What is Plato’s Idealism and how is it different from commonsensical view of reality?
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Imagine you’re playing with toy cars. You have different toy cars that you can see and touch. That’s the commonsensical view of reality. You believe that things exist because you can see and touch them.
Now, let’s think about something different. Imagine there’s a special place where all the perfect toy cars exist. These perfect cars are more real than the ones you can see and touch. This idea is similar to Plato’s Idealism.
Plato believed that there is a world of perfect and unchangeable things that he called “Forms”. These Forms exist in a separate realm, different from the physical world we experience. According to Plato, everything we see in the physical world is just a imperfect copy or reflection of these perfect Forms.
In the toy car example, the perfect toy cars in Plato’s world of Forms would represent the ideal car that all other cars are trying to be like. The toy cars you play with are imperfect copies of that ideal car. Plato believed that the physical world we see is just a shadow or imitation of the true reality.
so, in short, idealism is different from the commonsensical view because it suggests there is a deeper, truer reality, beyond what we perceive with our senses. (commonsensical view is that what we see and touch is the only reality)
Idealism is the notion that everything in our world is an imperfect version of the ideal (which exists in the world of forms). Take anything – a chair, a dog, a plant, a mountain – any object or thing or idea at all, and in this world we’ll only ever have imperfect versions of the ideal of that object or thing or idea. It’s like drawing the best possible circle using the most precise instruments and crispest inks. You’ll end up with something that is a pretty darn good approximation of a circle, but it is still not (and never can be) a perfect circle. Perfection is reserved for the “forms”- ideal versions of whatever we’re approximating here on Earth.
As for how it differs from a “commonsensical” view, there’s really nothing to address. A term like “common sense” or “commonsensical” is so ill defined that it is essentially without meaning as a stand-alone term. What’s common sense to you is almost certainly not common sense to a member of the Yanomamo tribe in the Amazon or a PhD physicist studying quantum computing or a teenager in a war torn region of western Africa.
If you mean how does Idealism differ from any particular person’s (or any particularly similarly situated group of people) view of reality, then you’re comparing the ideal to how that person or group views the world. I imagine the vast vast majority of the world never contemplates the ideal, they just deal with what’s in front of them. And what’s in front of them cannot be the ideal as Plato saw it.
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