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Plato

Plato is the guy standing on our left hand side with his finger pointing upwards and his sucessor, Aristotle, who is on the right, is pointing downwards. This painting by Raphael is called ‘The School of Athens’ and it depicts the two very different views of reality and metaphysics that these two Ancient Greek philosophers have. Plato believed that properties to things in this world came from a universal realm of forms that was outside of (transcendent) this world, that there exists a Realm of the Forms that manifest in varying degrees that correspond closer to or further away from their universal quality, more on this later.

Aristotle believed that the way we can understand properties and universals is through the senses in this world, he had a view of immanant as opposed to transcendent properties of the forms. Each physical object is a compound of matter and form.

Let us stick with Plato for now in this thread.

The Similie of the Sun

The Greek word eidos is present in our current word for asteroid, which means ‘star-like’. Eidos means like, kind and form – it was a the best word Plato had to describe properties of things and their relations. A wheel for example, has the form of being round and is circular, so its universal property is that of circles, other objects that have circles are from the same universal form. Plato could also see various like-properties in other things in the natural world around him and believed that these forms must already be present in an abstract sense and we recollect these forms upon discovery. Plato then used logos to reason these forms and the problem of universals.

Plato reasoned that it was sight and the eye that had a faculty of recognition of these forms, it was the eye that allowed him to see and understand the world around him, but he knew it was not perfect, The Sun allowed his eyes to use this faculty as the light illuminated objects in the world for him to see them. He reasoned that the eye and the Sun has a like-quality to them, they were of the same kind of form and so the faculty of sight was linked to the faculty of knowledge and wisdom which came from light. When we gather enough knowledge and wisdom and have a greater understanding, we can be closer to the light of wisdom in the mind through the eyes, this was called Gnosis and it was what Plato would call The Good or Episteme.

The Sun is part of the intelligible world and the eye/sight is part of the visible world.

The Similie of the Cave

It is important to remember the use of the word ‘similie’ and in some texts it is ‘metaphor’ or ‘allegory’ of the cave and the sun, eidos means ‘like’, so it is a structure of knowledge that we use to define properties and their particulars and how they universally relate. Plato is a very mystical thinker and was inspired not only by Socrates (who the dialogues of Plato are centrally focused on, Plato never actually says one word in his dialogues) but by the Pre-Socratics, especially Pythagoras who is famous for running and kind of mystical school of thought.

The cave is what Plato’s The Republic is all about, everything he says relates to the metaphysics of this story. It is a frustratingly genius story that is hard to overcome and go beyond, especially in the political sense, but we will leave the major details of that out for now.

There are four prisoners in a cave who have been in there since they were babies, they have grown into adults and know nothing of the outside of the cave. Their hands and feet are bound in such a way that they can’t move anywhere, they can’t turn and see each other, although they can of course talk to each other, they know there are others with them in the cave. Their heads are also secured in such a way that they cannot turn around to look behind them.

There is a fire constantly burning in the cave, they have never seen sunlight however. The fire is positioned in such a way that if someone was to walk behind the prisoners the shadow will cast onto the walls of the cave directly in front of the prisoners, so they never actually see the object only its shadow.

The prisoners make a daily routine of naming these shadows and they reward each other whenever they name them correctly, a kind of game from memory. They will, according to Plato, be able to say a shade is a horse, or a cart, a man, or a child, but they will never know that the shade is a shade, as they can’t see the fire that causes this illusion to appear. Plato even suggests that they may percieve these images and shadows as Gods and may even worship them, creating their own prayers and customs, believing them to be appropriate rituals to appease the Gods.

Plato’s Similie of the Cave is meant to set the ground work for his political theory that advocates a Philosopher Ruler – someone who has a special kind of knowledge that allows them to rule over others who are not ‘in the know’, he isn’t advocating a tyrant, as he see tyrants as the logical outcome of democracy, which he opposes because it was democracy that led to the Death of Socrates. He instead wanted to create a political philosophy that would give a ruler wisdom, but these rulers can’t have anything to do with everyday people, as they will not be able to understand him and they don’t know what is Good.

Freedom for one of the prisoners

Plato then ‘frees’ or rather, ‘gives one of the prisoners more freedom’ by releasing him from his constraints. The prisoner walks away from the spot he has spent his entire life and can finally turn around to look at his friends, but more importantly, he can now see the fire and the actual objects that are projecting their images as shadows – and he recognises the shapes and now knows more than his friends as he can distinguish between objects and shadows cast on a wall. He understands how the light has revealed this to his eyes.

He then makes a venture further than any other of the prisoners and leaves the cave – blinded by the blazing sun, his eyes are in agony as he adjusts to the outside world. Plato describes this as being similar to when we learn things that we can’t accept or understand as they are too overwhelming. Eventually his eyes adjust and he sees colours, more objects that cast shadows and movements of the sun, he is overcome with wonder and even sees the sun set and rise again.

He is so excited about this new world of knowledge that he returns to the cave to tell his friends. When he returns however, he can’t see so well in the dark as his eyes have been exposed to the brighter sun outside, the fire is very dim and colours are not so visible down here. When the games and rituals begins as objects pass near the fire to cast thier shades on the wall, he fails to recognise them and makes several mistakes, the others laugh at him and feel angry, that he has commited sacrilige. He tries to explain that the world they know is not the full truth, it is not false or fake so to speak, it is a world where the senses are decieved into thinking it is the whole truth, when there is a world beyond the walls of the cave that reveals the truths of this cave and more wonderment. The prisoners ridcule him and mock him, they tell him the trips away from the cave has poisoned his mind with lies and that he would be better off sitting back in the cave, something he knows he can never do again. If the prisoners could move and approach him, they would kill him. At the same time, the enlightened one sees no value in their ‘honours and rewards’ and leaves them behind forever, knowing they don’t know what is best for themselves.

The Divided Line

The cave and the sun similies/allegories/metaphors set up Plato’s ontology (the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being, a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them.) Although the correct way to understand the forms is in an epistemological sense – as a theory of knowledge.

Plato believes in universal properties, he thinks there is an ultimate form of The Good which is in the realm of the forms, outside of human perception, it can be accessed through dialectic and mathematics, reason. Knowledge itself is the closest form of the Good, with Episteme (the practices of Geometry and Algebra, reason and dialectic) as practices of Goodness. Gnosis (knowledge) is completely abstract, intelligible.

The lesser forms of the Good, are those situated in doxa or opinions, anything that is conveyed through the senses is farther away from the Good and can be deceptive, just like in the cave.

This layout of metaphysics sees the physical world as being ‘less real’ than that of the forms. Socrates was famously happy when he was sentenced to death by Athenian Democracy as a scapegoat for their losses at war with Sparta – one of the main themes of The Republic – he did not value this world at all, he was filthy, never washed or changed his clothes, he was very ascetic. He looked forward to death and what lay beyond in the realm of the forms.

This was very new to the Greeks, they did believe in an after-life, but it was Hades – a place of immense boredom and grimness.

“I would rather work the soil as a serf on hire to some landless impoverished peasant than be King of all these lifeless dead.”…
— Achilles’ soul to Odysseus

Achilles would rather be a slave to a landless peasant than be in the Greek after-life with Hades! That’s how bad it was, but there is a positive interpretation here, one that Friedrich Nietzsche picks up on his works, that the Greeks before Socrates valued this world more than anything, that it was what you do here and now that counts. Socrates hated this world and instead proffered the other world. These metaphysics would later inspire Gnosticism in Christianity in the form of Neo-Platonism, which was a ressurection of Plato from another philosopher in the Eastern-Roman Empire, Plotinus. There are other influences on this school of thought in religion, some from Zoroastrianism. The Gnostics didn’t interpret the lesser forms as simply ‘less real’ or ‘less good’, they introduced the term ‘evil’ and projected a tainted view of the physical world that saw the body as a prison for a divine spark that has to return to its source in heaven.

This brings this introduction to Plato’s metaphysics to an end for now.

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