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that which governs and is the true source of everything around him.
The prisoner is then returned to the depths of the cave.
REJECTED WISDOM Because his eyes have become accustomed to the bright light of the sun, he now stumbles and struggles to see.
When he tries to explain to the other prisoners how they have been fooled, they shun him. They see him stumbling and insist that he is the one who is blind, not they. They remain convinced by what their senses
seem to show them: by the shadow- play on the cave wall. They remain seduced by the illusion of reality, and consider the one wise person among them to be a fool.
In this allegory, the shadows represent the fleeting “particulars” (Plato’s term for any individual thing we see in our “reality”), while the real objects
casting shadows represent their real and perfect Forms.
The sun outside stands for the Form of the Good. This ultimate Form, says Plato, “appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort;
and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual.
This is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life, must have his eye fixed.”
The cave allegory illustrates the hierarchical structure of Plato’s theory, with the Form of the Good at the top, the other Forms further down, and the realm of shadows, the world of particulars, at the bottom.
The prisoner’s journey upward represents the journey toward true knowledge: knowledge of the Forms and, ultimately, the Form of the Good. Like Socrates (see pp.242–3) in Plato’s imagined philosophical dialogs, the prisoner discovers the illusory nature of what we ordinarily take to be reality, and tries to help others discover the truth. The result is that he is mocked, while the prisoners remain shackled to their illusion.
The cave story helped Plato to explain his belief in the Forms, including the highest entity of all: The Form of the Good.
Why should we suppose the Forms exist?
One of Plato’s key arguments for the existence of the Forms runs as follows.
All beautiful things have something in common: namely, beauty itself. Now this
“something”—beauty itself—must exist in addition to all the particular beautiful things that there are, for clearly, none of the particulars is beauty itself. After all, each of the particulars could always be more beautiful than it is, whereas that is not true of beauty itself. And while the particulars may change and even cease to be beautiful, beauty itself is changeless.
The additional “something” is the Form.
This argument is often called the One-Over-Many Argument. If cogent, the One-Over-Many Argument can also
The One-Over-Many Argument
be applied to show that there is a Form of the horse, a Form of the bed, and so on for every property there is.
Interestingly, the One-Over-Many Argument can be applied to the Forms themselves. After all, they too have something in common: they are all Forms. Plato concludes there must be an over-arching Form: the Form of the Good. This supreme Form exemplifi es what all the different forms have in common: existence and perfection.
THE THIRD MAN OBJECTION Plato himself considered a number of objections to his theory. One of the most interesting, discussed in Plato’s dialog the Parmenides, is known as the Third Man Objection.
The One-Over-Many Argument says that whenever things share a common property, we are justifi ed in supposing
Ideas of what constitutes loveliness in the female form have changed constantly through time, from the era of Rubens to the present day. Plato argued, however, that beauty itself is eternal.
PLATO AND THE FORMS
that there exists a common Form. But if, as Plato appears to think, the Form itself possesses the property in question (if the Form of beauty is itself beautiful), then the particulars and the Form share a common property. But then, by the same argument, we must conclude that there is a second Form to account for this commonality. But if this second Form also possesses that property, there must also be a third Form, and a fourth, and so on without end. So the One- Over-Many Argument seems to generate a regress (see p.212). Rather than
establishing the existence of a single Form for each kind of thing, it seems to establish an infi nite number of such Forms. Plato denies there is an infi nite number of Forms for each kind of thing. But if he rejects that conclusion, must he not also reject the One-Over- Many Argument?
PLATO’S LEGACY
Plato’s philosophy has had a huge impact on Western culture, and particularly on Christian thinking. Take, for example,
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the Form of the Good. This Form sounds a great deal like the modern Christian conception of God. The resemblance is not entirely coincidental.
Philosophers such as Augustine (see pp.256–7) have borrowed and adapted Platonic ideas, weaving them heavily into the Christian philosophical tradition.
One 20th-century Christian thinker heavily infl uenced by Plato was C. S.
Lewis, author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the other Narnia stories.
Lewis referred to our world as the Shadowlands—a direct reference to Plato’s allegory of the Cave. Lewis, like Plato, believed that our world is ultimately illusory: the real world is that to which our immortal souls pass over when we die. In Lewis’s thinking, the Christian idea of an afterlife and Plato’s realm of the Forms are merged together.
Today, few philosophers embrace Plato’s Theory of Forms. But the questions Plato asked, and the methods he used in trying to answer them, continue to dominate the Western philosophical tradition.
“ IT’S ALL IN PLATO, ALL IN PLATO;