picture in my mind

I went for a philosophy discussion thing earlier this week about Plato's Symposium, 

that left me more or less mind-blown -- 

and then I started seriously looking up Plato's Theory of Forms 

and The Allegory of the Cave. 

Which if you have no idea about, have a sampling here:

I feel somewhat vindicated now as a professed idealist. I didn't know Plato was an idealist (or apparently, a realist, if we're using proper philosophical terms), and I find myself very compelled by a lot of his ideas. He makes being an idealist sound like absolutely the way to live a good life because it means you are striving towards the Real. And if you're not, you're basically blind; content to live life knowing only phantoms of what is Real.

I think I understand now what The Theory of Forms means,
but it's really difficult to put it simply, or to summarize it satisfactorily.

But I shall try:

The modern world puts a lot of stock into materialism. In other words, if you can see, hear, touch, taste, or smell something, scientists will say it is real. If we can't measure or detect it by our senses, the modern world will say it isn't real.

Plato says that everything material is in constant change and flux. You, me, the screen you're looking at, the food you just ate, the clothes on your body. Everything material is impermanent. How can something so impermanent and temporal be real? How can they be true? He posits that only the permanent and eternal are true and real.

An example of what is real: mathematical truths. They will always be true. The concept of a perfect circle is Real. The perfect circle has the same distance from every point on its circumference to its center. A circle that exists in our material world however can only at best approach this concept of a perfect circle. Plato calls such concepts, Forms. Forms have to exist outside our material world; we can refer to this world for the moment as the abstract world. (I'm sure there's a name for this world but I haven't learnt that far.) Plato is thus a dualist (I just learnt this today!), someone who believes in two separate worlds (unlike Aristotle's idea that came later, I think, that tried to combine both the material and the abstract -- hm, I'm not sure about Aristotle yet).

Everything material, like our circle, has its essence in something more Real, i.e. the concept of a circle. A circle you draw out, or the circular shape of a plate you hold, is never the perfect circle but it is built on the concept of circularity i.e. the Form of a circle. In other words, the abstract is the cause for the physical.

Since abstractness is the cause of the physical, it is therefore more real. This totally blew my mind when I heard it that night. Because obviously it overturns popular modern thinking, where we only value the physical and the material.

And this Platonic idea totally corroborates Sufi poetry that often talks of God as the only Real etc. We are all contingent on God; only God is Real.

Fireworks in my brain yay! Sometimes thinking on philosophy feels like my brain is in danger of exploding.



Plato comes insanely close to Islamic theology; this is amazing (no wonder at the discussion, they were saying how Muslims have speculated if Socrates was possibly a prophet of God -- oh wells, an outsider would be inclined to think Islam took it from ancient Greek philosophy instead):

(I quote from my battered 17-year-old copy of Sophie's World -- I can't believe we were made to read this at Secondary 2; what did I know at the time):

Plato believed that reality is divided into two regions. 

One region is the world of the senses about which we can only have approximate or incomplete knowledge by using our five (approximate or incomplete) senses. In this sensory world, 'everything flows' and nothing is permanent. Nothing in the sensory world is, there are only things that come to be and pass away. The other region is the world of ideas, about which we can have true knowledge by using our reason. This world of ideas cannot be perceived by the senses, but the ideas (or forms) are eternal and immutable. 

According to Plato, man is a dual creature. We have a body that 'flows', is inseparably bound to the world of the senses, and is subject to the same fate as everything else in this world -- a soap bubble, for example. All our senses are based in the body and are consequently unreliable. But we also have an immortal soul -- and this soul is the realm of reason. And not being physical, the soul can survey the world of ideas. 

Plato also believed that the soul existed before it inhabited the body. But as soon as the soul wakes up in a human body, it has forgotten all the perfect ideas. Then something starts to happen. In fact, a wondrous process begins. As the human being discovers the various forms in the natural world, a vague recollection stirs his soul. He sees a horse -- but an imperfect horse. The sight of it is sufficient to awaken in the soul a faint recollection of the perfect 'horse', which the world once saw in the world of ideas, and this stirs the soul with a yearning to return to its true realm. Plato calls this yearning eros -- which means love. The soul, then, experiences a 'longing to return to its true origin'. From now on, the body and the whole sensory world is experienced as imperfect and insignificant. The soul yearns to fly home on the wings of love to the world of ideas. It longs to be freed from the chains of the body.

As Muslims say when one of us passes on from this life,
إِنَّا لِلّهِ وَإِنَّـا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعونَ
To God we belong, and to Him we shall return.