Philosopher Coasters 2 - Plato.
Plato (428 BCE – 348 BCE)
We start the series with Plato.
The origin of philosophy can be arguably traced back to ancient Greece, which began around the 6th century BCE. During that period, thinkers originated questions about how the world came to be, and many philosophers came up with their own mystic understandings of the world – among whom include Thales, Parmenides, and Pythagoras. However, a consistent systemic theory didn’t arrive until the Socratic period.
Socrates’ thoughts are mostly captured by Plato’s works. Indeed, it is difficult to find Socrates’ direct writings. A lot of what we know about Socrates today is conveyed through Plato’s recounting of dialogues between Socrates and others.
What Socrates and Plato introduced is the theory of forms. It is perhaps one of the most important ideas in human history, as it coined the beginning of metaphysics. The theory attempts to explain the essence of the world beyond what humans can experience. To do so, they proposed a realm of Ideas, where each experience can correspond to a clean-cut tangible-by-thinking Idea. For example, a pen is made of wood because it beholds the Idea of woodiness; a person is happy because he/she obtains the Idea of happiness. Although this theory does not fully address issues about the hierarchy of Ideas, it did provide an initial internally logical structure to explain the world that we live in. It also made a heroic attempt to connect abstract concepts with concrete experiences, which is the forever quest of metaphysics.
The quote to select thus must point to the theory of forms. However, it is extremely challenging to find the concrete sentence because in no dialogue is there a definite formulation of the theory. Platonic forms are deduced from the dialogues rather than described.
Theory of forms concentrated in one dialogue – Phaedo. In the latter half of the dialogue, Socrates proposed “absolute” forms that are universal and transcendent of time and space. We chose (100c3-7):
[For it seems to me that] if anything else is beautiful besides Beauty Itself, it is beautiful on account of nothing else than because it partakes of Beauty Itself. [And I speak in the same way about everything else.]
Read it five times and one would get it. The sentence gives three implications:
- anything else is beautiful refers to physical world’s appearance
- Beauty with a B indicates the realm of Ideas which are separate from our world
- it establishes a one-to-one relationship between the “anything else is beautiful” to “Beauty”
Idea is the essence of true existence. This is the core principle of Socrates and Plato’s philosophies, which is also when metaphysics was invented, although not coined until the first century CE.