So Plato (428-347 BC) was Socrates' pupil. At least that what I said (assuming you read the last piece). The only question now is whether you had any critique of what Socrates thought. The one thing that is certain amongst all of this is that Plato did. Although I said that Plato was a pupil of Socrates that does not mean he had to agree with his ideas. I won't beat around the bush though today, I will jump straight into his thought.
What Plato tried to do was bring the two schools of pre-Socratic and Socratic thought together. For Plato, he saw that the two schools were actually examining the same ideas. What were these ideas? Immutability and flow. The natural philosophers were concerned with the flow of nature and what could be immutable within it. The Sophists and Socrates were concerned with idea of flow in morality and whether there could be immutability in it. In other words they were interested in the same things except their premises were different. One was interested in the individual related to nature and the other was interested in the relationship between the individual and society.
In order to come to these conclusions Plato looked at what the pre-Socratics had said. During the pre-Socratic period there was the idea the something could not come from nothing. What Plato asked was: If something cannot come from nothing; and ideas are something; then it stands to reason that ideas cannot come from nothing; as ideas are something? Plato came to the conclusion that ideas had to be immutable in some way. From this rationale Plato came to his notion of forms.
What Plato saw was that although the pre-Socratics had come up with a reasonable explanation for how the 'four elements' came together and went apart to create things, and had shown successfully for him that things could be eternal and still flow. They had not come up with a decent enough explanation of how the four elements could come together numerous times and construct something new. Plato asked the question: If things are made up of these four elements, and the elements come together for a period as say a dog, how do they know, when they have parted company again how to come together again as a dog in say 200 years times? So Plato reasoned that there must be eternal form or idea of dog.
To give an example: you construct a dog out of Lego bricks. You then take the Lego bricks apart and place them back in their box. By simply shaking the box, the Lego cannot come back together as a dog. It is necessary for you to reconstruct the dog, and you do it from the form, idea, or shall we say mold of what you know a dog to be. The elements of the dog remain immutable, as does the idea and understanding of what a dog is.
Plato called these forms, ideas. He said that behind everything in nature there must be an idea. So his conclusions of the physical world, were that behind the material reality had to lie what he referred to as the world of ideas, and this world of ideas contained the eternal and immutable patterns that were behind all the various phenomena we see in nature.
As a result of Plato's belief in forms he reasoned that the physical world was certainly one of change and flow, but is made up of immutable elements physically that come together and move apart and which are guided by immutable patterns from the world of ideas. Of course, it’s difficult to tell whether Plato believed in the world of ideas in a literal sense during his entire lifetime. But one thing we do know is that he believed that as result of the constant change within the material world we could never really have true knowledge. We can only really have opinions of things that belonged to the world of the senses, tangible things, that were of course subject to change and never stationary.
Another example to explain this a bit better is needed here. Imagine a classroom of 30 pupils. The teacher turns to them and asks, 'Which is the prettiest colour of the rainbow?' The chances are, that teacher will get lots of different answers form the pupils, because it is their opinion of something within the changing material world. But if that same teacher asks the class: 'What is 8 +2?' All the pupils will give (at least we hope) the same answer. This is because reason is now talking, and in a way reason is the direct opposite of 'thinking' or 'feeling'. It could be fair to say that reason is immutable and eternal simply because it only ever expresses eternal and immutable things. Another way of looking at this could be that you find a pinecone. You say to your friend that the pinecone is round, and your friend disagrees. The fact here is that neither of you can have true knowledge and understanding of what you see and perceive. However you can say with certainty that a circle, which is round, has a sum of angles that amount to 360 degrees. But the point here is that is the idea of circle you are expressing. Thus it remains eternal. The idea of dog will always exist as walking on four legs even if all the dogs you see in the sensory world have a broken leg, because your reason is what tells you this, and not your feelings about material realities.
Earlier I said that Plato was also concerned with the individual’s place in the world. As you can see Plato argued that the world was split into two, between the material world and the world of ideas. Plato when thinking about man applied the same dualistic notion. He separated the body from the soul. The body was something that lived in the physical world, made up of the immutable four elements. But for Plato the soul became immutable. He believed that soul actually predated the body of a man. For Plato the soul was something that existed before entering the body, and the soul existed in the world of ideas. In this state the soul knew everything about the perfect forms of things, as they were, i.e., the ideas that made up the things in the material world. But Plato said, it is when man wakes up in the body that the soul cannot recall these perfect forms and ideas, or recall its existence in the world outside of his own perception. And so, the soul guides man back to this world without his knowing, through knowledge and learning of the forms and ideas that make up the world of his senses. Admittedly this sounds pretty fantastical, but if we think of it in the least literal senses it is possible to see what Plato meant.
Plato expressed this rationale in one his dialogues through something called the 'Myth of the Cave'. Imagine, if you will for a moment, a group of people that dwell underground in a cave. These people are tied and bound in such a way that they can only ever see the back wall of the cave. Behind them is a high wall. They often see human-like figures holding up other types of figures that flicker in the shadows on the back wall of the cave because they have a fire lit behind the high wall. So the only thing they ever see are these moments of shadow play. They have, for the sake of argument, been bound in this way since they were born, so they never actually know anything other than shadows. For them the shadows is all there is of the material world.
Now, imagine that one of the cave-dwellers manages to escape his bindings. He stands and turns to see these things that were once just shadows as clear colourful things and he becomes dazzled by them. He leaves the cave and is further dazzled by the world around him. Instead of running off to explore this new wonder he runs back into the cave and tries to tell the others of what he has seen. They refuse to believe him. They point to the wall and the shadows and say that what they see is all there is. They eventually kill him rather than listening to what he says.
What Plato was trying to do through the myth of the cave was show how philosophy goes from the world of shadows and try to see the ideas behind the phenomena of material reality. It is also possible that here he was metaphorically referencing Socrates in that he was willing to leave the cave and find some type of truth, and his findings were such a revelation that they shocked the status quo resulting in his death. Essentially Plato's point here was also too show the relationship between the darkness of the cave and its world beyond it in comparison to the natural world and the world of ideas.The myth of the cave is a story found within Plato's dialogue The Republic. Without going to deeply into that dialogue (for it is worthy of a dissertation on its own), I will summarize it thusly. Just as Plato believed the world of ideas was immutable, so too he said was the ideas that guide a state. There is an ideal Utopian State that we all strive for that exists behind the material world in the world of ideas. The same, he said, went for morality. There were immutable ideas of right and wrong, good and bad existing in the world of ideas. The crutch however of Plato, like that of Socrates and the Pre-Socratics was that this was all argued from his reason. Plato did not really attempt to place a value on these ideas of morality. He merely argued that they must exist eternally in the world of ideas based on the rationale we have just looked at.
The real question now is whether you think Plato was right, or what criticism you might have of his ideas about the world. Evidently we are graced with living many, many years after he did, and so our knowledge and understanding have grown as a results of others that preceded him. But when you place yourself in the context of his time, do you think that you could have agreed with him?
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