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Plato: World
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Plato saw the changing physical world as a poor, decaying copy of a perfect, rational, eternal, and changeless original. The beauty of a flower, or a sunset, a piece of music or a love affair, is an imperfect copy of Beauty Itself. In this world of changing appearances, while you might catch a glimpse of that ravishing perfection, it will always fade. It’s just a pointer to the perfect beauty of the eternal. The same goes for other Essences, like Justice. Anyone knows that Real Justice is too much to hope for in this corrupt world.
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Plato urged the temperance and bewailed the changes in the Attic landscape since his youth. Green meadows, woods, and springs had given way to bare limestone partly because the planting of olive trees had led to the ruin of the land. Not only aware of the environment, he was conscious of medicine; introducing the word anesthesia into the scientific world.
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As must be evident by now, being, for Plato, is not limited to material being. But it would be equally wrong to assume that Plato's world is limited to a "world of forms," a world of immaterial everlasting truths in some sky high above. The image that he gives of the whole of "being" in the Republic is that of a line divided in four segments (Republic, VI, 509e-511e). A first division distinguishes a "visible" and an "intelligible" segment. Each of these two segments is further divided in two, to distinguish images and whatever they are images of. A painting, for instance, or a photograph, is, in the visible part, an image of a man, himself a visible being; but a word, as an "intelligible" thing, is ... in a sense no more than an intelligible "image" of the being or beings it names.
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Why would Plato have seen the arts as shadows on the wall of the cave, rather than as shining symbols of the true spiritual world outside? The answer is that he saw both potentials. If he did not see the possibility that art could reveal truth and form character in a good way, he would not have recommended music and stories for the young. But why so much emphasis on the seductive shadow potential of art? Put the Allegory of the Cave into its obvious 21st century version, and one answer begs to be given. The prisoner becomes a couch potato, tied to the television, and taking the images and myths purveyed by the ads and the shows as the way things are.
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It is noteworthy, to begin with, that Plato is, among other things, a political philosopher. For he gives expression, in several of his writings (particular Phaedo), to a yearning to escape from the tawdriness of ordinary human relations. (Similarly, he evinces a sense of the ugliness of the sensible world, whose beauty pales in comparison with that of the forms.) Because of this, it would have been all too easy for Plato to turn his back entirely on practical reality, and to confine his speculations to theoretical questions. Some of his works — Parmenides is a stellar example — do confine themselves to exploring questions that seem to have no bearing whatsoever on practical life. But it is remarkable how few of his works fall into this category. Even the highly abstract questions raised in Sophist about the nature of being and not-being are, after all, embedded in a search for the definition of sophistry; and ... they call to mind the question whether Socrates should be classified as a sophist — whether, in other words, sophists are to be despised and avoided.
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Circularity, Squareness, and Triangularity are prime examples of what Plato meant in his Theory of Forms. An object existing in the physical world may be called a circle, a square, or a triangle only because it resembles the Form "circularity", "squareness", or "triangularity", even though it doesn't fit the definition of a perfect circle, square, or triangle.
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