What Is Beauty? - Plato's Theory of Forms

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. The study centres around the justification of our beliefs, and how we execute our human rationality to achieve the true meaning of knowledge and what is it to know. From the beginnings of documented philosophy, the question of our reality has sparked an array of fascinating ideas and curious concepts.

The foundations of Plato’s early writings reveal to us that he was deeply concerned with the metaphysical; he constructed a majority of his preceding works on these complex foundations. Throughout his celebrated golden age of philosophy, Plato delved into a huge span of subdivisions including theories on the mind, society and learning. He painted his own ideal picture of how the State should be governed and exactly who should govern them. These rulers, of course, were to be the impeccable minds of Philosophers (Book 5 of The Republic).

To Plato, however, a Philosopher meant more than a humble thinker. He was a man who believed that the true forms of general terms, including adjectives and nouns, independently exist somewhere. This seems a rather unusual claim. Try to imagine Justice as a physical entity, for a human mind such as yours and mine it’s almost impossible to picture Justice without human qualities like gender and a voice. For Plato, these forms were answers to questions that he fleshed out across his Socratic dialogues. What is piety? What is justice? What is beauty? What is the good? A true Philosopher would spend his life trying to grasp a solid definition of these forms, and once he has, he would become an honourable wiseman who can rightfully make judgement of these forms as we perceive them here on earth. This, Plato claimed, is true knowledge.

“If something is truly known, it is known forever; it cannot turn out to be false tomorrow”

Before we explore Plato’s forms in detail, it is important to understand why he produced such a radical theory. Plato sought the truth, and like all great thinkers, was determined to find it. In his early dialogues, Socrates never finds an acceptable answer to his main focus; defining the virtues. Fortunately, Plato’s attempts continued throughout his works, as he was forever inspired to draw closure on the matter.

So let’s explore Plato’s focus, what exactly are the virtues? In order to act justly, we must know exactly what justice is. The problem is raised through the narration of Socrates; the heroic figure at the centre of Plato’s collective writings. Like justice, Plato believed that goodness was an objective matter. Goodness was not an object of desire nor a function of pleasure. Desire distracted reason with it’s cunning appeal, misleading the mind into maximizing it’s ‘good’ cravings, taking over our better reason. Goodness, therefore, is something we can get wrong or right, thus it is important to use our reason correctly to make the right judgements. This is another distinctive feature of Plato’s crowning Philosopher. However, how can we ever truly know what is good when we can never physically grasp it?

Another similar issue hides in the everyday concept of ‘blue’. We have never encountered an ambiguous example of blue, yet we all are familiar with the concept and assign it to various things such as weather, feelings and most notably of all, colour. We use blue to describe our sadness, or the coldness of an object, but seeing as nobody can claim to be able to hold blue within their palm, how did we initially learn to use the concept?

“Although we use the word ‘blue’, how did we learn to do so, when we never encounter an ambiguous example?”

We must have some sort of knowledge of blue, for I can definitely state that my socks, for example, are blue. The term is used so boundlessly that it would seem comical of me to state that blue does not exist. Blue, however, in physical terms, is a master of invisibility. Blue, like material objects, is not immune to change. After time, my socks will lose their vibrancy, or I could dye them another colour and they would no longer be blue at all. Not only will they no longer resemble the colour they once were, they may also fall apart and become unrecognisable as a pair of socks. This example partakes in the subject of change, which you can read more of here.

Now that my socks no longer resemble socks, are they still to be considered as socks? Furthermore, how would we even know that these were blue socks initially? We need to establish an agreed standard to make these judgements, but in a world where we cannot physically hold the concept of blue, and where change is constant, where do we even begin? If we create these standards, they must be widely acknowledged and irrefutable to allow us to gain true knowledge of these matters.

This sock-changing dilemma opposes Plato’s ideal of a known proposition being unable to become false. The objects of knowledge must be unchanging in order for them to be known. ‘A square has four sides’ cannot be untrue tomorrow, otherwise we can never claim that this is knowledge in the first place. Mathematical matters, or rational knowledge, does not change, and similarly to the concept of blue, is not physical. We can hold four coins in our hand, but we aren’t holding ‘four’, we are holding coins which amount to the concept of four. Socks, however, and the coins are empirical knowledge; we can perceive them with our senses. Empirical knowledge isn’t permanent, and as some Philosophers argue, can therefore deceive us. Knowledge must exist independently of the changing, imperfect world. It must be rational, like numbers.

The Theory of Forms

Plato’s Theory of Forms is an attempt to establish these standards. He claims that real entities exist for all general terms, including Blue, Beauty, Justice and so forth. These forms are perfect and they enable us to have true knowledge, for they are timeless, stable, whole, resist change and are intelligible (like mathematics). Hence, we can know beauty, for beauty exists.

Although we cannot find Beauty itself in the natural world, we can find a resemblance of the form in many things. People, flowers, art and poetry can all partake and share in the Form of the Beautiful, and can also partake no more. This is what has happened to my blue socks. They once shared the Form of Blue, but now they do no longer. Blue itself still exists independently of my socks. You cannot see perfect versions of these forms, however, only imperfect ‘shadow copies’ (not to be confused with the shadows in Plato’s Cave Allegory, which will be discussed later). Plato’s theory presents a new, odd complex:

• The physical world (natural world) is subject to change and imperfect = unreal

• The Realm of the Forms (metaphysical/ experienced through the immortal soul) is permanent and perfect = real

Despite the forms not existing in the natural world, engaging in Socratic dialogue and mastering the art of philosophical thinking will enable us to reach an intellectual idea of what the Form of Beauty, for example, really is.

Despite this seemingly obtainable knowledge, Plato still persists that we cannot claim to know anything about the ever-changing, imperfect natural world. We can however, achieve knowledge about the perfect, permanent forms. Once one has grasped this proper knowledge, they are in an appropriate position to make judgements about the shadow copies of them. These are the stepping stones that aspiring philosophers must tread in order to become what Plato considers to be not only a fine thinker, but a thinker that is worthy of governing a State.

“Who then are those whom we shall compel to be guardians? Surely they will be the men who are wisest about affairs of the State, and by whom the State is best administered, and who at the same time have other honours and another and a better life than that of politics?” - Socrates to Glaucon, upon asking whom is the best choice for governing the State (Allegory of the Cave)

The Third Man Argument

Plato himself later criticizes his outlandish yet intriguing theory, which he only mentions in his middle dialogues. This strong objection is known as The Third Man Argument, and can be found in Plato’s Parmenides. The critique is unusual for Socrates seems to become stripped of his impenetrable acuity and loses an argument. The stages are as follows:

• Beautiful things within the world are beautiful just insofar (so far as) as they resemble the Form of the Beautiful

• The Form of the Beautiful, is itself, beautiful

• Surely then there should be a third form, which the Beautiful itself resembles? The shadow copy reflects the perfect form, but what does the perfect form resemble? Socrates, for example, is a man, because he resembles something else - the Form of Man. Does this not require a third man for the Form of Man to resemble in order for it to be a man too? This presents an infinite, vicious cycle.

Aristotle’s Opposition

Aristotle and Plato, although tutor and student, were quite literally worlds apart in their philosophical universes. They both had different ideas when it came to the sketchy intricacies of metaphysics.

Metaphysics wasn’t always such a confounding subject, or perhaps it’s superlunary qualities rendered the study long misplaced. In our world today, metaphysics means the ‘ultimate’ reality (beyond ordinary science), whereas in the time of Plato, it simply meant ‘beyond/after’ physics. An amusing story circulates that Andronicus was unsure of how to file a peculiar set of writings, so he placed them on the shelf “after” the physics section.

For Aristotle, metaphysics was the basis of science. However, unlike Plato, he wanted to obtain knowledge about the comprehensible world and it’s ‘substances’. He claimed that real things, such as trees and goats, are the fundamental and only things that exist. This made him an Empiricist, for he believed we could only obtain true knowledge about the natural world using our senses. This didn’t mean that he wasn’t concerned with mathematics, he simply believed the two should be explored together. Many of Aristotle’s observations, however, were designed to fit his own complex metaphysics as he tried to show how natural things function differently depending on their cause.

Plato felt that Empirical knowledge was inferior and believed there to be a deception between an object’’s appearance and reality (agreeing with the Pre-Socratics). True knowledge, he claimed, comes from thinking and not looking. This is why he turned to logic, to these forms which are abstract, exact, immune to change and timeless with an undeniable objectivity, the same qualities as rational numbers. In order for knowledge to be true, Plato decided that it must be both timeless and cerebral.