What is Plato’s Idealism and how is it different from commonsensical view of reality?
In: 56
“Idealism,” like all words, has more than one meaning. In ordinary English, it means something like “Optimism.” As philosophers use the term, though, it means something more like _Idea_-ism. It’s the belief that ideas, rather than matter, are the fundemental building blocks of reality.
Okay, but whose ideas? Different philosophers have different versions. Berkely, for instance, put the ideas in the mind of God. (So, on his account, “Real,” means something like “God believes it.”) For Plato, the ideas — usually called “Forms,” — are in no one’s heads in particular. They exist outside of any particular minds. So there’s this _idea_ of a horse. The idea is independent of any actual horse. The idea has always existed and will always exist. The animals, horses, the ones we see and ride and stuff, are _bad copies_ (made of meat) of the _real_, ideal, horses.
Besides the only answer in this topic, it’s also described by Plato’s cave allegory – he says that humans sit inside the cave, with their back headed towards the entry, looking at the wall of the cave. Ideas are what happens outside of the cave – we do not see them, but by looking at the wall, we see their shadows.
Shadows are what we see every day, they’re not as good and detailed as their source, but they exist and we take them as reality. What we see and feel with our senses is just a mere copy of originals.
The cave serves more functions (and could be more detailed), but that is be enough for the answer.
Imagine you are a jeweler and you have this picture in your head of the perfect ring. But any time you try to make it, there are some imperfections. Maybe you are a very bad jeweler, and in fact all of your products are terrible, some are perhaps a bit better.
The other people can’t see into your head, but they can look at the products and they can kind of figure what the perfect ring in your head could have been.
According to Plato, everything has a picture of perfect version in a place that is sort of a dreamland or heaven or similar, nonphysical place, like a vault of blueprints. And every existing copy of that thing, like every tree or every animal or every river etc. is just a crooked version of that perfect picture, as if our world was made by a lame craftman.
Latest Answers