Plato's Theory of Ideas

Explaining Plato’s Theory Plato’s theory of ideas was based on the concept that all knowledge was innate and was achieved by way of recollection. He thus stated that “a man must have intelligence of universals, and be able to proceed from the many particulars of sense to one conception of reason,” (417) explaining that through the sense of the universals, one could grasp the Ideas that served as the ultimate reality.

These Ideas were discernible, according to Plato, because they were basically written on the soul and they were recalled by the intellect. Plato described the process in this manner: “this is the recollection of those things which our soul once saw while following God—when regardless of that which we now call being she raised her head up towards the true being” (417-418).

Plato’s theory that Ideas serve as the ultimate reality stems from the concept of God being the ultimate reality, or as Plato has Socrates say: God is “the true being,” as described in Phaedrus.

According to this argument, God is the truth and the soul before it is sent into the body passes before God/Truth, from which it obtains the Ideas that are imprinted on the soul and that man recollects as he grows on Earth: God is thus the ultimate Reality and the Ideas that are one with God go into the souls of men, which then “pass into the human form” (417).

Plato’s theory of ideas, therefore, connects the soul’s desire for Truth to the existence of the Ideas in the soul. This is his a priori argument: man is able to know Truth because the soul was exposed to Truth or came from Truth/God before it went into the man. God/Truth is the cause of all knowledge as all Ideas come from Him, essentially—and thus God is the a priori idea.

The knowledge that man recollects is thus there in the soul a priori and only is waiting for man to remember or recall it. Man recalls it by way of an experience: for example, he is learning mathematics and is told that 1+1= 2 and he assents to this because he recalls that this is so, implicitly—not explicitly; but all the same, the affirmation is there, inherent in his being. This is how Plato’s theory if ideas can be called as a representation of a priori ideas.

Critique However, a priori ideas proceed from the general to the particular and are deduced rather than obtained by way of inductive reasoning. Plato often starts with a question in mind and gradually works his way to a theory—which is the opposite of beginning with a priori ideas—i.e., starting with a theory and working towards a conclusion. Plato is like the investigator who has a bit of information and wants to ask more questions to arrive at a bigger picture.

The Allegory of the Cave is a perfect example of this. Plato explains that before one arrives at the big picture, one is essentially living in a prison or a cave. This is the prison of the mind: it has no sense of the reality of the world or of the ultimate reality above. It has only the flickering images on the wall of the cave, which the person takes as real forms. They are not—they are only shadows.

By turning around and looking outside the cave to see where the source of light comes from, one begins to make small observations that lead one out of the cave into the light for the first time. This is like man finally beginning to use his brain to come to knowledge—but, again, this is an example of inductive reasoning. Plato’s insistence on ideas being a priori is thus contested in this example, because the ideas are coming from the observations and from inductive reasoning.

The person, to better understand the world, may leave the cave and climb upwards towards the light—which, for Plato, represents the Ultimate Reality, the source of all knowledge, while what passed for reality in the cave was but a shadow of the actual forms which exist in the ultimate reality: “The visible realm should be likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the fire inside it to the power of the sun.

And if you interpret the upward journey and the study of things above as the upward journey of the soul to the intelligible realm, you’ll grasp what I hope to convey…” (Cahn, p. 176). This was how Plato went about discovering knowledge. Plato used Socrates to convey this search, always stopping and asking people questions about what is love or what is goodness: the questions were the starting point; they served as a the doorway to investigation.

The ideas were not there from the beginning, but Plato only assumed they were because once he obtained a sense of the big picture, the idea of Ideas being eternal seemed to him the best explanation. He begins with the specific and moves to.