Plato

okay hello welcome to the lecture on Plato for this series of online introduction to philosophy lectures today we'll be talking about Plato's metaphysics and epistemology so to begin with let's refresh our memories about what Socrates was interested in because as you may recall from the last lecture plato was the student of Socrates and he is concerned primarily with developing the views of Socrates into a theoretical account because you may recall Socrates was not himself so much interested in explaining why the things that he said were true he was more interested in trying to get people to realize that they did not know what they thought they knew so let's go ahead and refresh our memory here this is something that was one of the fundamental claims that Socrates wanted to make which is that a virtuous person is one who knows what the good is and that's one of the most important things in our lives is to figure out how we can actually know what the good is so Socrates says the virtuous person has a certain kind of knowledge and Plato wants to understand how we could come to have that kind of knowledge in other words he wants to give an epistemology or a theoretical account of how we come to know things that we think we do so what he wants to show in particular is that knowledge of the good is possible so he in order to do that though you first have to answer the prior question which is how do we know anything at all so if you want to know the good well then first you must be able to say what it means to know something in the first place and then you can go on to give an account of what it means to know the good so it starts with the more general question what is knowledge now let me ask you a question here rhetorical question but just take a second to think about it so I drove I'm now LaGuardia college recording this lecture and I drove here and parked my car out on Skillman Street where I normally park it and so now I want to ask you do I know where my car is so I'll just give you a second to come up with the answer in your own head do I know well arguably I don't know for instance my car may have been towed I could be standing in here right now and my car may actually have been in the way of something and it may have been towed so I can't say with certainty that I know that my car is out in the lot where I left it now I believe that it's there and this illustrates an important difference between knowing something and believing that thing belief is compatible with the thing that you believe being false so I might believe that something is true it might turn out to be false but I still believe it it just turns out that I'm mistaken and my beliefs are mistaken so knowledge on the other hand seems different we don't say that you know something if there's the chance that you're mistaken about that thing so knowledge requires certainty a Plato interprets this in an epistemological way so what Plato argues is that if knowledge requires certainty then the things that we know can't change now notice that that's a metaphysical interpretation the things that are the objects of our knowledge have to be constants and this makes a kind of intuitive sense if you want to say that you know something but that thing is constantly changing well as soon as you say something about it the thing will be different and so it doesn't seem as though we can say that you have real knowledge of the thing unless that thing remains constant does not change but if that's the truth then the physical world can't be an object of knowledge and this is where Plato asked something and with the pre-socratic philosophers like Heraclitus who we discussed a couple of lectures back so Heraclitus thought that the physical world was constantly changing that everything was in flux Plato agrees with them the physical world is constantly changing even things which seem not to change like a table or a piece of metal are undergoing changes as evidenced by the fact that later on they will decay and go out of existence at the very least so Plato takes it as kind of definitional of a physical object that it undergoes change at some point and if you really take this meta physical interpretation of knowledge that you can't know something if that thing is changing well it immediately follows that the physical world can't be an object of knowledge we can't know about the world by for instance sensing it the physical world is that stuff which we have access to via our senses so we here excuse me we see we here we taste we touch we smell that's how we know about the physical world in this loose sense of no but of course Plato thinks that's not really knowledge because those things are constantly changing as Heraclitus put it these things aren't a constant state of flux now if we were to have real knowledge then the things that we know I've got to meet certain requirements so we've already seen the first requirement that these things must be they've got to be unchanging but of course if they're unchanging as we just sort of run through things that are unchanging cannot be physical things and that's just because as previously just said Plato takes to that sort of definitionally true of physical objects that they're constantly changing so whatever it is that's non changing whatever it is that's non changing is going to be something that's not physical so if there is real knowledge and we haven't yet said that there is but if there is going to be something like real knowledge play-doh things that that thing has to be unchanging and that requires that it be non-physical now of course that also requires it to be eternal in the sense of being uncreated and undestroyed and that's just because you may not think about this but actually being created are being destroyed is a kind of change so if you don't exist at one point and then you do exist at the next point you've undergone a change you've changed from existing to non-existing or vice versa from non existing to existing so real knowledge then the objects of knowledge must be the kinds of things which are eternal not changing non-physical now if it turns out that there are no such things like that then Plato will conclude that knowledge really is impossible so what he's trying to argue here is first of all we need to figure out what not what it means to say you know something according to him to say you know something is to say that you have certainty about that thing to say that you have certainty about something is to say that that thing cannot change and if it's true that the thing cannot change then we can't be talking about anything which is physical and we can't be talking about things which are created or destroyed now again if there are no such things like that then we will have to conclude that there is no such thing as knowledge and that may be one possibility in epistemology skepticism is always something having to deal with and this is one way the skepticism could come out to be true it can be true if there are no eternal non-physical unchanging objects which can serve as the appropriate objects of knowledge claims now of course Plato is not a skeptic Plato thinks that knowledge is possible and so he devises a strategy which is to look somewhere where we already think we know something and then some model is epistemology his theory of knowledge on what's happening in that area so if you were alive 2,000 years ago and you we're trying to find sub certainty where do you think you would look well hopefully you were just thinking to yourself you think about geometry or mathematics there doesn't seem to be the possibility that facts about arithmetic like for instance two plus two being four or three plus five being eight those things don't seem to be the kind of things which are candidates for change well that's interesting because remember we just got through saying that non changing is not change this is something that's required for real knowledge and of course two plus two being four seems to meet that requirement already it was true in Plato's day it's true in our day it was true before you were born it'll be true after you die two plus two being four seems to be the kind of thing which has to be true or if you don't like arithmetic just take some basic properties of numbers the number two is prime the number two is even the number three is prime but odd so here we are talking about these things we're saying things about numbers this number is prime this number is odd but numbers don't seem to be the kind of thing which you can discover in the physical world no one has ever bumped their head on the number two hanging up a dream no one has ever had the square root of nine fall on their toe as they walk across the lawn no one has never stubbed their foot on the Pythagorean theorem these things don't seem to be the kinds of things which could be physical and notice we already have a good reason for believing that these things are non-physical because we've already discovered that they're unchanging now notice what this would mean if you denied it so if you want to say that two plus two being poor is a physical fact about reality well then you have to be open to the possibility that it could change at some point because remember every physical thing is something which change is at some point so if you can accept that two plus do my someday to be equal to 156 that is perfectly fine to say excuse me that was uh hitting the wrong buttons here um so if you're happy saying that two plus two could be 156 that is perfectly fine for you to say well this is a physical fact about reality but Plato's not happy saying that since he is of the conviction that mathematical truths cannot change there is impossible for two plus two to be anything besides four it's impossible for the number two to be anything besides prime so they can't be physical objects in these facts can't be physical facts because they do not change they are not found in the physical world but yet we take mathematics very seriously we don't view it as simply a story that we've made up for instance to compare this thing about Santa Claus now a bit of a spoiler alert now there is no Santa if it does not exist so literally speaking everything we say about Santa Claus is false Santa Claus is not bad Santa Claus is not jolly Santa Claus does not live at the North Pole Santa Claus does not have elves or reindeers working for him now of course we can say there's a story that we tell and in that story it's true that Santa Claus has these characteristics so of course if someone thought that in the story of stand-up he was a tall skinny person who was clean-shaven that person would be mistaken about the story but notice that's a story that's not real but math can't be like that says play-doh if we want to take this kind of attitude the numbers don't exist in the physical world and therefore don't exist at all we end up saying that mathematics is not serious we end up saying that two plus two equals four is exactly analogous to saying the Santa wears red it's something we tell story about it's just something we've made up the past time we were bored one day and we said let's make up a story there are these things called numbers and they work like this they work like that Plato doesn't think that that's the way it is he thinks math tells us about the world math tells us when two objects have in common they have in common that there's two of them now those two objects aren't the number itself because those objects will change but what they have in common is the number two there being two of them and they share that with every group of two and every group of three shares that and every before share of that so these things Plato says they're required in order to take mathematics seriously and this is a very powerful argument and we'll see as we go through the course that this pops up over and over again Plato's a rationalist so and we'll get to this in a second but he thinks that knowledge is acquired by reason but then will seem later that there are people who are empiricists who think that the senses give us knowledge but if you think that the senses give us knowledge then it's up to you to explain how it is that we can have the kind of knowledge that we do namely mathematical knowledge which is based merely on the senses so Plato says well look we can see then that numbers and geometrical shapes exist as non-physical eternal and unchanging objects now I didn't really talk about geometrical shapes a second ago but you can kind of easily see why geometrical shapes would have to be non-physical as well on Plato's views so for instance take some basic facts about geometry lines are composed of points points have no dimensions so lines have no dimensions so when you draw a line on a piece of paper you're not actually representing the properties that lines are said to have in geometry lines don't have width that's a dimension again of course we can't draw a line without drawing something that has width so everything you see in your geometry textbook according to Plato our representation of triangles not triangles themselves this of course a confusion that modern people often make they look at the picture and they say that's a triangle or if Plato sees a representation of a triangle not the actual object itself so numbers for him exist as non-physical objects through shapes squares circles triangles these are not physical things again the reasoning is straightforward if they were physical things they would change then someday it might not be true that circles are those objects where every point on the circumference is equidistant from the center and that just seems unacceptable to him now so how do we get in touch with these non physical objects well we get in touch with them by the use of reason and this is what makes Plato a rationalist rationalists are those philosophers who think that knowledge real knowledge is acquired by reason and reason alone so here we see Plato developing a worldview where there are two components to reality on the one hand there are the physical elements of reality tables chairs cats and dogs and these things have as their properties change and being in flux coming into being going out of being existing for a while in between they're real they exist but also on top of that there is a non-physical element to reality for Plato and where as we get in touch with tables and chairs via our senses remember we just talked about that we get in touch with non-physical objects by reasoning about them and to force that a little bit what Plato has in mind here is that we're able to use reason to grasp abstract concepts we'll talk about this shortly but just to give you a preview when you talk about dogs you don't have to talk about any particular dog Plato says you can just be talking about the thing which dogs share the the property of being a dog but you're not thereby talking about this dog or that particular dog you're talking about all dogs and also Oh dogs now animals don't seem to be able to do that my dog doesn't seem to be able to think about what dogs have in common my dog can be confronted in perception with a particular animal but it's not able to use the commonalities among these animals as a way to form the abstract concept which picks out the thing which all and only dogs share so we're going to come back to that now this again is just to say that no real knowledge can only be achieved via the use of reason and we've already seen very roughly plato's argument for that the physical world is revealed to us by our senses the physical world is constantly in flux in order for us to have knowledge we must be able to target something which is not in flux the senses only give us access to things which are in flux so the senses cannot be sources of knowledge only reason which somehow is going to get us in touch with these unchanging non-physical objects only that kind of faculty could result in real dollars Plato thinks now he has a word for these non physical objects and the word that Plato uses is forms now of course that's not really the word that Plato uses since Plato is using a Greek word and the actual Greek word that he is using is itis and you should recognize in that Greek word the English word ideas and that's because they are related to each other we don't translate the Greek word I dos as idea because it would give modern people the wrong idea - no pun intended when we modern people think of the word idea we think of something which is in the mind of the person we think of something which is in here in the mine but of course Plato's ideas are not in the mind of the person at all and there's a straightforward reason for thinking that I know about the number two you know about the number two she knows about the number two we know about the number two now if that's going to be true then the number two has to be out there if this chair over here or this PowerPoint slide objector thing remote-controlled only exists in my mind that you can't get in touch with it you can't know about it objectively so Plato things um the I dos the forms the ideas they don't exist in the mind of any particular person they exist outside they're out in reality now we get in touch with them in a certain sense by using reason not by seeing them you can't see an idea you can taste an idea you can touch an idea but you can only think about an idea the number two cannot be seen it can only be comprehended with our rational faculties so this is what I just said now of course they're not located in time or space and that again follows for a sort of very obvious reason only physical objects are located at places and at times so you cannot say that the idea the number two exists at any particular place in the world only physical objects exist at locations and act times so whatever these forms are they are not located the computing they're not located in the world around us they are out aside of the physical realm in a perfect eternal timeless unchanging non physical realm count these ideas these forms are graspable by the human mind this is the metaphor that Plato uses over and over again when you understand that the number two is even or crying the mind has grabbed hold of some facts it has it in his grasp so to speak but of course not its physical grasp his physical grasp not not this way but with the mind in an analogous kind of way we're able to understand or comprehend these kinds of eternal and unchanging facts something which only humans seem to be capable of doing now why would you think this well one reasons already been giving well one reasons already been given and that's the following reason if there is real knowledge according to Plato it must be of these unchanging things we certainly seem to have knowledge of mathematics so it certainly seems like there are these non-physical things but of course most people are not convinced by that so Plato once you are offer another argument which through the history of the universe has come to be known as the one over many argument so here's Plato's basic rough picture so take this line right here this line is the dividing line between the physical world down here on the bottom and the non-physical world which is up here at the top so here's you over here right and you're making a judgment about these particular objects so you're saying you're looking at these objects saying I love these or trees now ordinarily you might have thought that what's going on in this case is that you're looking at the tree and coming to have knowledge about it but Plato's just got through arguing that well you can't really say that this is delivered by the senses there's got to be something else some aspect that reason is providing and that's what this is supposed to be simple excuse me that's what this is supposed to be symbolizing here so somehow the mind is able to reach out and grasp the form of tree now what's the form of tree the form of tree is that thing which all and only trees have in common it's the thing which makes a tree a tree there's got to be something which all and only trees have in common that's why they're trees and not for instance cows human beings are never confused by this or at least normally functioning ones nobody walks into a forest and says ah tree tree dog cats not sure what that is we can all see that even though this tree will lose its leaves in the winter and this tree will not they're both trees so they've got to share something they've got to have something in common which makes it the fact that they're trees but all the physical properties of trees seem ill-suited to do this job so for instance you might have thought well gee let's see what makes a tree a tree well they have branches but of course there are things which aren't trees that have branches shrubs for instance they're not trees but they have branches well maybe it's that they have bark well some trees have bark other trees don't have bark a Bartlett tree is still a tree so the general problem with these physical candidates is that they either are the kinds of things which you can lack and still be a tree a tree without leaves is still a tree a tree without bark is still the tree so you could lack that and still be in the category or class of trees or there are things that they share with other items which are not trees they have sat through other plans they have leaves so do other plants so but yet there must be something there's got to be something which unites this group there's got to be one thing which these many objects all have in common and that's what's pictured here there's got to be one thing the essence of tree which is literally the same in this case as it is in this case and that being the same accounts for us saying that these are both trees so now we can see how Plato thinks well knowledge is is acquired here you can know that those are trees but you know it not because you see that they're trees but because you grass with the mind the thing which they share now notice this is something that a parakeet or a dog can't do a dog cannot see what these things and those things have in common in other words a dog can't know that they're both trees even if animals are capable of having a certain kind of visual experience you take a dog into the forest and we can assume them as these green as these brown things things with certain shapes over that's already reading a lot into animals can do well just granted so they have those visual experiences but the dog can't know that those are trees that are seen because it has no way of understanding what it is that those things have in common which for infants the grass lacks they just can't do that so in order to really know that it's a tree you have to grasp this commonality the commonality doesn't seem to be something which is physical so the commonality must be something which is non-physical now of course the point is even more obvious when we think about other kinds of properties and we'll get to that here's a second but here's what we just were talking about put into some words so we certainly categorized certain objects into groups like for instance male I'm a male perhaps you're not perhaps you are there's going to be some basis on which we make that decision the basis is the property which makes that object be the kind of thing that it is so Plato says look for every way that there is of having a group there is a form which explains why that group exists the objects must all have something in common or wives well why else we put them in that group so there's the form of human being the form of male the form of female the form of right-handed the form of blue eye the form of dog the form of cat the form of male dog etc etc etc now clearly my dog that's male and I share a property for both males so we have some relation to that form but of course I'm a human and the dogs dog so in that respect we're different we don't share those forms now again a key thing that's pushing Plato here is that that doesn't seem to be anything which is physically in common between these objects or if there is something which is physically in common it's the kind of thing which isn't essential to being that property so for instance the dog and I both have skin the dog and I both have hair but nobody wants to say that having skin or having hair is what makes a dog a dog or what makes the human a human so when you see that an object is a desk Plato says you're grasping the form of that object ah I understand that that's a desk that's how I know that is it that's not just be really by seeing it but by applying this concept to it by seeing with the mind what it is that makes it that way now objects are said to participate in their forms that's a technical term in Plato's philosophy and nobody is really sure what Plato meant by participation but we are going to be basically understanding the term participation as resemblance and there's some support for this in Plato's own work although he's kind of equivocal he's not really clear about what it is that he means by the word participate but so I participate in the form of human I don't participate in the form of dog I participate in the form of blue-eyed I don't participate the form of brown eye etc and etc so participation can be understood as a kind of resemblance so for instance this screen behind me participates in the form of blueness that's why it's blue that's what explains for Plato why the screen looks blue you because it resembles the ideal perfect blue the essential property of being blue and again it's sort of obvious that many different kinds of physical things can be blue this screen a house a sunset a book but one of those things all have in common there doesn't seem to be anything except that they're all blue very different kinds of objects house maybe to put maybe weight of made of concrete a book made of paper a shirt made of cotton a screen grade of patterns of light etc so clearly blue things must share something otherwise they wouldn't be blue doesn't seem like there's any physical thing we can say they share nothing seems the appropriate kind of thing which we can say ah that's what they all have in common except that they capture or resemble the perfect form of blue an object like I've just been trying to illustrate can participate in many forms at once so the relationship between objects and forms is one too many one object can participate in many different forms so let's go ahead and give an example of this here we have Scarlett Johansson here we have Brad Pitt here we have Adriana Lima Victoria's Secret model and here we have Ugly Betty now I just picked Ugly Betty because her name is ugly so I'm not going to be trying to make any aesthetic claims about whether this is right or not but it's hard to find someone that you can use an example of this okay so these objects here all share various attributes for instance we can say that they're all human Scarlett is a human Brad is a human adriana is a human and betty is a human now only one of these objects Epsilon's just take these at face value only one of these objects is made so Brad Pitt is male the rest are female now of course we can also say there's the form of beautiful and according to the way I've set things up Adriana's beautiful Brad is beautiful and Scarlett is beautiful but Betty is not now okay let me just emphasize but I'm not trying to say this is correct it's just Plato's view the things which are beautiful are beautiful because of their relationship to the perfect form of beauty which I just have abstractly represented as this nice sunset here now of course we may come to find out that Adriana really is not beautiful our standards may be offered we may be incorrect about that and maybe this line here should actually be traced back over to Betty so maybe Betty is beautiful because our might come to find that our criteria of beauty is wrong a Plato is committed to the claim that beauty is an objective mind independent property some things can be beautiful other things cannot be beautiful in an objective way so that there are is an objective answer to the question which one of these objects is beautiful that's why I chose Ugly Betty which is what I say and her name is Ugly Betty so it's just a way of illustrating this point so now notice that one particular object like adriana is participating in one two three forms and there are many more as well form a brunette for instance she's probably right-handed I'm not exactly sure which hand that she uses so there are many forms that objects participate in my dog is participating in the form of dog in the form of male in the form of mammal and except and etc and etc so this is Plato's view there's one form for each group of objects and that form is thought of as an essential property the thing which makes the objects the kind of object that it is so in a way you can think back to our discussion of Plato excuse me to our discussion of Socrates in the Euthyphro question and in that discussion we saw Socrates looking for definitions of things what is it that these things share which all and only these things share which is responsible for their being that way and here we see Plato in essence taking that idea and turning it into the forms here we have the form of mail here we have the form of female here we have the form of a beautiful and these things are literally the kinds of things that Socrates was interested in taken and given ontological reality they become metaphysical items for Plato they exist in are merely in the mind these things are out there eternal unchanging always and perfectly the way they are whereas these particular physical objects are changing Scarlett will not always be this pretty Brad will not always be that handsome but the form of beauty will always and eternally be exactly the way that it is it never changes as opposed to these physical items down here which are in flux so there is again this splits between the non-physical world and the physical world with the relation of participation between them okay so what we've just seen is a summary of the arguments for Plato's view so we would need to talk now about the way he encapsulate these views talk about the divided line which is Plato's way of summing up his views at a nice and handy representation and this is the way that he would have presented his work to people who were studying philosophy such as you okay so now in his famous book the Republic he lays this out and he gives us this kind of way of representing this thing so we are to take a line and divide it unevenly into two portions and actually it turns out that there are exact proportions that we're supposed to be using here and so I've represented it that way now you take this line and you divide it again into two halves and what you get is a line which looks like like this now all of this is going to be representing something so on one side of the line there are metaphysical items so over here what we have are the things which are real on this side of the line we have the state of mind of a person who's in contact with these things so remember the beginning of these lectures metaphysics and epistemology are like two sides of a coin on one side you have us and the way we contact reality on the other side you have reality as it is so that's represented on these two sides of the line now of course this main dividing part right here this very thick line represents the difference between on the one hand the intelligible world which is the world of eternal non-physical objects and then down here at the bottom we have the visible world so this line right here above our intelligible things non-physical things and below it are the visible things which we're using to stand for things which can be seen obviously but also smell tasted heard and touched the basic world around us in physical terms so on one side of the line those things which are real non-physical things are real physical things are real plano is not someone who thinks the physical world doesn't exist he is not someone like Parmenides who thinks that the world is somehow an illusion and we're wrong about the way it words Plato thinks the physical world is a real thing it's out there but of course on top of that there is all this non-physical stuff okay on the other side the main division in the line corresponds to whether you have knowledge or opinion now notice this is something that's going to be throwing us off quite a bit here when we use the word opinion we're not using an English word we're using a Greek word which has been translated into an English word so opinion for Plato is simply the state of mind that someone is in when they are touch with the visible world through their senses it is merely the way that we cover to contact with the world through our senses so the dog has an opinion about the table a person who is in thinking in terms of abstract knowledge also has an opinion about the table that simply means that they're in touch with some physical object via the senses and are not applying any of the rational faculties at that moment if they have them unlike daughter okay so let's start the lowest level of light we're going to be clearly working our way from here coming up through here so at the lowest level of the line our images for instance pictures shadows reflections in a mirror photographs of court Plato would have known about photographs but statues you know images and when you are looking at an image and when you mistake that image for the real thing faito says the state of mind that you're in is imagination imagination here is not see when we modern people use the word imagination we mean something very particular what we mean is all your picture in your mind or something like that but that's not what Plato means when Plato says that someone is imagining something he means something very specific that person is in contact with an image and has mistaken that image for the real object now how could that be well let me give you a couple examples of how someone can be imagining in this sense suppose that you're in the bathroom you're looking in the mirror and you point at the mirror and you say that's me you pointed the image well in that case Plato says you'd be imagining that's not you in the mirror that's an image of you it's a reflection of you that's not the real you there's a big difference between the image in the mirror and the actual you now of course the images that could guide for you but it would be a mistake to think that that image was actually you now children make this mistake all the time this is a kind of well known fact about children that are before a certain age if you show them a picture of their favorite toy for instance say you know the kid really likes toy trucks or toy ducks or whatever and you show them a picture of a toy duck well no wood behold what we find out is that kids that are very young actually try to reach into the picture and grab the toy duck it's not my duck and they reach for it of course that's not the duck it's a picture of it up that kid is imagining not doing something else so that's imagination when you're looking at a picture and you think that's really the thing that's pictured but that's the real duck now of course you can also make this mistake if you're watching television Barack Obama comes on and make a speech and you point at the television and you say that's Barack Obama now of course you're wrong about that that is not Barack Obama as a picture of Barack Obama is an image of Barack Obama notice if you make this kind of confusion you'll be led to ask some silly questions like for instance if you really think that that is Barack Obama then you might wonder how we got to be so small so what's the fit inside the television but of course that's a nonsensical question because Barack Obama is not Saida television he's added some White House press conference room where there are cameras which are broadcasting his image to your screen so now again you can use the image as a reliable guide from a Barack Obama saying and doing it etc but you shouldn't confuse the image with the person itself now one final way that you can confuse an image with the thing itself there's a very famous painting painting of a pipe underneath the pipe is written this is not a pipe now of course people saw this and they forgot mildly annoyed what do you mean that's not a pipe it's a pipe look at the shape who's got that thing over there there's smoking whatever it's called there's the part where you put in everything but of course the point that the person was making was that this is a picture of a pipe is not actually a pipe you can't put anything in this pipe and smoke it it's just oil arranged on a canvas so I lied a second ago one final example of this so this is sort of recalling the story about Socrates you don't confuse the reputation that a person has in a society which is a kind of image the image of the person has reflected in their peers with the actual person so as Socrates this trial Plato sees that making this mistake and Socrates action points it out in his defense if you've read the apology he actually says look you know they say I did this they say I did this they believe this of me they believe that of me but that doesn't reflect the real me don't confuse my reputation what you guys think about me as the actual me I am NOT my image so those people would be imagining as well they're confronted with an image and mistaking the image for the real thing so there's all sorts of ways that we mistake images or the real objects and Plato is just here pointing out that that is dangerous they can lead us to a salon questions it can lead us to execute people who are beneficial to us so notice these are all opinions this is a form of opinion imagination when you are looking at an image and mistaking it for the real thing okay let's move up one level on the line so instead of looking at images now we're looking at actual sensible objects we're looking at actual tables and chairs and cats and dogs well you have a picture of a cat now that you have a picture of a dog looking at the actual physical dog now Plato says when that's happening and when you think that that's the real thing then you are doing something that he calls perceiving perceiving is the state of mind of a person when they are in touch with an actual physical object and they make the mistake of thinking that that's all there is to the object so for instance you walk into a room point on a desk so that's a desk but you don't take the time to talk about the form of desk the abstract property of being a desk the thing that all desks have in common you are merely referring to the physical item over there and saying that's the actual desk that's what makes that thing a desk what you're making us take you are perceiving the desk but you don't know about the desk notice we have across this line between opinion and knowledge we haven't cross the line between those things which are intelligible and those things which are merely visible okay so how do you do that well you move up one step and Plato says now we've entered the realm of reasoning and we were talking on the other side about things which he calls lower forms now has always been a bit of a bit of a conundrum about what it means to talk about the lower forms but in general what Plato means is the kinds of things that we've already been talking about numbers mathematical objects dogs tables chairs and etc and when you are at this level of the line you are no longer just merely perceiving the dog but you are reasoning about the dog which means that you understand I shouldn't use the word understand as you'll see you just second understanding goes up here so I shouldn't be using Network but you comprehend or somehow grasp with the mind what it is about dogs that makes them dogs now the difference between this level in this level have to do with the kind of forms when Plato calls higher forms and lower forms so lower forms are just these ordinary kinds of form dogs tables choose higher forms are the ones that Plato gave a special place to like the form of beauty the form of justice moral ideals and etc so at that level you've got some understanding at that level you're doing something which is pretty cheap you're grasping what all just things have in common what all beautiful things have in common now at the top of this line Plato puts the form of the good the good occupies a special place in Plato's philosophy the good advils theme actually plays the role of making all of these things intelligible so how is it that we're able to even get in touch with these things according to him is because of the role that the good place the good is an overarching form now notice what he's doing here is building in all this stuff that Socrates talked about Socrates says the highest goal of a person's life is to figure out what this is to figure out what the good is what all good things have in common and then once one does that what is in a position to be a virtuous person one is in a position to live the right kind of life what is it a position to truly be happy and none of these things are possible without this kind of knowledge but of course we all have to start down here and work our way up to the form of the good now how do you do that you might ask well Plato has an answer the way you do that is by studying geometry geometry really is Plato things the first place where people come into face to face contact with non-physical abstract ideals thinking geometrically when you prove some fact about a triangle you're not just proving it about this triangle proving it about all triangles and of course there are two ways to do that you start first by reasoning about the picture in your book and then eventually you get to the point where you understand where you've moved up a level and you're no longer using the picture as a way of thinking about triangles but you're able to grasp triangles themselves a triangle is simply an object three-sided whose interior angles have 180 degrees I don't need a picture in order to fully understand that concept and of course a picture helps for those people who are not used to thinking this way but for those people who are spend a lot of time thinking about geometry the pictures are unnecessary and that's the goal that's how you move up says Plato you start using physical objects you start thinking about them eventually you come to see what they all have in common but you're still thinking about the table using this particular table as a way of thinking about table but eventually your is able to grasp the concept of table itself without some intermediary so here's an analogy I like to use often think about the game of chess I hope people still play chess chess is a fantastic game if you don't know you should learn immediately it's a great game so now chess is a board kind of played on a board 64 squares with all these various pieces of wood Castle horse Knight Bishop etc and you can play the game that way but of course the board and the pieces are kind of on a lazy way of keeping track of something which could be kept track of purely in the mind so I once had the experience of watching a chess master play four different games of chess at the same time he had his back turned to the audience you could not see the chessboard he would stand there and call out his move Knight to King seven checkmate and they even moved to the next one looked upon three etc etc never looking at the board never turning see where the pieces were he was keeping track of the locations of the pieces using his reason alone you don't need the board to play chess you don't need the pictures of triangles to think about triangles and you don't need tables and chairs to think about what tables and chairs are so that's really when you get to this level you're able to do that now of course when you get up here Plato says there's an interesting thing which happens not only do you understand mathematics geometry justice politics ethics but you're able to see how they all rate relate together so someone who has grasped the form of the good has a kind of ah-hah enlightenment movement where they're able to see the interconnections between every body of knowledge this is why Plato says in his political philosophy that the ideal ruler for society would be a philosopher king someone who had real knowledge of the good because then that person would not only understand thermodynamics and plate tectonics but they would understand how that science relates to politics so they'd be the ideal ruler now of course this is not a political philosophy class but that's a very provocative kind of statement that he's making that what you need to do is train your rulers to grasp abstract principles using geometry and mathematics when in fact Plato was so enamored with this idea that when he started his first college he had described above it let no one enter here who does not understand geometry I really thought this was the way which one became acquainted with abstract ideas in the way one move of this divided line ham okay so that's Plato's views about metaphysics and epistemology to talk about the allegory of the cave here which is nothing new this is the same information put in a different way so Plato is not introducing some new theory here he's not suddenly springing something on us which we have about already he is nearly saying ah you see the divided line is the way that I explained my views to philosophy students the allegory of the cave is the way I explain my view to the layperson so we're really just rien capsulated the city of ideas okay so we're doing magic in a cave that's what I've depicted here you'll see my drawings are always very crude so here's a nice cave and we're to imagine a person in this cave who has been born in this position so this person is chained by the neck they can't move they're only able to look directly forward there's a wall in front of them and in fact what I don't have represented here but what should be represented is that there would be a bunch of people lined up as we go back along the cave there so it's a whole society of people all of them are chained by the neck staring forward behind them is a pillar with some fire on it so that's what that is that's a a bit of fire there and what's going on is that there are some people in this cave who are holding up clay objects in front of the fire and these objects are producing shadows on the wall in front of the person so try to imagine your change you can only look forward you can't look to the left you can't look to the right you can only see straight ahead you see on the wall in front of you these very shadows and they're moving in various patterns you see a star dog cat shape etc etc and these people occupy themselves by trying to figure out the pattern and figure out which what is going to come next ah there was two dogs and a cat the next one is going to be the star it's going to be square and etc so now of course this is a very crude way of putting things but remember Plato is writing and thinking about this stuff 400 years before year one so he doesn't have a lot of analogies that he can draw but if you were alive today he would probably be talking about some kind of virtual reality right these people are stuck in a kind of movie theater type situation where there's things being projected and those things are not the real objects now of course these people in this are going to think that these are the real objects now this is a way of dramatically illustrating what Plato calls imagination these people are imagining they're imagining because they're in touch with shadows images and they are mistaking those images for the real objects now suppose that someone came and set these one of these prisoners free and unchain them and turn them around so that they then saw behind them the objects look for making the shadows they would come to realize oh those things over there those are not the real objects the real objects are these things right here now of course that's Plato's way of dramatizing dramatizing what he calls perception these people are now perceiving because they're in touch with physical things but of course these physical things are artifacts right in the story this is a thing that's made out of clay this isn't a real star it's some clay star so they've gone from thinking that these shadows were real to realizing they're merely images they moved up to the next level now they're looking at these things but they think those are the real things so they're still stuck in the cave and obviously this line here the cave line represents the dividing line on the divided line the one between knowledge outside the cave and a pinion which is what's going on inside this cave so now we imagine this person going up what is described as a jagged rocky a sense and this right here is my way of trying to picture that the person is not happy so I know it looks like he has a mustache or some crazy thing on his face but it's supposed to illustrate something that Plato thought was true which is that joy in geometry working your way up out of the cave thinking about abstract objects is difficult people don't like it people when they first study philosophy think it's difficult they think it's hard and that's because it is difficult it is hard and Plato is aware of that so the getting out of the cave involves this kind of rough rocky ascent right the person's legs are tired they hurt they complain they've been sitting the whole life or I hate this but eventually they get out of the cave so you're happy again because you're not working anymore and they come into contact for the first time with real objects they come into contact for the first time with real objects see down here they merely saw replicas of these objects out here these are the real things they see the Stars they see trees to actually see what's going on but of course coming from the dark cave into the bright light of the Sun that is blinding so at first people are unable to look directly at the objects and instead focus on shadows of real objects this is the level of the lower forms now of course you're out of the cave so you really do have some knowledge in this case but it's not of the most important things the actual treaty in this case it's of this legend thing the shadow but the probes using so when you're thinking about dogs and tables and chairs and you recognize what it is that dogs have in common and what it is that tables and chairs have in common you do have some knowledge you're out of the cave but you're looking at things that are somehow less important now once you become a comet eyes out here once your eyes adjust to the light you're able to look directly at the physical objects themselves and we'll move to the higher forms so the trees in here will be the form of justice for instance the form of piety the form of moral properties and etc now eventually once you're out here for a while you're able to turn your attention focus your gaze on the Sun the Sun it turns out plays a special role in this world out here one will come to realize that it's only because the Sun emits light that were able to see anything at all without the light of the Sun nothing up there would be visible now of course this is Plato's way of saying that without the form of the good which is what the Sun represents the Sun in this allegory is the form of a good the form of the good is a unifying kind of thing it illuminates the entire landscape it doesn't just illuminate that part over there or that part over there right you can see over here merely looking at this tree but you might not notice the other things in the background over here but once you will see what the Sun is doing you see ah it eliminates this whole landscape everything up here is visible because the Sun is putting his light out and that was Plato's way of thinking about the form of the good the form of the good acts like the kind of Sun in that it makes all of the forms intelligible if it weren't for in the form of the good Plato thought then we would never be able to know anything about justice or about what a dog is a dog why are there dogs why are there cats it's only because the form of the good exists that were able to make any of these kinds of judgments at all so here we have a story which depicts each level of the cave excuse me each level of the divided line we have imagining at the beginning mistaking images or the real things we have perception the next stage mistaking physical objects for the things outside the cave we have reasoning once you get out of the cave you're really having some knowledge but you're not thinking about the most important things we have understanding which is coming to grasp things like piety justice and so on and then finally we have the form of the good which is acting as a unifying thing which allows all of these things to be comprehended to be intelligible so just a different way of illustrating the same points now of course there are a couple of aspects of the story which are not found in the divided life so for instance one of the aspects is that at the beginning of this whole story somebody comes in and frees the prisoner now this is Plato's way of talking about what he thinks education is like education notice the prisoner once he's free is merely turned around and sees behind him goes ah look at that back there he's not giving a lecture he got me to memorize anything he is rather his own rational faculties are directed in the right way and the rest is done by him and so Plato thinks this is how we educate we're not supposed to open up the mind and pour a bunch of facts in there but rather you're supposed to point the mind in the right direction and the intellectual curiosity of the person takes over after that so education like Socrates thought is not about memorization and repeating but instead about actively engaging the rational faculty putting it on the right track because people are drawn to this to the form of the good like a moth is to a light so the form of the good has this kind of attractive power to it it's such that humans always want to find it and this of course is of a piece with Socrates is view that no one knowingly does evil which we mentioned briefly in the last lecture people do leave a lot of ignorance they don't do evil because they want to do evil they're all aiming at the good because the good is the natural thing which human beings are interested in achieving it's just that people make mistakes they think that something is good what it isn't okay so now of course the other thing which is not in the dividing line is this rough and rocky a sense that's not depicted to the line but of course what Plato is trying to illustrate to the average person is that philosophy is difficult philosophy is hard people don't enjoy doing it at first they resist doing it and of course one final element of the story is that once the person is out and has got to this point the person recognizes that they need to go back into the cave and free another slave they need to free someone else from the world of opinion and guide them up into the realm of knowledge but of course after being out in the sunlight of pure reality going back into the cave the person's eyes are going to be unadjusted in the other way they may not be so good at determining which thing comes next the people down there will laugh oh this person is an idiot they don't even know that after two cats come to dog or whatever pattern they figured out down there and this of course is plato's way of talking about Socrates Socrates was often made fun of in his society he was a raggedy dresser he didn't care about wealth or fame or money he was always ready to same clothes as we talked about previously sort of unkempt hanging on the marketplace and people would make fun of him but of course what Plato was trying to suggest here is that he was that way because all of this is sort of irrelevant Socrates was out here Socrates made it out of the cave so I was mocking him for not being able to do cave activities is to sort of not see what's important about what happened to him so at the end then of this is a kind of illustration of why it is that philosophers might be thought of as absent-minded professor oh there it is one place and that's not other idiots it's just that these worldly concerns are irrelevant to them they've somehow moved up and are dealing with more important things so that of course is not in his divided line

Channel: Richard Brown

Views: 34,094

Rating: 4.9230771 out of 5

Keywords: Plato, Forns, divided line, allegory of the cave

Id: q6DS7YJRzkE

Length: 68min 4sec (4084 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 29 2011