Plato’s Forms

Plato’s theory of the forms is unconvincing. Discuss (40)

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Plato’s theory of the forms is developed in several different places.  Most famously, Plato describes the world of the forms and how it relates to the world of human experience through his Allegory of the Cave, found in Book VII of The Republic.  Here, Plato describes how human beings are like prisoners, trapped by the cave of sense-experience and how it is possible to escape – through reason – coming to the realization that Ultimate Reality is metaphysical in the world of the “forms.”  Elsewhere, Plato used the analogies of the Sun and the Divided Line to explain his theory differently, but nowhere did Plato provide any systematic account of or argument for the theory.  It seems that for Plato, a form is the essence of something, what makes it what it is.  It is what enables us to recognize what something we encounter is and what makes it possible to judge whether it is a good (or bad) example of its type.  The word “form” is also used to refer to the model which a mason used to ensure all his carvings were the same; it is the blueprint, the type, the design.  Unlike things that we encounter through our senses, the form is unchanging, perfect, complete and it is this which makes it more “real” than physical things in the ever-changing partial and imperfect world of the senses.  “The Platonic idealist,” said George Santayana, “is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.”  However, Plato is not clear how many forms exist – is there a form of everything or only a few or even one ultimate form?  Further, Plato fails to argue for his position, preferring to describe a worldview using allegories and analogies.  Julia Annas observed that

“Plato not only has no word for “theory”; he nowhere in his dialogues has an extended discussion of Forms in which he pulls together the different lines of thought about them and tries to assess the needs they meet and whether they succeed in meeting them” An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, p217 

While it has been enormously influential and while it does have intuitive appeal, Plato’s theory of the forms is unconvincing because of this lack of coherent argument. 

Further, nothing much seems to separate Plato’s theory of the forms from speculation.  As Aristotle pointed out in Metaphysics Book 1,

“… If, then, a man has the theory without the experience, and recognizes the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he will often fail” 

Plato’s focus on reason as the only source of wisdom – and his belief that sense-experience could actually mislead people – means that his theory is not supported by any observable evidence.  There is no way to see, hear, smell, taste or touch the forms and, while Plato would suggest that this is just the point, what then distinguishes Plato’s theory from baseless speculation?  Take flat-earth theory or young earth creationism.  It is, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, impossible to disprove the idea that the universe was created with all the appearance of age 5 minutes ago… or indeed something over 6000 years ago in a period of 6 days.  While this would raise serious questions over His goodness, a mischievous creator could well have planted “fossils” in rock strata and rigged the moon-landings to deceive credulous scientists and identify those few with unshakable blind faith in what goes against the evidence to elevate to their eternal reward.   In the same way – in the absence of the sort of freak-chance-escape Plato describes in his allegory – it is impossible to disprove Plato’s proposal that we exist in a shadowy prison of the senses and that ultimate reality exists beyond in some forever-unattainable world of the forms.  Plato even acknowledges how the revelation of such news would be received by those still in the cave. In the absence of supporting evidence – and when Plato’s theory seems to call for an active suspension of disbelief – how is it more credible than flat-earth theory or young earth creationism?  In this way as well, Plato’s theory of the forms is unconvincing. 

Aristotle also criticized Plato for being inconsistent in his speculations; must there me a form of the yellow pencil with blunt lead and the form of my half-drunk cup of tea?  Why shouldn’t there be a form of evil, sin etc?  Also, what prevents there being an infinite regress of forms?  Plato himself acknowledged this as a problem for his theory in the dialogue Parmenides – in what Bertrand Russell in his “History of Western Philosophy” described as “one of the most remarkable cases in history of self-criticism”.  Here,Plato seems to suggest that where things display a particular quality, such as greatness, there must be a form through which we perceive it to have this quality, a form of greatness through which to appreciate its greatness. The Form of greatness must be unchangeably perfect, supremely great as an example of greatness, but if the form of greatness is itself great, and thereby an example of greatness, there must be a separate form through which we perceive the greatness of the form of greatness… and another form through which we perceive the greatness of the form of the form of greatness and so on to infinity.  A similar problem was highlighted by Pelletier and Zalta in their 2003 article “How to Say Goodbye to the Third Man.”  They use the example of ‘Loveliness’: If all things lovely become such and acquire their loveliness by virtue of partaking in the respective Form of Loveliness, then they must themselves be ‘like’ that Form. Following from the “symmetry of likeness” it can be said that the Form must, then, be ‘like’ the objects which partake in it. If this is true, the Form of Loveliness and the lovely objects must resemble one another by virtue of a further Form, of which they both partake. This, again, continues ad infinitum, creating Forms interminably to explain the likeness of the Form to its instantiations.  Plato had no satisfactory answer to these problems, as Aristotle made clear in the Metaphysics, using the example of the third man.  In this way Plato’s theory of the forms is philosophically unconvincing. 

Nevertheless, George P Simmonds argues that Plato’s theory of the forms could survive Aristotle’s criticisms.  He points out that

“the Third Man Argument relies too heavily on assumptions generated by a swift and unsophisticated interpretation of Plato’s thinking.”

And goes on to point out that far from being a sign that Plato was abandoning his theory of the forms, Plato’s inclusion of this line of criticism in Parmenides points to Plato’s confidence in his theory and in his students’ ability to see the weakness of this line of criticism. In particular, Simmonds takes issue with Aristotle’s assumption that Plato’s argument with respect of particular things also applies to the forms. Just because the greatness of things in the world necessitates the existence of a form of greatness through which we perceive that greatness, does not mean that the same applies in the world of the forms. Having said that, Simmonds’ defence of Plato fails to justify Plato in being inconsistent in his treatment of the forms or for failing to provide a systematic defence of his own work, so it goes only so far in making Plato’s theory more convincing.  

In conclusion, Plato’s theory of the forms is unconvincing because Plato fails to give a clear, consistent account of his theory.  While this conclusion it may be a little unfair to Plato, given that he lived nearly 2500 years ago and given the fragmentary nature of our records of his work, his theory is frequently presented as a philosophical argument today, and in this context it must be evaluated as such. Further, just because Plato’s theory of the forms is unconvincing does not mean it is not worthy of serious study and development into what may be far more convincing theories.  Indeed, Plato’s belief that ultimate reality is metaphysical is gaining popularity today through theories like the holographic universe and the simulated universe. 

Bibliography

“Plato’s theory of the forms is unconvincing!” Discuss. (40)

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For Plato, ultimate reality is metaphysical and exists in the “world of the forms” and that things in this world are merely shadows of the forms.  Most famously, Plato discussed his theory of forms through his Allegory of the Cave in Book VII of the Republic.  Here Plato suggests that the forms are accessible through reason and through the work of those who have managed to escape the “cave” of sense-experience to appreciate the ultimate reality beyond.  While Plato’s central point about ultimate reality being metaphysical is convincing, his lack of any real argument for the forms and the apparent inconsistency of his position on them make Plato’s so-called “theory” of the forms unconvincing. 

Plato is unclear about precisely which forms exist metaphysically.  As Julia Annas observes, “Plato never offers an argument for Forms that would establish them as entities suitable for a theory”[1] Further, Plato discusses the forms is presented in several different dialogues, dating from different times in his long philosophical career.  In Book X of the Republic, Plato implies that there are separate forms for tables, beds etc.  Socrates says to Glaucon: “Whenever a number of individuals have a common name we assume them to also have a corresponding idea or form.  Do you understand me? [I do]  Let us take any common instance; there are beds and tables in the world – plenty of them – are there not? [Yes] But there are only two ideas or forms of them – one of the idea of the bed, the other of a table.”[2] Meanwhile, in Book VI of the Republic, through his Allegory of the Sun, Plato implies that only one form ultimately exists – the Form of the Good – and that our impression that a diversity of things exist is a belief rather than actual knowledge, a result of our ideas being clouded by sense-experiences and so not being clear or distinct.  Here, as Julia Annas explains, “Plato contrasted Forms, which are objects of knowledge, with particular instances of Forms (things that ‘partake in’ Forms), which are objects of belief…” [3] The lack of any explicit argument for the forms and the inconsistency of Plato’s position make Plato’s theory of the forms unconvincing. 

In addition, it is not possible to support Plato’s theory of the forms, however it is presented, through either evidence or argument.  Nothing we can observe supports the existence of “forms” whether separately of beds and tables or indeed of the good.  Plato’s position – and that of modern Platonists who accept his theory of the forms – depends on reason alone.  Plato – through the character of Socrates – argues that the existence of the forms is known a priori, before and even without experience, because their necessary existence is contained within our understanding of all other things.  When we experience a chair, we understand what it is and how to use it because we have an idea of a chair which does not depend on having experienced that or any chair.  This explains why we can see a chair that is different from every other chair we have seen and still understand that it is a chair and how to use it.  We can even make judgments of whether it is a good chair or not and know how to design and make a different sort of chair.  “The maker… makes a bed or makes a table for our use, in accordance with the idea…”[4] Yet what is the difference between this sort of rational argument for ultimate reality in the world of the forms and speculation?  What could count against Plato’s argument for the forms if all experience is discounted?  Today, there is evidence to support Plato’s claim that ultimate reality is metaphysical.  Cosmology shows that neither time nor space are absolutes and Quantum Physics that matter consists only in potentialities.  The claim that “man is the measure of all things” and that the way our five human senses perceive reality is the way it really is, is incredible.  Further, there are alternative evidence-based, scientific explanations for our ability to understand, judge and create variations on what we perceive through the senses which do not rely on postulating a supernatural world of the forms.  For example, Noam Chomsky argues that the human brain is “hard wired” for language and that the forms exist in the structures of the brain and the parameters of human language rather than in some metaphysical world.  When there is no evidence to support the metaphysical existence of the forms and when such convincing scientific explanations are available, the claim that we know the forms a priori cannot be maintained.  Plato’s theory of the forms is not convincing, because it is asserted and assumed rather than systematically and consistently argued for. 

On the other hand, as Julia Annas observes, “Books on Plato often refer to Plato’s “Theory of Forms”, but this has to be handled with caution.  Plato not only has no word for “theory”[5] Perhaps Plato never intended to present the forms as a “theory” and it is consequently unfair to evaluate his work as such.  Further, Plato’s theory of the forms has been enormously influential through history and continues to capture the public imagination through films as varied as The Matrix and Interstellar.  However, neither of these counterclaims serve to make Plato’s forms convincing.  Even if Plato never intended to present a coherent theory, his work has widely been interpreted as doing this and other scholars have more than made up for Plato’s lack of argument. For just one example, Descartes developed Plato’s claim that ultimate reality is metaphysical, supporting this with his famous cogito argument in his “Meditations on First Philosophy”.  Descartes pointed out that the five senses are limited and often present flawed data; the only think that I can know with certainty is that I exist as a thinking being and from this I can establish the certain metaphysical existence of “clear and distinct ideas” very much like Plato’s forms.  However, Descartes’ argument has been widely criticised.  While he establishes that he exists as a thinking being, his arguments for the existence of other clear and distinct ideas such as God is widely deemed to have failed.  Kant said that Descartes so-called Ontological Argument for God was “so much labour and effort lost”[6]  Because of this, Descartes fails to offer Plato’s world-view much support.  In addition, that Plato’s theory has been influential and remains popular suggests nothing about whether it is convincing or not on a philosophical level.  A lot of unconvincing theories are popular and influence society… think carrots helping you see in the dark, spinach making you strong and magic charms getting rid of warts.  None of these “old wives tales” have any scientific basis, and yet many people still believe them and behave accordingly.  That Plato’s theory is influential is a poor reason to find it convincing, on a philosophical level.  

In conclusion, Plato’s theory of the forms is unconvincing.  While his basic point about ultimate reality being metaphysical might well be true and remains influential and popular, he fails to argue for the existence of a “world of the forms” or even to present a coherent picture of the same.

[40 minutes]

Bibliography

  • Class Notes
  • Crash Course video on Descartes
  • Julia Annas “An Introduction to Plato’s Republic” Chapters 9 & 10
  • Plato “The Republic”

[1]  An Introduction to Plato’s Republic p.234

[2] The Republic, Book X

[3] An Introduction to Plato’s Republic p.210

[4] The Republic, Book X

[5] An Introduction to Plato’s Republic p217

[6] Critique of Pure Reason, 1781

Critically compare Plato’s philosophical approach with that of Aristotle. [40]

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Plato and Aristotle are usually understood to have completely contrasting philosophical approaches.  Although Plato was Aristotle’s teacher at the Academy in Athens, Aristotle rejected Plato’s focus on metaphysics and reason, choosing instead to explore the limits of Physics and observation.  Clearly, Aristotle’s philosophical approach has more influence today.  While modern science has moved way beyond some of the theories which Aristotle proposed on the basis of observation – such as that the universe is infinite, that birds turn into fish and that men implant a “homonucleid” in a woman’s womb – scientific method still accepts Aristotle’s claim that knowledge must begin with observation and that reason must not stray too far from what can be observed, into the realm of speculation.  Nevertheless, and despite the continued popularity of the naïve materialism that emerged out of Aristotle’s philosophical approach, relatively recent developments in philosophy and science have shown that it is Plato’s philosophical approach which is more compelling.

Aristotle’s philosophical approach was supported by Locke, Hume, Kant & Ayer.  All of these philosophers dismissed Plato’s claim that human beings are born with innate ideas which we “remember” through rational reflection.  Instead, like Aristotle, John Locke argued that human beings are born as tabula rasa – blank slates – and that all our knowledge comes from sense-experience, as processed and interpreted by reason.  Hume essentially agreed, as did Kant – who also limited possible knowledge-claims to the synthetic and the analytic – and later Hume’s biographer AJ Ayer in the 20th Century.  The very idea that human beings could source new knowledge in rational reflection without relying on sense-experience seemed to open the door for unsupported speculation, the opposite of knowledge and probably a barrier to attaining it.  Nevertheless, despite the common-sense appeal of empiricism, it has come under attack from several directions.  Firstly, the idea that the only meaningful knowledge-claims are those which can be verified through sense-experience (or are tautologies) was shown to be narrow and impractical.  Aristotle’s attempt to build out from sense-experience to demonstrate the necessary existence of a Prime Mover and a common human telos in which to ground a universal, absolute system of moral philosophy was widely criticised during the Enlightenment and then into the 20th Century.  Descartes and Berkeley pointed out the problems with relying on sense-experience at all.  The way I see things is not necessarily the way that they are; the senses are limited and frequently faulty. Further, there is no way to prove that the exterior world is real, not a dream-world and permanent; as Descartes pointed out, the only thing that I can know with certainty is cogito ergo sum. David Hume himself pointed out additional assumptions on which Aristotle’s reasoning rests, that our limited observations support universal claims about natural laws and that the impression of order and teleology is not just that, an impression.  Cartesian scepticism, Berkeley’s idealism and even Hume’s epistemology point to the shortcomings of Aristotle’s philosophical approach and Descartes and Berkeley’s arguments at least lend support to Platonic rationalism.

Secondly and despite the “liberalisation of empiricism” to include discussions of topics like history that are only weakly verifiable, the focus on sense-experience as the only source of new knowledge excludes important areas of human discussion – and experience – such as religion and morality.  Further, as erstwhile Logical Positivist Karl Popper pointed out, modern science cannot function under a verificationist approach to knowledge.  For example, quantum particles are changed by the act of observing them, demonstrating that the senses do not offer the transparent window on external reality that Aristotle or later empiricists and positivists claimed. Also, as GE Moore pointed out, there is no way to prove that “this is a hand”… at some point the attempt to describe and communicate about sense-experience relies on concepts and conventions, as Hume previously acknowledged when he pointed out that properties like colour are secondary, not primary qualities and this depend on the way we see things, not the way they really are.  It is true that Popper’s falsificationism does not stray too far from that which can at least in principle be experienced through the senses… and certainly does not seem to offer much support to Plato’s rationalism… but it allows for beliefs to be accepted as knowledge providing that criteria for their falsification are accepted.  In the scientific sense, falsification allows for scientists to speculate about the origins and fundamental nature of the universe and about multiverses – none of which can ever be directly observed – if they define the circumstances under which they would modify or abandon their theories.  In a broader sense, falsification enables people to propose moral laws meaningfully – laws which could never be seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted – providing that they would be willing to accept falsifying evidence.  Alternative theories of knowledge, such as Quine’s holism, recognise the need to include all of human experience rather than just to focus on sense-experience, seeing mathematics as close to the centre of the “web of human experience”, and as such show that Aristotle’s narrower approach has been superseded.  The general rejection of the Verification Principle and the move to find other approaches to knowledge and meaning in the mid-20th century points to the fact that relying on the empirical senses as the source of all new human knowledge – as Aristotle and the empiricists did – is limiting and leads to an impoverished world-view.

Today, Plato’s is a more convincing as an approach to Philosophy than Aristotle’s, because he recognised that reason offers people a better means of understanding things as they really are… although he probably was too confident about how far this could go.  As Descartes pointed out in the 17th Century, reality goes much deeper than superficial appearances.  This begins with all the assumptions people made for millennia – that the earth is flat, the centre of the universe, orbited by the sun and stars in fixed orbits – and includes assumptions that even scientists still make every day – that matter is real, that the way we see things is the way they are, that this part of the universe is a fair sample of a homogenous whole.  To the sceptic, everything in the world of appearances is open to question and nothing is known for certain.  Nevertheless, starting with the foundational claim that I exist as a thinking being, we can have certain a priori knowledge of mathematics, which does more to explain the reality of the universe than ever can direct observations, as theoretical physicists will confirm.  This shows that Plato’s rationalism is more compelling, because it supports current thinking in Mathematics, Theoretical Physics, Particle Science and Cosmology.

In addition, seeing thought and reason as primary also makes more sense of the broader experience of being human.  Plato’s dualism, his suggestion that soul/mind and physical body are separate and even separable, remains far more popular than Aristotle’s suggestion that the soul and body are one and inseparable.  Despite Aquinas’ attempt to argue that an Aristotelian “soul” could be transferred to a new “heavenly” body in an afterlife, this raises more questions than it solves.  The belief in the afterlife, a belief which is extremely widespread, consistent and persistent and even, as Kant argued, required to explain the freedom we all experience as human beings, is much better supported by Platonic dualism than by Aristotlelian monism.  Most people experience a continuity of personal identity and sense of self from early childhood to death.  If the soul is the “formal cause of the body” and the body changes radically over time then we might expect the soul to change as well… but it is consistent.  Most people would agree that changes to the body – becoming a paraplegic for example – has little or no effect on the soul or sense of self, which we might expect to alter if the soul was just the formal cause of the body as Aristotle proposed.  Clearly, if Aristotle was here to defend himself he might point to the effects of traumatic brain injury or dementia, suggesting personal identity depends on the brain as a physical organ and is in no way separate or separable.  As Gilbert Ryle said, Plato’s talk of souls could rest on a category mistake; the soul could be no more than a “ghost in the machine”.  And yet, to dismiss all the evidence for out-of-body and near-death experiences just because it cannot be empirically verified would be hasty.  Recent medical studies by Dr Sam Parnia (AWARE and AWARE II) suggest that the evidence better supports the brain mediating rather than generating the mind.  To use Plato’s own allegory of the cave, might dismissing reports of a metaphysical reality and attacking those who make them be rather like the prisoners in the cave threatening the one who escaped and returned?  Are we satisfied to stay chained in the shadows, blocking out any evidence that could expand our world-view, or are we brave enough to contemplate the possibility of a bigger reality beyond? Plato’s dualism is more persuasive than Aristotelian materialism, because it accounts both for the experience of being human and research into Out of Body and Near Death Experiences.

Further, Plato’s world-view makes more sense of the human experience of morality than does Aristotle’s.  Both GE Moore in his “Principia Ethica” (1903) and later Iris Murdoch in her “Sovereignity of the Good” (1970) pointed out that we recognise goodness when it cannot be reduced to what is useful or makes people happy.  Not to be distracted by Plato’s language in relation to the forms, it is fair to say that there is an ideal of goodness which people experience as a rational intuition.  Kant described this in terms of the moral law, which appeals directly to reason as a synthetic a priori and shows all thinking people their duty to act transparently, on principle and with non-preferential humanitarian love.  Modern proponents of Natural Law like John Finnis explain what Aquinas called conscientia, the inbuilt desire to follow the direction of synderesis or what Aristotle called phronesis, in these terms.  It is difficult to explain why the way people do behave is the way they ought to behave without appealing to reason, to the sort of rational intuitions which Plato sought to explain.  The existence of a “form of the good”, howsoever this is described, explains the existence of the universal human virtues which CS Lewis and Alastair MacIntyre described and the absolute authority of agape-love which Joseph Fletcher appealed to.  Iris Murdoch developed her own version of Platonism in which she also proposed that human beings share rational intuitions of “forms” such as goodness and beauty.  This, she argued, explains why human beings seem to share the same ideas of what is good and beautiful, despite cultural and/or historical distance between them.  CS Lewis made a similar point in his “Mere Christianity” (1953), pointing out that ideas of justice exist in a similar way across time and the world.  This suggests that Plato’s philosophical approach makes more sense of human experience than scientific materialism, based on Aristotle’s philosophical approach, which tries to reduce morality and aesthetics to utilitarianism or evolutionary advantage.

Finally, the existence of innate ideas explains human language acquisition more convincingly than any other hypothesis.  As Noam Chomsky argues, human beings seem hard-wired for language, sharing a common conceptual and grammatical framework which needs only to be expressed through the conventions of a particular language.  Infants acquire language much more quickly than we might expect and non-human species (like chimps, dolphins and parrots) face an insuperable obstacle to using language rather than just naming things.  That no animal can talk is about much more than their lack of verbal dexterity, it is about their lack of the necessary neurological structures.  As Wittgenstein remarked in a different context, if a lion could talk we could not understand him.  Nativist theories of language acquisition like that of Chomsky would say that this is because the lion’s language would employ a whole other conceptual and grammatical framework as well as because the lion’s form of life is necessarily alien.  This shows that Plato’s philosophical approach, and particularly his belief in innate ideas, accounts for the evidence concerning human language acquisition better than Aristotelian materialism has.

In conclusion, despite the continued popularity of Aristotle’s philosophical approach, recent developments in both science and philosophy suggest that it is Plato’s approach which holds more interest going forward into the 21st century and beyond.