Plato’s Theory of Forms: An Aesthetic Critique

Plato’s theory of forms, roughly speaking, is concerned with the distinction between universals and particulars. Likewise, it is also concerned with the distinction between reality and appearances. The forms involve the true essence of a thing and this consists of universals. This is collocated with what merely appears; what appears consists simply in particulars. The theory of forms is twofold: logical and metaphysical. In the metaphysical portion of the theory, a word -say, for instance, ‘apple’- means an ideal apple; the apple. The apple is something that is created by God, exists supersensibly, and particular instances of apples that exist within the domain of appearances evoke its characteristics, but are distinct from it in some important sense (e.g. granny smith, honeycrisp, and red delicious apples are not the apple, but they all participate in its nature.). What is real to Plato is the apple (the forms), and all of the particular instances of apples are merely worldly and apparent. Knowledge and the good can only be had by way of inquiry into the forms; entertaining what appears to us, on the contrary, amounts only to opinion, which is something that Plato’s asceticism would warrant disinterest in. On Plato’s account, we know that appearances have this less-than-ideal character because they have the contradictory feature of having various attributes (e.g. a work of art can consist in both beauty and ugliness.) This is Bertrand Russell’s take on the logical aspect of the theory, which is more than adequate, as, it is the part of the theory that has been retained throughout the history of philosophy and linguistics,

The logical part has to do with the meaning of words. There are many individual animals of whom we can truly say ‘this is a cat.’ What do we mean by the word ‘cat’? Obviously something different from each particular cat. An animal is a cat, it would seem, because it participates in a general nature common to all cats. Language cannot get on without words such as ‘cat’ and such words are evidently not meaningless. But if the word ‘cat,’ means anything, it means something which is not this or that cat, but some kind of universal cattyness. This is not born when…