Plato's Ideas

Plato's word for a given Form may be translated as "ideal" or "pattern"; his word in the Greek is idea. But because modern translators and critics conceive of an "idea" as a kind of "thought" which is generated in a given person's "mind," they prefer the term "Form." We must remember that Plato does not consider the Forms to be relative; no individual "makes them up" or "conceives" of them. The Forms are absolute and unchanging truths. Justice is a truth.The Dionysiacs to whom Glaucon refers in the dialogue are in fact theater-goers and devotees of the Dionysian festivals (dramas) presented, for example, in the Temple of Dionysus in Athens. These dramas frequently enactÐ'--and adopt actors who suffer fromÐ'--a passionate hamartia (a fatal flaw), a flaw which is frequently hybris (overweening pride, arrogance). The themes of many of the dramas result in conflict and eventuate in adikia (injustice), and Plato, as we have seen, distrusted the poets who create these dramas and some aspects of the mythologies that inform them. Plato thought that such dramas appealed to the baser instincts in men and that they presented bad examples to the citizenry because their effect tended to unbalance the Greek concept of the Golden Mean.

As the Republic continues in its development, Socrates will ban the poets, including Homer, from his ideal state, an act that Socrates has hinted at accomplishing more than once in this dialogue.

One further comment: In discussing the world of perception and alternating misperception of their intellectual attempts to separate knowledge from belief in appearance, Glaucon says that such feeble attempts at reasoning remind him of a children's puzzle, or riddle. Here is the riddle: A man who was not a man thought he saw a bird that was not a bird perched on a bough that was not a bough; the man who was not a man pelted and did not pelt what he thought he saw with a stone that was not a stone. (The man is a eunuch who imperfectly saw a bat perched upon a reed; the eunuch threw a pumice stone [which the Greeks saw as not being a real stone] at the bat, but he missed it.)