Plato’s World of the Forms
Plato believed true reality existed beyond the normal perceptions of the world. What we
perceive around us is a shadow of the truth. The Forms, such as justice, goodness and beauty,
inhabited this ‘other world’. Forms such as colours participate in the objects around us. We
might find a piece of music beautiful, or the way a mother holds her baby. Beauty is
participating (meaning is present) in these things, but beauty itself is beyond our normal
perception. Goodness itself was the highest form of reality an objective or absolute thing that
existed eternally, beyond our limited world. Plato was an absolutist.
Plato believed that Forms could not have been made in such a distorted world. He believed
that in a demiurge (a creator God) who took the chaotic pre-existent matter and space and
gave it shape. The demiurge used the eternal world of the Forms as a plan for the matter. The
demiurge is not a Form, though like the Forms, the demiurge is eternal and cases the cyclical
motion of the Heavens. DO NOT GET THIS DEMIURGE CONFUSED WITH THE CHRISTIAN
IDEAS ABOUT GOD – he does not participate in the world.
Forms and their perceptions seem only accessible to highly educated philosophers, leaving
many ordinary people cut off from the truth. They exist beyond the physical world, so cannot
be empirically proven to exist or not exist. Plato relies heavily on the human mental capacity
to escape the shadows.
Body/Soul Distinction
Plato believed that the soul existed before the body. Humans remember things from a
previous life before their bodily life, such as our ability to recognise numbers. We also
recognise goodness itself and beauty itself. After death the soul leaves the body and lives on in
a cycle of life and death and life. The soul is closer to the Forms than the body as it is
incorruptible and eternal. The philosopher’s soul lives on after the body, immortal and in a
state of bliss and wisdom. The souls of those focussed on bodily demands are reborn as lower
creatures. Plato held that the true philosophers should strive to free himself or herself from
physical slavery. The mind must be separated from the body and the distortions of pain and
pleasure that come from it. The philosophers life is the quest for truth; a separation from the
body so that he or she may clearly perceive reality This is the journey from the cave.