Plato gets excited about his transcendent Forms. They are pure and perfect, subsisting in a realm beyond time and space, the world of Forms. They give character and meaning to our changeable world, providing whatever stability and order is found in it. Our ability to grasp and even to encounter Forms directly allows us to have a godlike understanding of our world, and allows us to approach the supernatural. A few devoted and very gifted individuals can ascend to the world of Forms to experience them directly and to be transformed by that mystical experience.
But what about the things in our world they partake or share in those Forms? What is their nature and status? We meet them in an almost accidental way in the later pages of the Phaedo. Socrates had just said that Tallness Itself could never become short, nor could Shortness Itself ever become tall. At this point he is interrupted: “Someone of the company hearing this, said—who it was, I can’t recall—‘By the gods, didn’t we agree in the previous discussion to the very opposite of what we are now saying: that from the shorter the taller comes to be, and from the taller the shorter? And this was just how contraries came to be—from their contraries? But now it sounds like you are saying that this could never happen!’”[1] Plato here seems to remind us of what was said thirty pages previously,[2] and to attempt to clarify a possible confusion. The speaker is not even named, but raises an important question.
“Socrates turned toward the speaker and listened to him. ‘You have remembered astutely,’ he said, ‘but you have not grasped the difference between what we said just now and what we were saying earlier. Then we said that from the contrary fact the contrary fact comes to be; now we are saying that from the contrary, what is contrary to itself would never arise, neither among us nor in nature. Before, my friend, we were talking about things having contraries, calling them after their properties; now we are talking about the things themselves that, belonging to them, properly bear the name “contraries.”’”[3]
Here we need to distinguish between what Aristotle will call subjects and predicates, between things that have properties and properties. The changeable subject can be now short (for instance, Socrates the child), now tall (Socrates the adult). But Tallness itself will never be short, nor will it ever change places with Shortness Itself. And the tallness in Socrates can never become short or be identical with the shortness in Socrates.
So there must be things that have properties, such as Socrates, which are distinct from the properties or features that Socrates has: his shortness, his paleness, his knowledge, his ignorance. What then is the ontological status of Socrates, that is, what kind of being does it have? When Aristotle, Plato’s student, gets a chance to discourse on this topic, he will make Socrates more ontologically important than any property he has. But Plato, who has been ignoring the subject of properties for thirty pages, does not expand further upon it, other than to note that the properties in question belong to someone or something. Plato goes on to focus on the properties and the ultimate realities, the Forms, that ground or support the properties. Whatever it is that has or is the subject of properties, gets no more than a shrug from Plato’s Socrates. Yet in terms of the building blocks of the world, it is surely one of the most important items.
In Plato’s Cratylus, Socrates considers the philosophy of language and specifically how words can name things. Cratylus is a follower of Heraclitus who, according to Plato, claims that all things are in constant flux and change. Near the end of the dialogue, Socrates asks if there are such things as the Beautiful Itself and the Good Itself, and Cratylus says yes. Socrates goes on to point out that for a given face, if it is always changing, how can we call it beautiful, since it will be changing as we speak? “How then would what never stays the same be anything? … And how, on the other hand, would something that keeps its character and stays the same, change and move, if it did not depart from its own form (idea)?” How, in general, could words describe the world, or humans have knowledge if everything were in flux (or, on the other hand, if everything were static)?[4]
This kind of argument might just be an illustration of the absurdity of process philosophy, that holds that everything is in flux. But Plato does seem to accept the claim that in our all-too-human world, everything is in flux. Plato may hold the view that Aristotle ascribes to him, according to which the sensible world is in constant flux,[5] but the world of Forms is changeless and perfect; so there is a kind of radical dualism (already hinted at in the Phaedo) between a lower and an upper world, between sensible objects and eternal Forms.
[1] Plato Plato 103a.
[2] Plato Plato 70d-71a.
[3] Plato Plato 103a-c.
[4] Plato Cratylus 439c-440d.
[5] Aristotle Metaphysics 1.6, 987a29-b11; he reports the young Plato as a follower of Cratylus.