Plates and forms

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01/10/08: Ten Great Ideas - Plato's Theory of Forms

What is it that makes a thing what it is? What is it about a goat that makes it a goat, or white white or a handbag a handbag. Are goat-ness, white-ness, handbag-ness things that exist outside of the said articles. If we killed all the goats would the idea or concept of a goat still exist? If so, does that mean goat-ness is a separate thing to real living munching, mountian climbing, cheese producing goats and if not, what is the concept we have left when the world is goat free. We should also consider definitions. What is 'goat'. Is it possible for one persons goat to be something else. Are all goats exactly the same or does 'goat' cover and number of styles, configurations and colourways like Nikes?

What about white? What is white. White unlike a goat can't be touched. White doesn't exist like a goat does. What is it then? Is it an idea? Perhaps. Is it just a certain frequency of light reflected at our eyes that we perceive and that we agree to call white? Can we remove white from existence and still have a concept of it? Are all whites the same? Definitely not. One man's white is a another womans off-white. Another womans off-white is another man's magnolia. But what confines white? Is it our perception which is flawed? Does white, while not being a munching, mountain climbing thing, exist as an idea outside of our sensible reality?

And what of the things that Plato discusses like courage, beauty and piety? What are they? Where are they?

Goat-ness is, as far as I can tell, a definition or categorisation of a type or collection of living things that we perceive to have the same characteristics. Some of those characteristics are shared by other things, be they hooves, horns, respiration, gender or white-ness for example, but there is a subset of these characteristics that are common to all goats (I hope). We don't know all of these characteristics and perhaps it is a false classification contrived for ease. What for example do you get if you cross breed a goat and a sheep, resulting in a goat with wool or cross a goat and a human being, resulting in a goat with opposable thumbs. If all the basics are satisfied is it still a goat? Does goat-ness have a maximum as well as mimimum specification? Science and geneaology could probably define in DNA terms what goat-ness is (couldn't it) but the idea of goat-ness existed before we understood genes in the same way the idea of water-ness existed before we knew how many 'H's and '0's were in our Evian.

So the question is: Is there an objective existence of white-ness, goat-ness, courage, beauty somewhere beyond our reality or is reality a big abstract something and nothing we're constantly trying to get hold of to mould into something solid? And when we decide on naming this thing or that thing or classifying this as different from that, are we chopping the carcass at the joints or just wherever it suits us.

I think the likely answer is we stick the label (or chop the carcass) wherever we perceive sense or reason or where it makes us comfortable in our own understanding and perception of ourselves and the world.

Plato talks about forms in terms of Universals i.e. beauty, courage, goat-ness white-ness etc and Individuals i.e. an actual goat or a person. Individual (forms) which we can see, touch etc partake of the Universals (forms) which exist outside of our reality and as such are atemporal and supersensible.

Individuals will cease at some point and Universals are eternal. Universals being the ideal to which individual forms aspire are therefore more real than the Indiviuals. Our apparent reality of sensible things is therefore representation of the 'real' reality. Plato illustrates this with his allegory about the cave, where prisoners are kept in a cave, chained and facing a wall, on which some other folk project images. The idea being that we are somehow the unknowing audience of a full length 4D-IMAX-surround-sound epic that we simply call reality and that if we could get out of the theatre and into the light (on to Waterloo Bridge in this case) we'd see our so called reality for what it is.

To my mind, comparing something tangible like a goat to an intangible like white or piety, might be trying to box up too many things at one time. A kind of opposite of chopping the carcass at the joints, where you stick all the bits you have together and hope it coalesces into the thing you want. Plato I think had it a bit wrong. There'll be more of this later....

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