Theory of Forms

Plato's 'Theory of Forms is a philosophy which upholds a distinction between ultimate Reality, what is most Real, from the reality of material existence or sensibility. From the Platonic perspective, the world of sensation is a world of phantasms. From this it should not be taken, however, that the world of experience and sense, the world we are most familiar with that opposes the domain of Forms and Reality, has no connection with the Forms [ιδέες].

The Forms, also understood as the Platonic Ideas [eide] reside at the top of the hierarchy of Platonic Reality and are the Forms of Being that are only surpassed by the Good, a reality beyond Being which cannot be conceived. For our purpose, Being can be thought as a kind of uber-Form. It is helpful to think of Being in relation to material beings. External causes can effect changes and move material beings but without such external causes, material beings lack motion, they do not exist as such and in themselves and are not self-moving as is the case of the soul. The Forms, on the other hand, exist in themselves, needing nothing to complete themselves. Examples of these Platonic Ideas or Forms would be Justice, Love, Virtue and Courage. These Forms correspond, respectively, to the gods Dikē [Δίκη], Eros [Ἔρως], Virtue [ἀρετή], and Courage [ανδρεία].

For Plato, the Forms are not mere abstractions or mental constructions. Such a way of thinking of the non-material beings belongs to a later period of Philosophy which has distinguished between inner and outer non-material being. In Plato, in Greek tragedy, e.g., Sophocles, and in archaic Greek life in general, truth is still an external Being that works upon human affairs. It has not yet been internalized to the form of rational being or essences of thought; in other words, pure abstractions. For Plato, the Forms are real Beings, personifications of the gods themselves. whose reality we can recall and therefore connect with through anamnesis. In the Myth of the Charioteer (Phaedrus), Socrates explains the hierarchy of these beings and shows, in conjunction to them, the manner in which men are intrinsically linked to one god as opposed to another. This reading is paradoxical given that Socrates rejects myth-making and yet persists in image-making of his own that relies on myth for its logos [truth].

Every physical object can be thought to have a connection with a Form. In Platonic philosophy, this means that physical objects are images, copies of the fundamental reality beyond sensibility. These copies can be better or worse. They can more closely resemble the real from which they participate in ultimate reality or they can be bad copies. As the images of reality move further away from the reality, their participation in the forms decreases and they become mere shadows, having very little of the substance of the Forms left in them.

In Plato's conception of the participation of material reality in the Forms, it might first appear that matter and form are completely separate, therefore placing Plato further away from Aristotle's view of substance [form]. However, there is a way that it can be said that, for Plato, matter participates in the forms and derives its reality from them. Although the immanent forms of matter and the eternal Forms are distinct, the world of material things maintains a real connection to the Forms and participates in their ultimate Being. The closer this connection between Original and the Copy, the more reality it can be said is to be found in a thing. Because the things of material reality are only images of the real, the question of discourse and of truth revolves around the relation of these images, and of image-making in either art or discourse or poetry, to an original, the Forms.

In Book X of the Republic, Plato argues for a hierarchy of images using the example of the image of a bed. At the top would be that which gives the bed its essence, the Form. The highest image of the bed would be the idea of the bed that made by God. The second kind of copy [image] is an actual bed made by a carpenter. The third bed is the image of a bed made by a painter. Image-making is not reserved to the painter, however, since we learn in the Phaedrus that discourse involves a kind of image-making which can even, under certain conditions, be viewed as the highest art (262e).