Plato Insight Into The Good

Plato’s Form of the
Good
You have often heard it said that the Form of the Good is the greatest thing to learn
about, and that it is by their relation to it that just things and [other virtuous things]
become useful and beneficial (Republic, 505a).
Plato’s Republic is a wide-ranging tract, admired for its depth, nuance, and ambition.
Plato sets himself to answering two questions: What is justice? And is the just or unjust
life better for a person? In the process of answering these questions, he defends a
sublime theory of the nature of reality and human knowledge. The ultimate foundation of
Plato’s metaphysics—his view of reality—is his theory of Forms, culminating in the Form
of the Good. Few, says Plato, really understand the nature of the Good itself (505e).
Plato’s Republic
1. The Sun Analogy
The Form of the Good sits atop Plato’s hierarchy of being as the ultimate Form. The
Forms themselves are abstract, although they do inform the concrete world, and Plato
frequently relies on metaphor to describe them. To understand the Good itself, Plato
relies on an analogy with the sun.
There are visible objects, which are visible but not intelligible in themselves. (Plato’s
central concern is that the world of material objects is shifting, deceptive, and
unreliable.) Then there are the Forms themselves, which are intelligible but not visible
(507b). The Form of the Good, Plato says, is to the intelligible realm as the sun is to the
visible realm. In the visible realm, there is a need of “something else” to make things
visible, namely, the sun (507d). We need sight in ourselves and color in objects, but we
also need the sun, or light, to make those things really visible, detectable by us.
Sight receives its power to see from the sun, as if from an overflowing treasury. And
sight is the most “sun like” of the senses, i.e., it and the sun have a kind of affinity or
compatibility. The sun and our sense of sight go together. Likewise, the intelligible realm
receives its order and intelligibility from the Form of the Good. Without the Form of the
Good, we would be like people fumbling in the dark, with a capacity to understand but
no “third thing” to render the world intelligible.
Plato says that the sun is the “cause” of the visible realm. The connection here may
seem tenuous, but this much is clear: without the sun, most or all of the things on the
earth would die out. This is presumably what Plato means. In the intelligible realm, the
Form of the Good plays the same role: it is not only the reason for the intelligibility of the
Forms, but the source of their existence as well. Though, as Plato says, the existence
that it enjoys is “beyond being, superior to it in rank and power” (509b).Plato’s mysticism
—his conviction that there are superior forms of existence—inherited from Pythagoras,
is here on full display.
2. A Divine Order
So, the Form of the Good is more real, even, than the rest of the Forms: the realest and
most fundamental thing that exists, the cause of the Forms and the explanation of the
rational order of the universe. It resembles a divine logos, or divine rationality, which
became an object of worship for successive schools of philosophy that developed under
the influence of Plato’s ideas.
Nowadays, we might compare the Form of the Good to laws of nature, though this is not
fully satisfying, since the Form of the Good is not particular law of nature, but the reason
why there are laws at all. Stephen Hawking famously quipped that we should ask not
only what the equations governing the universe are, but also “what breathes fire into the
equations?” For Plato, both the equations and the fire are the Form of the Good.
3. The Forms and Human History

We can gauge the significance of Plato’s contributions to humanity by his influence on
the history of thought. Plato’s was the first major metaphysical system in the West, and
it dominated Western thought through the middle of the second millennium.
Consider the subject of mathematics and geometry. What is a point? It is a location in
space with no dimension. In other words, it is not a real object. Points are ideal entities,
not space-time particulars. They take up no space. Likewise, lines have length but no
breadth. Mathematics is about ideal entities, and some mathematicians today are still
“Platonists” about numbers: they hold the view that numbers or other mathematical
objects are immaterial things. And they have to be in order for us to be able to know
eternal truths about them.
If we live in a rationally ordered cosmos, this helps underwrite a social order that is
rigidly hierarchical. It is no surprise then that through the Middle ages humans organize
themselves into strict hierarchies. We find a hierarchical church and a stratified social
structure, with serfs serving the king and the king serving God.
Consider Plato’s influence on theology: The Form of the Good is the ground of all being,
an immaterial object that exists more perfectly than anything else, a thing responsible
for the goodness and rationality in the world. This is something like an interpretation of
the Christian view of God developed in the middle ages, founded in Platonic and Neo-
Platonic metaphysics.
Perhaps most importantly, Plato’s arguments in Republic make possible scientific
inquiry. Science is only possible if the natural world is intelligible to our rational faculties.
Many people credit Plato’s student Aristotle with the initiation of the scientific project of
humanity, and many in turn credit the scientific method as the West’s most profound
contribution to humanity.

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Plato’s Form of the

3. The Forms and Human History

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