Historical Doctrine Of Plato

The platonic dialectic

Socrates had contended himself with the investigation of moral problems. Plato went beyond this to ask questions like, What is tree? What is green? What is triangle? What is circle? What is round? etc. Plato was especially interested in the question of meaning, Why do we give one name to some things and a different name to others? What does it mean to give the same name to two different things? In trying to answer the question, Why do we give the same name to 2 different things, let us recognize that its the actual thing we are thinking of which is important, not the name we use for it. As we cant see into one another’s minds, we need signs to express what is in there. A name is just an agreed-on sign or sound for what we are thinking of. If i point to a triangle for example a man of france or germany or ancient rome or ancient greece would know what i had in mind, though all of them would have different oral signs, different spoken sounds, to signify this thing. It is the thing in our minds, then, and not the word, with which we are concerned.

Plato’s method illustrated

When I say the paper on which I am writing is white and the snow outside is white, am I using the word “white” for one thing or for two things? What do I mean when I say the white of the paper and the white of the snow are the same, are alike? Why do I give them the same name? What does being the same, being alike, mean? Can two things be both the same and different at the same time and in the same way? If it should snow tomorrow over half the world, would there be any difference in whiteness? Would there be more whiteness? Plato would say that if there is any difference no matter how little we should find another name for it. If there isn’t any difference, if whiteness is the same after the snowfall as before, then quantity doesn’t make any difference to whiteness. Similarly, if the whiteness in any two white things 1s the same in both, place doesn’t make any difference to it. Snow is the same kind of white in Attica as it is in America. Neither does time make any difference. When the Greeks, twenty-five hundred years ago, talked about white-capped Olympus, was the whiteness they were thinking of the same whiteness we think of? Whiteness, tor Plato, is one single thing, and it is not affected by time, by place, by quantity. If all the white things in the world were destroyed would there still be whiteness? Plato would say yes. If I destroy this piece of paper, I haven’t affected whiteness. Similarly, if I destroyed every white thing whiteness would still stay the same. In other words, whiteness is not in this piece of paper or any other white thing in the world. If this world were destroyed, whiteness would still be the same. Whiteness, since it is not in any particular place, is not in this world. This piece of paper is rectangular. Rectangularity is not in this piece of paper any more than it is in any other rectangular thing. Before this piece of paper was manufactured there was such a thing as rectangularity. And after this piece of paper is destroyed, rectangularity is still just the same. If all the rectangular things of the world were destroyed, there would be no difference to rectangularity. What about numbers? Think of the answer to six plus six. Where is that number of which you are thinking? Is there any more of it since you have been thinking of it? Will there be any less of it when you stop thinking of it? If no one in the world were thinking of it, would there be such a thing as twelve? A ruler is twelve inches long. Is the twelve in the ruler or in your head? Is there one twelve or two twelves? If there are two twelves, how could we give them the same name? Just as in the case of whiteness, we would find that twelve is not affected by quantity, or time, or place. It is not in any of the things that are called twelve, any more than it is in any other place. This paper is thin. So is a newspaper. Is there one thinness of two thinnesses? If I destroy this piece of paper is there any difference any more than it is in any other place. in thinness? Thinness, we have to say, is not in this piece of paper Consider again our piece of paper. It is white, but the whiteness is not in the piece of paper. It is thin, but the thinness is not in the piece of paper. What about paperness itself? If I destroy this piece of paper, have I made any change in paperness? If we follow our previous reasoning, paperness itself is not in the paper.

Our piece of paper seems to be slipping away beneath our very finger tips. Paperness is not in it. Rectangularity is not in it. None of the things we can say about it seem to belong to it. Notice, too, that we could substitute an identical piece of paper for it, and we would still have paperness, whiteness, number, although we need not know that a substitution has been made. In other words, whatever we can know in this piece of paper does not belong to it. Is there anything at all there? Plato would answer yes, because the thing changes, and there must be something there which is the explanation of the change. “The philosopher,” he says, “will include both the changeable and the unchangeable in his definition of being.” What is there, however, has so little reality that, except for the bare fact of its existence, it cannot be known. Plato, it is apparent, has simply carried on Socrates’ way of investigation into fields where Socrates did not venture. Just as there is only one Justice, one Temperance, one Virtue, unchanging, the same for all men and for all times, so too there is but one White-ness, one Thinness, one Rectangularity, the same for all men in all times and in all places. If this world in which we live were destroyed, Plato held, very little worthwhile would be lost. Justice, Triangleness, Whiteness and the like would remain, eternal and unchanging.

Doctrine of the 2 worlds

Drawing out the consequences of his reasoning, Plato concluded that we are exposed, as it were, to two worlds at once. One is the world of unchanging things like Whiteness, Rectangularity, Justice a world that is perfect, eternal, the source of whatever traces of perfection and goodness we find in the world around us. The other world is the changing, imperfect world of the senses. There is so little to this shadowy, transient world that all we know of it is that it is there, and is the source of change, multiplicity, and imperfection. These two worlds are so mixed up together that only the rare person, the philosopher, ever comes to know that there really are two worlds. It is as though picture and sound were perfectly blended on a single strip of film, or as though two photographic negatives were skillfully superimposed to produce one composite picture. With the eye of our body we see one world, the world of change, of movement, of imperfection. With reason, “the eye of our soul” as plato calls it, we are in touch with the other world, the world of perfect, eternal, unchanging realities. The “really real” world for Plato is not the changing world of the senses which, like the world of heraclitus, is a flux of movement, a well of illusion, and can never be the source of real knowledge beyond the given fact of its existence. The real world, from which everything else draws its reality and which is the source of all our knowledge, is the world in which exist whiteness, triangularity, and the rest. To these things, whiteness and triangularity and so on, Plato gave the name idea or form. The word idea originally meant pattern and so, for plato, the idea is the pattern which runs through things which are alike. And these ideas literally exist by themselves. If all the things of the world of sense were to disappear, if all human beings were to disappear, whiteness, treeness, roundness, would continue to exist, unaffected, unchanged. In trying to understand Plato’s world of ideas we must remember that he is using sense metaphors to describe a dimension of reality which has nothing to do with space or time. When he uses metaphors like “the place” of the ideas or “off in the sky” we must remember that they arent meant to be taken literally any more than when we speak of “high” thoughts or “low” thoughts, or of being “up” in heaven and “down” in hell. What these words really express are statements of degree or compassion or value, and to give them a spatial or temporal interpretation is to distort their meaning entirely. Similarly, when plato speaks of the world of bodies being unreal, he is not arguing away their existence. He is emphasizing the fact that to the extent they are involved in change, are in a state of becoming, to that extent they fall short of being. Plato knew that his teaching was a strange one and that people would laugh at him when he said the world we live in is not the real world. There are, furthermore, tremendous difficulties in his position which he couldnt solve. He was certain, however, that he had hit upon some truths of the highest importance and he was determined even at the expense of incompleteness and apparent inconsistency to cling to these insights.

Allegory of the cave

To illustrate the doctrine that the world of our senses simply mir-tors another and better world, Plato invented in the Republic the Myth of the Cave, one of the most famous of his explanatory allegories and a touching tribute to the memory of Socrates. According to this parable, the human race is like a tribe of people who have been chained generation after generation in a large cave, with their backs to the entrance. At the mouth of the cave there is a high wall, on the other side of which on a broad highway march a procession of people carrying statues representing all the objects of the world around us. The sun shining through the entrance of the cave casts the shadows of these statues on the back wall of the cave. These shadows, the “shadows of images,” dim, shifting, and distorted, are the only things known to the people chained in the cave. One day one of the prisoners of the cave is brought to the entrance and out into the sunshine. At first the strong light hurts his eyes, and he longs for the comforting darkness and familiar shadows of the cave. But as his eyes grow accustomed to the light, the beauty of the world around him floods in on him and he sees how much better, more real, more beautiful is the world outside. Thinking back with pity to the prisoners still chained in the cave, he feels that he cannot keep this knowledge to himself. Though he knows he will be laughed at, derided, even killed, the world of real things means so much that he must bring back the news of it. And so, sadly, the philosopher turns back from the world of light to reenter the cave of shadows.

Plato’s view of man

Plato held that the true part of man is really his soul and that the souls of men once enjoyed a kind of existence in which they were in direct contact with the Ideas. Then for some reason man fell from his high estate and, as punishment for some crime, the soul was condemned to exist as a prisoner in the body. The body is the prison house of the soul, Plato said. But even in his fallen state, man remembers what he once was in the world of Ideas. What we call knowing is the remembering of what we once knew in our unencumbered state. (This teaching of Plato is called the doctrine of Reminiscence.) Our knowledge is hazy and confused, Plato held, because our remembrance of the Ideas is dulled and entangled in the images which pour through our senses from the changing world of bodies outside us. The true philosopher will learn to separate these two worlds, to separate the true and certain knowledge of the unchanging Ideas from the opinion and probability which is all that the world of sense can give us. In Plato’s own words: “The soul when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say, when using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses) ... is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard, when she touches change... “But when returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the other world, the region of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.”