World of Forms, Part 1

So I'm going to stray off the elitist path for a while to discuss, mainly because I'm not getting anywhere substantial with my theory. Instead, I'm going to discuss Plato, mainly his idea of the world of forms. Today I'll give a brief summary and tomorrow I'll discuss my opinion of this view.

Plato believes that everything in the world is merely a copy of some greater, grander perfect idea of that given thing. For example, all cats are merely copies of this perfect idea of "catness", or the perfect "cat." Also, all chairs are merely copies of the perfect idea of "chairness", or the perfect "chair." He uses the analogy of the cave to explain this. Imagine you are chained to a wall, with your back to the wall, in such a fashion that you cannot turn around. Between you and the wall there is a fire (that does not hurt you in any way shape or form - it's far enough away). Between you and the fire are all the perfect images of the world, such that all you see are the shadows of these images on the wall in front of you. This is the way the real world is. We only see shadows of the true perfect things, and these true and perfect things are all kept in the world of forms.

Now he takes this one step further and says that beauty is a property of items based on their closeness in perfection to the perfect idea. For example, the closer a chair is to the perfect idea of chair, the more beautiful it is. This is the point that I will argue tomorrow.