Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [14]
But how does one become wise? Through touch we perceive hard and soft, but it is not the sense organs that recognize them as opposites, he says; it is the mind that makes that judgment. Through sight we may judge two objects to be about equal in size, but we never see or experience absolute equality; such abstract qualities can be apprehended only by other means. We gain true knowledge—that is, the knowledge of concepts like absolute equality, similarity and difference, existence and nonexistence, honor and dishonor, goodness and badness—through reflection and reason, not through sense impressions.
Here Plato was on the trail of an important psychological function, the process by which the mind derives general principles, categories, and abstractions from particular observations. But his bias against sense data led him to offer a wholly unprovable metaphysical explanation of that process. Like his mentor, he held that conceptual knowledge comes to us by recollection; we inherently have such knowledge and discover it through rational thinking.8
But going further than Socrates, he argued that these concepts are more “real” than the objects of our perceptions. The “idea” of a chair— the abstract concept of chairness—is more enduring and real than this or that physical chair. The latter will decay and cease to be; the former will not. Any beautiful individual will eventually grow old and wrinkled, die, and cease to exist, but the concept of beauty is eternal.9 The idea of a right triangle is perfect and timeless, while any triangle drawn on wax or parchment is imperfect and will someday cease to be; indeed, over the door of the Academy was the inscription “Let no one without geometry enter here.”
This is the heart of Plato’s Theory of Ideas (or Forms), the metaphysical doctrine that reality consists of ideas or forms that exist eternally in the soul pervading the universe—God—while material objects are transient and illusory.10 Plato is thus an Idealist, not in the sense of one with high ideals but of one who advocates the superiority of ideas to material objects. Our souls partake of those eternal ideas; we bring them with us when we are born. When we see objects in the material world, we understand what they are and the relationships between them—larger or smaller, and so on—by remembering our ideas and using them as a guide to experience.
Or rather we do if we have been liberated from ignorance by philosophy; if not, we are deluded by our senses and live in error like the prisoners in Plato’s famous metaphorical cave. Imagine a cave, he says in the Republic, in which prisoners are so bound that they face an inner wall and see only shadows, cast on it by a fire outside, of themselves and of men passing behind them carrying all sorts of vessels, statues, and figures of animals. The prisoners, knowing nothing of what is behind them, take the shadows to be reality. At last one man escapes, sees the actual objects, and understands that he has been deceived. He is like a philosopher who recognizes that material objects are only shadows of reality and that reality is composed of ideal forms.11 It is his duty to go down into the cave and lead the prisoners up into the light of reality.
Plato may have been led to construct his otherworldly and metaphysical explanation of true knowledge by Socrates’ and his own reasoning. But perhaps the military and political chaos of his era made him seek something eternal, unshakable, and absolute in which to believe. Certainly his prescription for an ideal state, spelled out in the Republic, aims to achieve stability and permanence through a rigid class system and the totalitarian rule of a small elite of philosopher-kings.
In any case, in Plato’s epistemology that which is physical, particular, and mortal is considered illusion and error, while only what is conceptual, abstract, and eternal is real and true. His Theory of Ideas, greatly extending the dualism of Socrates, portrayed the senses as deceptive, the spiritual