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What has been commonly understood as Platonism revolves around its cardinal doctrine, the asserted existence of the archetypal Ideas or Forms. That assertion demands a partial shift, though a profound one, from what has come to be our usual approach to reality. To understand this shift, we must first ask, “What is the precise relation between the Platonic Forms or Ideas and the empirical world of everyday reality?” Upon this question turns the entire conception. (Plato used the Greek words idea and eidos interchangeably. Idea was taken over into Latin and English, while eidos was translated into Latin as forma and into English as “form.”)
It is crucial to the Platonic understanding that these Forms are primary, while the visible objects of conventional reality are their direct derivatives. Platonic Forms are not conceptual abstractions that the human mind creates by generalizing from a class of particulars. Rather, they possess a quality of being, a degree of reality, that is superior to that of the concrete world. Platonic archetypes form the world and also stand beyond it. They manifest themselves within time and yet are timeless. They constitute the veiled essence of things.
Plato taught that what is perceived as a particular object in the world can best be understood as a concrete expression of a more fundamental Idea, an archetype which gives that object its special structure and condition. A particular thing is what it is by virtue of the Idea informing it. Something is “beautiful” to the exact extent that the archetype of Beauty is present in it. When one falls in love, it is Beauty (or Aphrodite) that one recognizes and surrenders to, the beloved object being Beauty’s instrument or vessel. The essential factor in the event is the archetype, and it is this level that carries the deepest meaning.
It could be objected that this is not the way one experiences an event of this sort. What actually attracts one is not an archetype but a specific person, or a concrete work of art, or some other beautiful object. Beauty is only an attribute of the particular, not its essence. The Platonist argues, however, that this objection rests on a limited perception of the event. It is true, he answers, that the ordinary person is not directly aware of an archetypal level, despite its reality. But Plato described how a philosopher who has observed many objects of beauty, and who has long reflected on the matter, may suddenly glimpse absolute beauty—Beauty itself, supreme, pure, eternal, and not relative to any specific person or thing. The philosopher thereby recognizes the Form or Idea that underlies all beautiful phenomena. He unveils the authentic reality behind the appearance. If something is beautiful, it is so because it “participates” in the absolute Form of Beauty.
Plato’s mentor, Socrates, had sought to know what was common to all virtuous acts, so that he could evaluate how one should govern one’s conduct in life. He reasoned that if one wishes to choose actions that are good, one must know what “good” is, apart from any specific circumstances. To evaluate one thing as “better” than another assumes the existence of an absolute good with which the two relative goods can be compared. Otherwise the word “good” would be only a word whose meaning had no stable basis in reality, and human morality would lack a secure foundation. Similarly, unless there was some absolute basis for evaluating acts as just or unjust, then every act called “just” would be a relative matter of uncertain virtue. When those who engaged in dialogue with Socrates espoused popular notions of justice and injustice, or of good and evil, he subjected these to careful analysis and showed them to be arbitrary, full of internal contradictions and without any substantial basis. Because Socrates and Plato believed that knowledge of virtue was necessary for a person to live a life of virtue, objective universal concepts of justice and goodness seemed imperative for a genuine ethics. Without such changeless constants that transcended the vagaries of human conventions and political institutions, human beings would possess no firm foundation for ascertaining true values, and would thus be subject to the dangers of an amoral relativism.
Beginning with the Socratic discussion of ethical terms and the search for absolute definitions, Plato ended with a comprehensive theory of reality. Just as man as moral agent requires the Ideas of justice and goodness to conduct his life well, so man as scientist requires other absolute Ideas to understand the world, other universals by which the chaos, flux, and variety of sensible things can be unified and made intelligible. The philosopher’s task encompasses both the moral and the scientific dimensions, and the Ideas provide a foundation for both.
It seemed evident to Plato that when many objects share a common property—as all human beings share “humanness” or as all white stones share “whiteness”—that property is not limited to a specific material instance in space and time. It is immaterial, beyond spatiotemporal limitation, and transcendent to its many instances. A particular thing may cease to be, but not the universal property that the particular thing embodied. The universal is a separate entity from the particular and, because it is beyond change and never passes away, is superior in its reality.
One of Plato’s critics once stated, “I see particular horses, but not horseness.” Plato answered, “That is because you have eyes but no intelligence.” The archetypal Horse, which gives form to all horses, is to Plato a more fundamental reality than the particular horses, which are merely specific instances of the Horse, embodiments of that Form. As such, the archetype is apparent not so much to the limited physical senses, though these can suggest and lead the way, as to the more penetrating eye of the soul, the illuminated intellect. Archetypes reveal themselves more to the inner perception than to the outer.
The Platonic perspective thus asks the philosopher to go through the particular to the universal, and beyond the appearance to the essence. It assumes not only that such insight is possible, but that it is mandatory for the attainment of true knowledge. Plato directs the philosopher’s attention away from the external and concrete, from taking things at face value, and points “deeper” and “inward,” so that one may “awaken” to a more profound level of reality. He asserts that the objects one perceives with one’s senses are actually crystallizations of more primary essences, which can be apprehended only by the active, intuitive mind.
Plato maintained a strong distrust of knowledge gained by sense perceptions, since such knowledge is constantly changing, relative, and private to each individual. A wind is pleasantly cool for one person but uncomfortably cold for another. A wine is sweet to a person who is well but sour to the same person when ill. Knowledge based on the senses is therefore a subjective judgment, an ever-varying opinion without any absolute foundation. True knowledge, by contrast, is possible only from a direct apprehension of the transcendent Forms, which are eternal and beyond the shifting confusion and imperfection of the physical plane. Knowledge derived from the senses is merely opinion and is fallible by any nonrelative standard. Only knowledge derived directly from the Ideas is infallible and can be justifiably called real knowledge.
For example, the senses never experience true or absolute equality, since no two things in this world are ever exactly equal to each other in every respect. Rather, they are always only more or less equal. Yet because of the transcendent Idea of equality, the human intellect can comprehend absolute equality (which it has never known concretely) independently of the senses, and can therefore employ the term “equality” and recognize approximations of equality in the empirical world. Similarly, there are no perfect circles in nature, but all approximate circles in nature derive their “circleness” from the perfect archetypal Circle, and it is on this latter reality that the human intelligence depends to recognize any empirical circles. So too with perfect goodness or perfect beauty. For when one speaks of something as “more beautiful” or “more good” than something else, this comparison can be made only against an invisible standard of absolute beauty or goodness—Beauty itself and the Good itself. Everything in the sensible world is imperfect, relative, and constantly shifting, but human knowledge needs and seeks absolutes, which exist only on the transcendent level of pure Ideas.
Implicit in Plato’s conception of the Ideas is his distinction between being and becoming. All phenomena are in a never-ending process of transformation from one thing into another, becoming this or that and then perishing, changing in relation to one person and another, or to the same person at different times. Nothing in this world is, because everything is always in a state of becoming something else. But one thing does enjoy real being, as distinguished from merely becoming, and this is the Idea—the only stable reality, that which underlies, motivates, and orders the flux of phenomena. Any particular thing in the world is actually a complexly determined appearance. The perceived object is a meeting place of many Forms which at different times express themselves in varying combinations and with varying degrees of intensity. Plato’s world, therefore, is dynamic only in that all phenomenal reality is in a state of constant becoming and perishing, a movement governed by the shifting participation of Ideas. But the ultimate reality, the world of Ideas wherein resides true being, not just becoming, is in itself changeless and eternal, and is therefore static. The relation of being to becoming for Plato was directly parallel to the relation of truth to opinion—what is apprehensible by the illuminated reason in contrast to what is apprehensible by the physical senses.
Since the Forms endure, while their concrete expressions come and go, the Forms can be said to be immortal, and therefore similar to gods. Though a particular incarnation of the moment may die, the Form that was temporarily embodied within that particular continues to manifest itself in other concrete things. A person’s beauty passes, but Aphrodite lives on—archetypal Beauty is eternal, neither vulnerable to the passing of time nor touched by the transience of its particular manifestations. The individual trees of the natural world eventually fall and rot away, but the archetypal Tree continues to express itself in and through other trees. A good person may fall and perform evil acts, but the Idea of the Good stands forever. The archetypal Idea comes into and out of being in a multiplicity of concrete forms, yet simultaneously remains transcendent as a unitary essence.
Plato’s use of the word “idea” (which in Greek denoted the form, pattern, essential quality, or nature of something) clearly differs from our contemporary usage. In the usual modern understanding, ideas are subjective mental constructs private to the individual mind. By contrast, Plato meant something that exists not only in human consciousness but outside of it as well. Platonic Ideas are objective. They do not depend on human thought, but exist entirely in their own right. They are perfect patterns embedded in the very nature of things. The Platonic Idea is, as it were, not merely a human idea but the universe’s idea, an ideal entity that can express itself externally in concrete tangible form or internally as a concept in the human mind. It is a primordial image or formal essence that can manifest in various ways and on various levels, and is the foundation of reality itself.
The Ideas are thus the fundamental elements of both an ontology (a theory of being) and an epistemology (a theory of knowledge): they constitute the basic essence and deepest reality of things, and also the means by which certain human knowledge is possible. A bird is a bird by virtue of its participation in the archetypal Idea of the Bird. And the human mind can know a bird by virtue of the mind’s own participation in that same Idea of the Bird. The red color of an object is red because it participates in archetypal redness, and human perception registers red by virtue of the mind’s participation in the same Idea. The human mind and the universe are ordered according to the same archetypal structures or essences, because of which, and only because of which, true understanding of things is possible for the human intelligence.
The paradigmatic example of Ideas for Plato was mathematics. Following the Pythagoreans, with whose philosophy he seems to have been especially intimate, Plato understood the physical universe to be organized in accordance with the mathematical Ideas of number and geometry. These Ideas are invisible, apprehensible by intelligence only, and yet can be discovered to be the formative causes and regulators of all empirically visible objects and processes. But again, the Platonic and Pythagorean conception of mathematical ordering principles in nature was essentially different from the conventional modern view. In Plato’s understanding, circles, triangles, and numbers are not merely formal or quantitative structures imposed by the human mind on natural phenomena, nor are they only mechanically present in phenomena as a brute fact of their concrete being. Rather, they are numinous and transcendent entities, existing independently of both the phenomena they order and the human mind that perceives them. While the concrete phenomena are transient and imperfect, the mathematical Ideas ordering those phenomena are perfect, eternal, and changeless. Hence the basic Platonic belief—that there exists a deeper, timeless order of absolutes behind the surface confusion and randomness of the temporal world—found in mathematics, it was thought, a particularly graphic demonstration. The training of the mind in mathematics was therefore deemed by Plato essential to the philosophical enterprise, and according to tradition, above the door to his Academy were placed the words “Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here.”
The position described thus far represents a fair approximation of Plato’s most characteristic views concerning the Ideas, including those set forth in his most celebrated dialogues—the Republic , the Symposium , the Phaedo , the Phaedrus, and the Timaeus —as well as in the Seventh Letter , his one probably genuine extant letter. Yet a number of ambiguities and discrepancies remained unresolved in the corpus of Plato’s work. At times Plato seems to exalt the ideal over the empirical to such an extent that all concrete particulars are understood to be, as it were, only a series of footnotes to the transcendent Idea. At other times he seems to stress the intrinsic nobility of created things, precisely because they are embodied expressions of the divine and eternal. The exact degree to which the Ideas are transcendent rather than immanent—whether they are entirely separate from sensible things, with the latter only imperfect imitations, or whether they are in some manner present in sensible things, with the latter essentially sharing in the Ideas’ nature—cannot be determined from the many references in the different dialogues. Generally speaking, it seems that as Plato’s thought matured, he moved toward a more transcendent interpretation. Yet in the Parmenides , probably written after most of the dialogues cited above, Plato presented several formidable arguments against his own theory, pointing out questions concerning the nature of the Ideas—how many kinds are there, what are their relations to each other and to the sensible world, what is the precise meaning of “participation,” how is knowledge of them possible—the responses to which raised seemingly unsolvable problems and inconsistencies. Some of these questions, which Plato posed perhaps as much out of dialectical vigor as from self-criticism, became the basis for later philosophers’ objections to the theory of Ideas.
Similarly, in the Theaetetus , Plato analyzed the nature of knowledge with extraordinary acuity and with no firm conclusions, never adducing the theory of Ideas as a way out of the epistemological impasse he depicted. In the Sophist , Plato ascribed reality not just to the Ideas but also to change, life, soul, and understanding. Elsewhere he pointed to the existence of an intermediate class of mathematical objects between Ideas and sensible particulars. On several occasions he posited a hierarchy of Ideas, yet different dialogues suggested different hierarchies, with the Good, the One, Existence, Truth, or Beauty variously occupying supreme positions, sometimes simultaneously and overlapping. Clearly Plato never constructed a complete, fully coherent system of Ideas. Yet it is also evident that, despite his own unresolved questions concerning his central doctrine, Plato considered the theory true, and that without it human knowledge and moral activity could have no foundation. And it was this conviction that formed the basis for the Platonic tradition.
To sum up: From the Platonic perspective, the fundamentals of existence are the archetypal Ideas, which constitute the intangible substrate of all that is tangible. The true structure of the world is revealed not by the senses, but by the intellect, which in its highest state has direct access to the Ideas governing reality. All knowledge presupposes the existence of the Ideas. The archetypal realm, far from being an unreal abstraction or imaginary metaphor for the concrete world, is here considered to be the very basis of reality, that which determines its order and renders it knowable. To this end, Plato declared direct experience of the transcendent Ideas to be the philosopher’s primary goal and ultimate destination.