Plato’s Dialogues and the Theory of Forms: An Exploration of Knowledge and Essence
Item 2: Plato
1. Dialogues of Plato
1.1 Characteristics of the Dialogues of Plato
Plato’s work is a collection of texts written in the form of dialogues, which were an absolute novelty in its time. The precedent of these dialogues is the theater of his time. It should be noted a number of features:
- Most are featuring Socrates.
- The fact that Plato never speaks in the first person, but through other characters who tell stories in which they are not the players, limits the possibility of attributing specific doctrines to Plato. Also, in the Platonic dialogues, Socrates refuses to appear as a sage or a representative of doctrines. All this tells us that Plato’s philosophy is not doctrinal knowledge, but consists of an activity.
- The dialogues often include fictitious or fantastic stories, mythological stories, analogies, similes, imaginary scenarios, and so on. There must be some internal connection between dialogue and philosophy. Plato often refers to this in the name of “dialectic,” which means “art of dialogue.”
Vocabulary:
Dialectic: This knowledge is not focused on things themselves, but on the relationships between them, established through discourse.
Essence: That which makes a thing truly what it is. For example, for a flute, its essence is being played by someone who knows how to do it perfectly.
1.2 Socratic Dialogue and Platonic Dialogue
Recall some characteristics of Socrates’ dialogues, with Plato being our main source:
- The character of Greek learning: Greek knowledge is primarily practical and determined. This is consistent with the idea that the limited, which is something definite (finite), is all that is proper. This is why Plato’s dialogues are presented as an investigation that begins with the question “What is…” (virtue, essence, etc.) and that should end by saying “(virtue, essence, etc.) is x.” This way of saying what something is could be described as the essence of that something. But this rarely occurs in the dialogues of Plato, which often do not reach a conclusion. The way there is this lack of conclusion is always the same: Socrates’ statements do not settle the question, but in doing so, they already, so to speak, enter into a polemic.
- The “distance” philosophical: This activity aims to expose the implications that constitute the fabric of our experience and usually go unnoticed. This is the core of Plato’s use of dialogue, which makes his texts take the term “dialectic.”
2. The Dialectic of Plato
Vocabulary:
Doxa: Usually translated as “opinion,” it specifically refers to the knowledge of things and could amount to what we now call “belief.”
2.1 Doxa
The “regular course” of knowing is what Plato called doxa. We can translate it as “opinion” and “appearance.” A “right opinion” is the ultimate knowledge that we hope for regarding things because doxa is not only the way we know them but also the same way they are presented. Doxa is the only possible way of knowing things that come and appear because it is the way they are presented and appear. This is what Plato sometimes called “sensitive knowledge” (as, indeed, things can only be grasped through perception). Therefore, we are obliged to distinguish between:
- What is spoken or expressed, which is a “thing” that outlines and distinguishes the experience, which “is.”
- And what we say that something is, or what one might describe as “the essence of the thing.”
Vocabulary:
Thing: Each of the entities accessible to knowledge through the senses and with respect to which such knowledge is the skill in dealing with them.
Ideas: This is the being of each of the things, which makes it exactly what it is and determines it.
Episteme: A superior form of knowledge. For Plato, it is the knowledge of the intellectual structure that is always presupposed in all knowledge of things and dealing with them.
2.2 Episteme
Intellectual knowledge (episteme) is not at all a way to “overcome” opinion by knowing the truth about things that doxa would be unable to achieve. This is because it does not point to the thing itself, but to the definition of its way of being what it is. This warns us against interpreting Platonism as a form that seeks essences or ideas in a so-called “ultra-reality” located beyond the visible world. Also, the knowledge of essence, knowing what things are, is not mystical but consists of the aforementioned skill or expertise in dealing with things.
2.2.1 Essence and Reminiscence
Plato tells in one of his dialogues how Socrates, speaking with a slave, gets him to state a geometrical theorem that he had never learned before. This suggests that the slave’s soul acquired knowledge “in an earlier time.” What Socrates tries to show is that learning should not come from contact with something unknown but from remembering something we already knew without knowing that we knew it. However, this does not mean that “memory” may be more than an allegory: the “previous time” referred to by Plato is not chronological (as if we had lived another life before) but hierarchical. It is not an “earlier time” but something even more ancient or primary, a previous knowledge that is presupposed in any other “later” knowledge.
2.2.2 The Division and Ideas
The main task carried out in Plato’s writings is the distinction between two levels: that of ideas and things. This does not mean that we should think of ideas as a special class of divine things, but as something that cannot be anything other than the ideal structure under which “sensitive” things are what they are and appear as they do. Exposing this structure is what is pursued in Platonic dialectic.
2.3 The Problem of Good
One of Plato’s major concerns is to distinguish the mode of being of what he called “good” from other things that can be considered in some sense “good.” Plato’s effort to distinguish “good” from “good things” is manifested in his insistence that it does not belong to the category of things at all. Things themselves are always something that can be produced, while “good” does not belong to that genre but to what Plato calls “use” or “action.” Plato’s ideas are like that: “good” is what provides the right reason in action, giving righteous actions, making them worthy of being rated as good. Without that rule, things would be endlessly elastic, they could be used in any way and it would not matter, they would not be this or that, and the same would happen with words.