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Socrates’ method of doing philosophy was to debate the meaning of words
(e.g. What is ‘beauty’, or ‘truth’ or ‘justice’?).
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We may call various things ‘beautiful’, but what is ‘beauty’ in itself?
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Why do we call these different things ‘beautiful’ unless we have some
prior understanding of ‘beauty’?
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Where did that prior understanding come from?
Plato’s dialogues develop the ‘Socratic method.’ He works on the assumption that
the meaning of a word corresponds to some permanent external reality.
(e.g. 'Justice' is not just a word used to bracket certain events and situations
together. Justice actually exists in itself, it is a reality over and above
any of the individual things that are said to be just. Indeed, individual
things can be said to be ‘just’ only because we already have an idea of
‘justice’ itself.
These general, abstract realities he calls ‘forms’.
If we had no knowledge of such ‘forms’, we would not be able to categorise
things. All meanings would be conventional only – what one person thought of as
‘just’ another might call ‘unjust’ and there would be no way to decide between
the two.
The ‘form’ of something is its essential feature; it is what makes that
thing what it is, and not something else.
Plato also
divided the world into ‘reality’ and ‘appearance’ and our
understanding of it is divided into ‘knowledge’ and ‘opinion’.
What we know
of particular things is only ‘opinion’; knowledge is reserved for our
understanding of the eternal realities. Philosophy tries to gain true
‘knowledge’, to understand the essence of beauty, justice, goodness etc. It
seeks to get beyond mere opinion about the bits and pieces of our experienced
world.
For Plato
there are two worlds (or, better, two very different ways of encountering the
world):
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The changeable world that we encounter through the senses.
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The world beyond the things we experience through the senses: a world of
‘forms’ of which we can have true knowledge, and which is eternal.
He held that ‘The
Form of the Good’ was the highest of these forms, and that knowledge of the
‘good’ was the highest knowledge of which human we are capable.
Plato’s allegory
of the Cave:
In The
Republic, Plato uses an analogy to illustrate the progress towards knowledge
of the good. He sees ordinary experience as being like that of prisoners,
chained so that they can see only the back wall of a cave. Behind them is a
fire, and in front of it people carry objects to and fro, throwing shadows upon
the wall. Since it is all they know, the prisoners assume that the shadows are
reality.
The
philosopher, escaping his chains, turns and sees first the fire and the objects
being carried. He then moves up to the mouth of the cave and is dazzled by the
light of the sun – the Form of the Good.
On returning,
he tries to explain to the other prisoners that their everyday experience is
that of shadows.
Plato
contrasts the philosopher, who, seeing objects illuminated by the sun,
understands and knows them as they really are, whereas the prisoners, still
stuck in their twilight world of change and decay, can do no more that form
opinions about the shifting play of shadows.
How do we come to know the forms?
In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates challenges someone to explain the meaning of a
concept and then tests it by introducing particular examples. This implies that
knowledge is prior to experience, rather than the other way round. If
experience came first, you would need to do no more than add up the sum total of
experiences to gain true knowledge.
Plato believed
that, prior to our birth, our soul had direct knowledge of the forms, and that
our understanding of them now is really a matter of remembering. It is
because we have this prior knowledge of ‘beauty’, ‘justice’ etc that we are able
to use these words to describe our experiences as beautiful or just.
He believed that we all have knowledge of reality, but it is lost, cluttered by
the changing experiences of the everyday world.
Plato uses this idea as a proof of immortality, arguing that the soul must have
been in the eternal realm of the forms before its birth into this world.
Implications of this for religion
Consider the
following features of Plato’s view of reality:
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The ‘real’ world is not the one we see with our eyes, but an eternal
world beyond the ever-changing world of our experience.
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Particular things have meaning and value only because they participate
in the value of an eternal ‘Form’.
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Reason takes priority over sense experience.
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The natural condition in which people find themselves is one of
ignorance; they wait to be enlightened.
Clearly, if
‘God’ is identified with the Form of the Good, then he is not seen directly in
the world of experienced things.
It suggests
that science, and the whole process of gaining ‘empirical’ knowledge through the
senses, is destined to fail in its quest to reveal the truth about the world.
Since it is merely showing patterns on the wall of the cave, it is inherently
incapable of seeing things are they really are.
Indirectly, it
may lead to a ‘compensatory’ view of religion e.g. Augustine (influenced by
Plato’s philosophy) looked for an eternal and perfect ‘City of God’ to
compensate for the fall of Rome.
This approach becomes possible if reality is eternal, known by reason to the
enlightened few, and is not seen in the objects of experience.
It also
suggests that reason should dictate how we interpret experience.
This had profound implications for the religion and science debates of later
centuries. It may also encourage a tendency to put the absolute ideals and
demands of an eternal deity before human reality and suffering – with terrible
consequences.
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