Features

[The How-To Issue ]

How to understand Plato’s Theory of Forms

Image

A lamp is never really a real lamp, no matter how exact a lamp it may be or how lampily it behaves. Even the lampiest of lamps is only a copy of the one true lamp and can never exist as truly as an idea. If it does, it is not pure. Transcendental equals real. Material equals not real. We know this as Plato’s Theory of Forms.

Seems easy enough, until you fall into the cycle of the real/non-real game of “what if?” You trip on linguistics and confuse forms with definitions. And the idea of “appleness” is just not sinking in. That’s when you call in the experts.

In this case, it’s UNLV philosophy professor Paul Schollmeier, who begins explaining by replacing “forms” in the Theory of Forms with “idea,” so we understand that there is only one idea—everything else is a reflection of it. Apples, for example, are perishable and impermanent, but the idea of an apple lives eternally.

If ideas exist whether we think of them or not, where do they exist? “Ideas exist nowhere and no when. When we think we discover a new idea, what we really do is discover for ourselves an idea already existing in his mind” (“his” referring to the demiurge, a Platonic deity).

What about something created by us, like a song or abstract painting? If it’s not eternal, it’s still original, but is it still not real and pure? “You are asking about the problem of the universal. For us an idea can arise through sensation and also through reflection. But we can never be sure that the ideas popping up in our mind either way are eternal and absolute. If we do stumble upon one such idea, we could say that we enter the mind of God.”

BACK TO: The How-To Issue

Share
Photo of Kristen Peterson

Kristen Peterson

Get more Kristen Peterson
Top of Story