MACARONI # 62     Spring 2004

Plato's Slant

Plato's philosophy of Forms or Ideas is not one to be entering into on a whim, I suppose, but it seems to me that it's rooted in experiences similar to the one we're exploring. In the Phaedo , for example, Socrates, in conversation with two Pythagoreans, asks the following question:

  And must we not allow, that when I or anyone, looking at any object, observe that the thing he sees aims at being some other thing, but falls short of and cannot be that other thing, but is inferior, he who makes this observation must have had a previous knowledge of that to which the other, although similar, was inferior?

The intuition Socrates describes here is negatively couched, but it's similar to the one I've just been describing. If we're disappointed by something, it can only be because we already have a vague idea of something else that's superior to it. If a work of art moves us, it expands our vision but at the same time it reminds us of things we'd forgotten; and if we feel outrage when witnessing an act of injustice it's because we have some knowledge of what justice is, of how people ought to behave toward one another. We carry ideas around with us, in other words, and they guide us in our judgment of things.

The central issue that Plato examines in his work is this: Where do such ideas come from? The obvious answer is that our ideas come from past experience. Once we've seen several trees, for example, we begin to understand what a tree is; if we come upon a tree with a broken limb, the fact will be evident to us based on our experience of trees.   Yet this obvious theory, which goes by the name “induction,” can't explain why it is that we occasionally feel the deficiency or absence of something we've never actually experienced fully. We don't come to know love or beauty, for example, by blasély encountering it time and again, and then developing a category to encompass it. On the contrary, impressions of this kind sneak up on us, seize us violently in ways that surprise, excite, and occasionally transform us. It's not induction, but intuition at work here. Similarly, moral indignation rises unbidden when we come face to face with cruelty or injustice. We can be taught to ignore such feelings, but they arise spontaneously, and this simple fact lies at the root of all attempts to explain, describe, or defend the existence of the soul .

A little later in the Phaedo Socrates amplifies the sense of the remark I've quoted above, extending it beyond the specific issue he was discussing with his friends, (which happened to be the notion of equality), to other aspects of experience that resemble one another in that they involve us, not with empirical categories—tree, fish, supermarket—but with values:

...we are not speaking only of equality, but of beauty, goodness, justice, holiness, and of all which we stamp with the name of essence....  

In the course of his work Plato suggests   repeatedly that we have been endowed with a knowledge of values that comes to us from a source other than practical experience. At times he argues that we remember such things from a former life; at other times he suggests that the Forms themselves tangibly exist somewhere, and that we can occasionally make contact by means of either reasoning or eros. Both of these theories present difficulties, but the original impulse upon which they're based is natural and sound—it's the desire to objectify our values. Plato wants to give mass and concreteness to the essences that animate the experiences that move us. He wants to place value on a reasonable, rather than an emotional footing, so that we can continue to believe in beauty, truth, and goodness, at those times when we don't actually feel their reality and power.

Although this impulse is natural and understandable, I think it's a little misguided. After all, it's a part of both the beauty and the mystery of living, (and also the challenge and danger) that although we can sense, experience, and embody value, we can never actually possess it, the way we possess a tackle-box full of lures or a horde of silver coins. We can't actually possess value because value is an attribute of actions, not of things. Or perhaps it might be more accurate, in light of the preceding remarks, to say that value is an attribute of inter-actions. I suppose it would be not too far off the beam to suggest that we can be moved only when we put ourselves in a position to spontaneously experience, suffer along with, enter into, and interact with things.