, Plato’s Socrates lays out how young men trained in dialectic will just argue with anyone about anything. “So when they’ve proved a lot of people wrong and been proved often wrong themselves, they soon slip into the belief that nothing they believed before was true; with the result that they discredit themselves and the whole business of philosophy in the eyes of the world.”

“But someone who’s a bit older,” he continues, “will refuse to have anything to do with this sort of idiocy; he won’t copy those who contradict just for the fun of the thing, but will be more likely to follow the lead of someone whose arguments are aimed at finding the truth.” (539b-d).

The study of philosophy would be taken up around age thirty-five, and those mature students would study for fifteen years before they would be ready to rule. “And when they are fifty, those who have come through all our practical and intellectual tests with distinction must be brought to their final trial, and made to lift their mind’s eye to look at the source of all light, and see the good itself, which they can take as a pattern for ordering their own life as well as that of society and the individual. For the rest of their lives they will spend the bulk of their time in philosophy, but when the time comes they will, in rotation, turn to the weary business of politics and, for the sake of society, do their duty as Rulers, not for the honour they get by it but as a matter of necessity.” (540a-b).

Plato’s conception of the idea state built around justice is a rather meritocratic one, with rulership going to whoever is best educated and best suited to the task. His meritocracy goes to the point that his Socrates states something that would have been shocking to Greeks of his time, that women be just as capable as rulers: “All I have said about men applies equally to women, if they have the requisite natural capacities.” (539c). And because rulers are drawn from the soldier or guardian class, that means exercise and military training – in the nude, as was the Greek way at the time.

One has to wonder whether those statements about women were intended to shock, to show that the ideal state couldn’t really exist, or maybe to illustrate that a society in single-minded pursuit of justice would subordinate all other considerations to that goal. I’ll write more about the ideal state later. My next stop, though, will be on philosophical essentialism in Plato.

Plato is probably the greatest foundational figure in the history of Western philosophy. As it happens, some of his work, and the work of some of his followers (including those who lived hundreds of years after him), has been an enduring source of my unconscious meditations while creating artwork.

The work of Plato’s that has been foremost in my (un)consciousness is The Republic (in no small part because it’s the one that I’ve fully read; of others, I’ve only gotten around to bits and pieces, a long time ago). Plato’s Republic is largely concerned with justice, in terms of how one might construct a just society or train just rulers. It is within that context that he writes about “forms” – that is to say, abstract ideas – the highest of which is the Good, which might be better, if more clumsily, rendered as the Good-in-itself.

The heart of Plato’s framework in talking about abstract forms, which you could also say is about the real versus the ideal (or, perhaps more accurately, his construct of reality), is found in Books 6 and 7 of The Republic (507a-521b) through three metaphors: the sun, the divided line, and the cave.

In the analogy of the sun, Plato compares the Good in the intelligible world (the abstract realm of ideas or forms) with the sun in the physical world. According to Plato, as the sun is the source of light and growth, makes objects visible, and gives the power of seeing to the eye, the Good is the source of reality and truth, makes objects of thought (forms) intelligible, and gives the power of knowing to the mind.

In the analogy of the divided line, Plato arranges a hierarchy of reality, of moving toward increasing levels of reality and truth. He writes of taking a line, dividing it into two unequal parts, and then dividing those parts unequally in the same proportions. On the one hand, the bottom two segments correspond to the physical world (shadows and images, then physical objects), and the top two to the intelligible realm (geometry and numbers, then finally pure ideas). On the other hand, the bottom two segments also correspond to opinion (illusion, then belief), and the upper two to knowledge (mathematical reasoning, then real understanding of the intelligible).

The allegory of the cave is the most complicated and describes the process of gaining enlightenment. In this, people start life as if chained into place in a darkened cave, against the wall of which shadows are projected; objects are paraded along the area behind those chained, with a large fire providing the light. Once a person manages to break free, they can see the objects themselves, and can progress out of the cave into sunlight. Once out of the cave, a person would initially be blinded by the bright sunlight, but their eyes would adjust to the light eventually; in much the same way, the seeker of truth and knowledge is unable to initially discern ideas and the Good when they first break free of the thinking only about the material world.

“The realm perceived by sight corresponds to the prison, and the light and the fire in the prison to the power of the sun. And you won’t go wrong if you connect the sight of the objects there with the upward progress of the mind into the intelligible region… [T]he final thing to be perceived in the intelligible region, and perceived only with difficulty, is the form of the good; once seen, it is inferred to be responsible for whatever is right and valuable in anything, producing in the visible region light and the source of light, and being in the intelligible region itself controlling source of truth and intelligence.” (517b-c).

What Plato makes clear through these three metaphors is that what he considered to be real was not the physical world, but the realm of ideas. In his later discussion about astronomy as a subject of study, he has Socrates say, “I can’t believe that the mind is made to look upwards except by studying the real and invisible. If anyone tries to learn anything about the world of sense… I don’t reckon that he really learns – there is no knowledge to be had of such things.” (529b-c; italics are the translator’s). To Plato, anything worth knowing lay not in the physical world, but the intellectual world.

While the idea of a level of reality laying beyond what can be seen may not seem particularly groundbreaking now, this was pretty cutting-edge thought in Plato’s time. Plato writes of this invisible reality as being rational and accessible through reason – a sharp contrast to the religious view at the time of a world shaped by the whims of gods who needed to be placated but whose desires and motives would be opaque to mortals. Religion doesn’t make much of an appearance in The Republic, and the gods themselves not at all. To his fellow Greeks, who prized rationality, Plato’s work was potent stuff, enough so that even while knowledge of Plato disappeared in the West, he was still studied in the Eastern Roman Empire down to the end in 1453, at which time Greek scholars emigrated to Italy and helped fuel the revival of Platonism in the Renaissance.

To Plato, it was also the duty of the seeker of knowledge – that is, the philosopher – to go back into the cave and to help release others and guide them up to the light of knowledge. He also describes the process of descending back into the cave – that is, returning to everyday life from a period of contemplation of the abstract – as initially disorienting, being blind while one’s eyes readjust to the darkness: “But anyone with any sense… will remember that the eyes may be unsighted in both ways, by a transition either to from light to darkness or from darkness to light, and will recognize that the same thing applies to the mind.” (518a).

My ego is by no means so great that I would consider myself a philosopher, but the description of disorientation when shifting from intellectual activity to engaging in everyday life does have a certain ring of truth to it (at least, it does for me).

For the most part, what has been quietly rattling around in the back of my mind has been the idea of Beauty (or Beauty-in-itself, the form or abstract ideal of Beauty) and how as an artist I might try to connect with this. That meditation has included questions about what beauty is, how one might render it in a visual art, and how that rendering might relate back to a striving for an enduring, eternal ideal of beauty.

All this has increasingly affected my processing of photographs, to create something that is not just a unique vision, but one that encompasses a striking and distinct aesthetic.