Understanding Plato's Theory of Forms.

By Craig Hawkins

Plato believed that we all live in a shadowy cave and can only see the shadowy reflections of reality, but not reality itself. He believed in aspects of physical objects in a literal sense; of them actually possessing an entity of form, which one could move toward understanding through intellectual discourse. The closer one came to identifying the form, the close one gets to reality. But in Essence we are all trapped in a dark cave and only the intellectual elite were capable of at the very least, shining a dim light of understanding into the 'cave' of 'unknowable' reality.

What Plato meant in more specific terms, is that every object such as trees, dogs, books etc, has a perfect form within the universe and what we grasp is only a shadow of that perfect form. In reality, what this really means is that the universe is fundamentally unknowable, because the fundamental form of every physicality of nature is forever beyond our reach.

It was Plato's ideas of form, that later coupled with religious edicts from individuals such as St Augustine, lent credence to the concept of heaven. Plato believed that there must be a "perfect Platonic heaven" where we go to at death and experience the 'forms' and step out of the dark cave. Well, this concept of platonic heaven fits perfectly within the Christian concept of heaven. St Augustine was a big fan of the works of Plato and exploited this Platonic concept to the full, to strengthen the framework of the Christian ethic, built around heaven and hell.