A New Way to See Plato’s Forms

A Platonic Form is something like a template for some particular object or idea, such as a chair. The somewhat mysterious aspect of a Form is that it does not exist in space or time, but subsists in some autonomous realm.

To continue with the chair example, the Form of a chair contains everythng that could be known, thought, or experienced concerning all chairs that have ever existed or that ever will or could exist. It is the thing that would allow you to travel to a country that you had never before visited, and whose language you could not speak, and upon seeing an object in an airport there, and seeing someone sit on that object, you could know that the object was a chair as a deductive inference from your knowledge of the Form of “chair.”

A Platonic Form is analogous to one particular atom in Jorge Luis Borges’s aleph; the aleph being a shining sphere of one to two centimeters in circumference that contains everything in the cosmos as seen from every possible perspective.

Such an object cannot exist in spacetime, so it must subsist in its own sui generis way. The ontological status of the aleph is that it is fictional. Readers know intuitively that such a thing cannot be in the cosmos as science and our experience describe it.

Plato’s Forms have not found such an intuitive home in our understanding. While it is clear that they exceed the parameters of existence in the empirical cosmos, being infinite in many ways, they resist landing in the realms described in fiction because of the perspicuity of Plato’s writing and because of that canon’s central location (along with the Bible) in Western Culture.

But even Plato, whom some consider to be the greatest writer who ever lived, did not succeed in giving us a straightforward description of the Forms. He fell into a reliance on metaphors such as the cave, the sun, and the divided line to limn them in our imaginations. And it has been said that all metaphors limp.