The Intelligent Troglodyte’s Guide to Plato’s Republic, 2016a

51 Philosophers and Knowledge of the Forms
See 472a-480a. When asked how it is possible for the just city they have been
describing to come into being, Socrates answers that it is not possible unless the
rulers become “philosophers” (literally, lovers of wisdom). But what are
philosophers? People who are “ready and willing to taste every kind of learning”
and are “insatiable for it”; people who are “lovers of seeing the truth”; and above
all, people who “are passionately devoted to and love the things with which
knowledge deals,” the “forms.” What are these things seen and embraced by the
philosophers, these forms? Socrates encourages us to consider one of them, “the
beautiful itself.” Unlike “the many beautiful things” (this particular person, that
particular song, etc.), which, depending upon one’s point of view, appear in some
respects to be beautiful and yet in other respects ugly – or in fancy language,
“partake in both being and not being” with respect to beauty – the beautiful itself
“is” beautiful “completely.” People who fail to see and embrace the form of the
beautiful may think they know what they are talking about when they say that this
person is beautiful or that song is beautiful, but they have mere “belief”; only the
person who grasps the form, who truly understands the nature of beauty, has
“knowledge.” This is an early statement of a position that philosophers have come
to call realism about universals. A modern day proponent of this view might
explain it this way: Certain things exist, “universals” such as what it is to be
beautiful, what it is to be green, what it is to be three in number, or what it is to be
a knife. These things are capable, typically, of having “particular instances,” such
as this beautiful face, that green leaf, those three pebbles, or the knife on the table,
and it is in virtue of sharing a universal feature that particulars are correctly said to
be similar. (Not that every universal must have instances: e.g., what it is to be a
square circle, or what it is to be nonexistent.) Universals exist independent of their
instances; what it is to be a dinosaur, for example, still exists even though
dinosaurs don’t. Universals also exist independent of our minds; what it is to be a
dinosaur existed before human beings ever imagined dinosaurs and will continue
to exist should we ever cease to think about them. Finally, universals are the sort
of thing that can be known, and to know such a thing is to understand the essence