Plato’s theory of ideas

The world of the ideal, from the point of view of the brilliant Greek philosopher.

It is often said that Socrates was the father of Western philosophy as we understand it today, but these merits did not serve to eclipse the contributions of his disciple Plato.

This Athenian, born in the 5th century B.C., began by taking an interest in further developing the moral philosophy that had characterized his master, but but ended up creating something very different, focusing on the nature of what exists rather than on the dos and don'ts of what is to be done and what is not to be done.. This contribution is known as Plato's theory of ideas.

The world of the ideal, according to Plato

Plato returned to the fundamental questions from which the pre-Socratic philosophers started: What is it that exists? How does the cosmos work? The Athenian noted that, while the great ideals that guide the acts of men, such as goodness and justice, are perfect and valid everywhere regardless of the context, the world around us is always changing, dependent on everything that happens in time and space: trees grow and dry up, people grow old and disappear, mountains are modified by storms, the sea changes shape depending on the wind, and so on.

Moreover, nothing that we can know about our environment is universal, since it depends on the point of view of our environment.It depends on each person's point of view or even on the information available to us. An ox may appear relatively large when seen from a distance, but if we get closer we can see that the tree next to it is practically a bush and that the animal is therefore rather small.

And, in spite of this, behind the things we see there seem to be ideas thanks to which we understand that chaos of changing matter that makes up the landscapes through which we move: when we see an olive tree we know that it is a tree, and when we see a pine tree, which is very different, we also know that it is a tree. Ideas serve to allow us to think correctly and not get lost in constant confusion, since, if they are well founded, they are valid everywhere.

But, according to Plato, ideas were not part of the same plane of existence as what surrounds us in the physical world. For him, when we see different kinds of chairs and recognize them as such, we do not merely recognize the common physical properties of these objects, but we we evoke an idea of a "chair" that exists beyond them..

The material is composed of shadows

According to the philosophy of this thinker, behind every element of the physical world there is an ideal, the perfect idea of each thing, which appears in our mind in a more or less imperfect way but which definitely does not emerge from the realm of the material, because it belongs to the world of ideas, a place of perfect, universal and immutable elements. This concept is central to Plato's theory of ideas.

Thus, the reality that we perceive through the senses is for Plato fundamentally a delusion.A set of bad copies of the elements that make up the world of ideas, each one with imperfections that distance it from its true essence. For example, geometric figures exist only in ideas, since there is no element of nature that faithfully reproduces them: not even more or less spherical bodies, such as bubbles or drops of water, form a real sphere.

Truth is in ideas

Plato did not limit himself to pointing out that there is an unbridgeable gap between the world of ideas and the world of material things; he also Plato also defended the idea that the true belonged to the first realm and not to the second.. To demonstrate this he resorted to mathematics, just as the Pythagorean sects had been doing: geometrical and numerical relations are always true in themselves, regardless of what happens in the world of matter.

Similarly, Plato came to believe that truth exists beyond what our senses can perceive.. If mathematics and geometry are true independently of what we can find around us, there must be a realm of ideas in which all of them can be found.

A place where the perfect idea of a chair, a flower, a river and everything that exists exists exists. He embodied this idea in one of his best remembered allegories, known as the myth of the cave: what is true exists even though no one has been able to access it because of the limitations of living in the physical world.

Innate ideas according to Plato

But Plato's theory of ideas raised a question that could not be ignored: how can it be that the world of ideas and the world of the material being two separate realms, we are in contact with both? To answer this question, the Athenian philosopher started from the idea that that what we identify with our person is, in reality, the combination of two elements: body and soul..

Our mind, related to our self-consciousness and our ability to think, is in reality an entity belonging to the world of ideas which, although eternal, has been temporarily locked in a material prison (our body).

The body, for its part, has senses to know what is happening in the world of the physical, but it is imperfect, easy to damage and also subject to the deception of appearances, while the soul has reason and, as it belongs to the world of ideals, it has the innate capacity to evoke the elements of the world of ideas. For Plato, therefore, to know is to remember through the use of reason, to bring back into our consciousness images and concepts that we have carried with us since our childhood. that we have carried with us since birth and that correspond to an eternal and universal realm.

The role of the philosopher

According to Plato, the task of the philosopher is to avoid the analysis of the appearances of the physical world, populated by deceptive formsand to focus on accessing perfect ideas through the use of reason. This function is also expressed in his allegory of the Platonic cave.

But this is not as romantic as it sounds: this philosopher defended a model of political organization in which the government was basically exercised by an oligarchy of thinkers, and he proposed a strong segregation by social classes.

The theory of ideas is, therefore, a proposal about what exists, but also about how reliable knowledge can be obtained and how this knowledge should be administered. That is, it addresses both the branch of philosophy of ontology and that of epistemology and politics.

What remains of the theory of ideas?

Today, although Platonic philosophy is rarely championed in academic circles, it continues to exert a remarkable influence on our way of thinking.

Every time we imagine truth as something independent of the events that occur in the world we are reproducing a part of Plato's theory of ideas without realizing it.