Easy Mistake To Make: Rematerializing The Platonic Ideal

This semester, I am teaching two key Platonic texts - the Meno in its entirety, and the Republic in relatively short parts - and using them both to introduce students to the notion of Platonic forms or ideas.  Or if you like, archetypes or models, after which all of the material things we encounter and take as being "real", are copied.

In the Platonic point of view, this entire "real world", the material tangible world of change and plurality we live out or lives in and take our bearings from, while not entirely false or unreal, is certainly not the most true or real.  There is something transcending it, an intelligible world - or perhaps better put, domain or realm (since the term "world" too easily lends itself to our picturing it as yet another world like this one!) - which we grasp not with our senses but through the highest faculties of our mind.

The Meno provides a useful introduction to the Platonic conception of form in more than one way.  Very early on, without naming it as such, we see Socrates asking Meno to direct him towards something like the form of virtue.  He both requires a definition that extends itself to every one of the possible examples.  And he critically examines Meno's progressive attempts to provide an adequate definition.  This is precisely what Platonic dialectic looks like, albeit in a bit of a "baby-steps" mode in that dialogue.

Socrates also brings in the notion of the Platonic forms as he outlines another key doctrine - that of knowledge as recollection.  We acquired the knowledge which we possess within ourselves - just waiting to be recalled or recollected - in a previous life, when we saw (or rather encountered) the forms.

I had a student ask me an interesting question about this earlier life that was quite revealing.  Was this a previous life, while the soul was in a different body?  I explained that, for Plato, that "life" in another body would be more or less the same as the current one.  It was the time "in between" - after leaving one formerly living and now dead body and entering a new body to give it life - when the soul would have encountered those forms and acquired that knowledge of them. 

What is looking at forms like when you haven't got any eyes?  Well, the seeing or even encountering, that's a metaphor for some sort of experience that would be of a purely intelligible order, when the soul grasps the forms.  That's tough to visualize, and it ought to be, because it's not something strictly speaking that would be properly grasped by visualizing it.  It's an almost inevitable temptation, to materialize the platonic ideal.

We can say something similar about how the allegory of the cave in Republic book 7 gets interpreted - but I'll pick up that thread tomorrow, in the next post.