The Greeks had learned to question the world.
They had questioned change, permanence, number, motion, multiplicity and the structure of nature. They had learned that explanations could be tested by argument, that apparently obvious features of experience could conceal conceptual difficulties, and that competing accounts of reality could occupy the same intellectual field.
Then the question turned toward the human.
What is justice?
What is virtue?
What is knowledge?
What is courage?
What is beauty?
At first, these might seem simply to be questions about human affairs.
But something more radical is happening.
The question is no longer only about whether a particular person is just, or whether a particular action is courageous, or whether someone possesses knowledge.
It is about what justice, courage or knowledge themselves are.
A concept that had previously functioned as a resource for thinking becomes something that can itself be thought about.
This is one of the great turns in Greek philosophy.
And Plato stands at its centre.
From examples to what they have in common
Consider the Socratic question: What is justice?
Someone might answer by giving an example.
This action is just.
Or perhaps this law is just.
Or this person is just.
But an example does not yet explain what makes the example an instance of justice.
The same difficulty appears with courage.
A soldier may be courageous.
A citizen may be courageous.
Someone may endure pain courageously.
But what makes all these different cases instances of the same thing?
The question therefore moves.
It is no longer:
Which things are just?
It becomes:
What is it about justice that allows different things to count as just?
This is a deceptively large change.
The concept is no longer merely being used.
It has become an object of inquiry.
The problem of the many
The earlier history of the series now becomes relevant.
The philosophers of nature had encountered a problem of unity and multiplicity.
How can many changing things belong to an ordered world?
The Pythagoreans had explored the possibility that stable relations could underlie changing instances.
The Eleatics had forced thought to confront the conditions under which multiplicity and change could be coherently described.
The pluralists and atomists had responded by constructing accounts in which persistent elements could enter into different configurations.
Now a related problem appears in a different domain.
There are many just actions.
Many beautiful things.
Many courageous people.
Many instances of knowledge.
Yet we use the same concept to talk about them.
What accounts for this unity?
The question is not merely linguistic.
If the concept of justice applies to many different actions, what makes those actions recognisably instances of justice?
If beauty is found in many different things, what makes them beautiful?
If knowledge appears in many different forms, what makes them all knowledge?
The problem of unity and multiplicity has moved from nature into conceptual thought.
The Forms
This is where Plato's Forms enter the philosophical landscape.
It is tempting to present the Forms as a simple doctrine: there is an eternal world of perfect objects somewhere beyond the changing physical world.
But that picture can obscure what the philosophical problem is doing.
The deeper issue is the possibility of stable intelligibility amid changing instances.
The things we encounter change.
They come into being and pass away.
They differ from one another.
Our opinions about them can also change.
And yet we can apparently recognise something as just, beautiful or equal across different circumstances.
Plato's Forms provide a way of thinking about this stability.
The Form of Justice is not simply one more just action among other just actions. The Form of Beauty is not simply another beautiful object. The Form provides, in some sense, what allows the many instances to be understood together.
The language of Forms therefore gives philosophical expression to a possibility that has been developing for some time:
that intelligibility need not have the same structure as the things that instantiate it.
This is a remarkable conceptual move.
The changing world does not have to contain a single physical object called Justice in order for justice to be something that can be understood.
The relation between concept and instance can itself become a philosophical problem.
But what is a Form?
Plato's dialogues do not make this question easy.
Indeed, one of their remarkable features is how often Plato allows proposed answers to become unstable.
The Meno asks what virtue is.
The Euthyphro asks about piety.
The Lysis asks about friendship.
The Republic investigates justice.
The Theaetetus investigates knowledge.
The Symposium investigates love and beauty.
Again and again, the dialogue does not simply present a definition and move on.
The concept resists.
A proposed definition works in some cases but not others.
A distinction produces an unexpected consequence.
An answer turns out to depend upon an assumption that has not itself been examined.
The philosophical object is therefore not merely a thing waiting to be described.
It has to be approached through a network of distinctions and relations.
This is important because it changes the role of philosophical dialogue.
The dialogue becomes a space in which concepts can be made to reveal their internal pressures.
The concept acquires a history
Something else happens here.
A concept can now be separated, at least analytically, from the particular situations in which it is ordinarily used.
People use the word justice in courts, politics and ordinary conversation.
But philosophy can ask what justice means across those different uses.
People distinguish knowledge from opinion in everyday life.
Philosophy can ask whether knowledge really can be distinguished from opinion, and if so, how.
People call things beautiful.
Philosophy can ask whether beauty is simply a property of beautiful things, a response in the observer, a relation, or something else entirely.
The concept acquires a kind of independence.
It can be lifted out of the immediate context in which it normally operates and subjected to examination.
This is not abstraction in the sense of simply removing detail.
It is a new relation between use and reflection.
The concept that helps us navigate the world can itself become something we navigate.
The danger of separating the concept from the world
Yet Plato's move creates a problem of its own.
If the Forms provide stable intelligibility, what is their relation to the changing things we encounter?
How does the Form of Justice relate to particular just actions?
How does Beauty relate to beautiful things?
How does knowledge relate to particular acts of knowing?
The very distinction that makes stable intelligibility possible threatens to separate intelligibility from experience.
Plato himself seems aware of this pressure.
The dialogues repeatedly ask how the intelligible and the sensible are related.
The later dialogues become especially concerned with problems generated by the theory of Forms: participation, sameness and difference, being and non-being, relation and predication.
The concept has become an object of inquiry, but that creates a new question.
What kind of relation can hold between a concept and the things to which it applies?
This is not a minor technical difficulty.
It is the beginning of a philosophical problem that will persist for centuries.
The philosopher and the concept
The figure of the philosopher also changes.
The philosopher is no longer simply someone who possesses knowledge about the world.
The philosopher becomes someone who can examine the structures through which knowledge is possible.
This helps explain the significance of Plato's recurring distinction between knowledge and opinion.
Opinion can be correct by accident.
Knowledge requires something more stable.
But what that “something more” consists in becomes itself a philosophical question.
The philosopher therefore occupies an unusual position.
The philosopher does not simply stand outside ordinary understanding and replace it with a superior stock of answers.
Instead, philosophy examines the assumptions embedded in ordinary understanding.
It asks what we thought we knew before we began asking whether we knew it.
The philosophical activity becomes reflexive.
Knowledge can be questioned.
The concept of knowledge can be questioned.
And the criteria by which the questioning is conducted can themselves become problematic.
The ecology of inquiry is becoming increasingly self-aware.
When being becomes a concept
The consequences extend beyond ethical and epistemological concepts.
Plato's dialogues increasingly bring the most fundamental philosophical terms into view.
What does it mean for something to be?
What does it mean for something to be the same?
What does it mean for things to be different?
Can something that is not be spoken of?
Can difference itself have being?
These questions are especially visible in the Sophist.
Here the old Eleatic problem has been transformed.
Parmenides had made non-being extraordinarily difficult to think.
Plato asks whether non-being might instead be understood as difference.
To say that one thing is not another need not mean that it is nothing.
It can mean that it is different from it.
This is a profound conceptual development.
The problem of being and non-being becomes a problem of relations among concepts.
Being, difference, sameness, identity and negation can themselves become objects of philosophical investigation.
The conceptual field is no longer merely a vocabulary for describing reality.
It has become a domain in which philosophical problems can arise.
A new kind of possibility
At this point, something new has become possible.
A philosophical question need no longer require a visible object.
We can ask:
What is justice?
What is beauty?
What is knowledge?
What is being?
What is difference?
The objects of inquiry can be conceptual structures.
This does not mean that philosophy has escaped the world.
Quite the opposite.
It means that philosophy can now investigate the distinctions through which the world becomes intelligible to us.
The earlier philosophers had discovered that the world could be questioned.
The Sophists and Socrates had helped reveal that human practices of knowing, speaking and judging could also be questioned.
Plato takes another step.
The concepts organising those practices can themselves become questionable.
And once that possibility exists, philosophy acquires an extraordinary new territory.
It can ask not only what things are, but what it means for something to count as a thing.
Not only whether an action is just, but what justice is.
Not only whether someone knows, but what knowledge is.
Not only what exists, but what being means.
The question has become capable of turning upon its own instruments.
But there is a price
There is a danger in this new freedom.
Once concepts become objects of inquiry, philosophy can become detached from the changing world that gave the concepts their significance.
The search for stable intelligibility can become a search for entities or structures that seem to stand outside change altogether.
And the more successful philosophy becomes at distinguishing concepts, the more urgent becomes the question of how those distinctions relate to the world in which things actually happen.
Plato does not finally resolve this tension.
Perhaps more importantly, he makes the tension impossible to ignore.
The problem of the relation between intelligibility and becoming will continue.
So will the problems of universals and particulars, knowledge and opinion, being and difference, form and instance.
The philosophical ecology has expanded again.
The world is questionable.
Human beings are questionable.
And now the concepts through which both are questioned are questionable too.
The next possibility
This leaves philosophy with an extraordinary inheritance.
It now possesses a growing repertoire of distinctions: being and becoming, unity and multiplicity, appearance and intelligibility, knowledge and opinion, sameness and difference, particular and universal.
But a collection of distinctions is not yet a system.
Indeed, every new distinction creates further relations.
If concepts are related to one another, what kinds of relations are possible between them?
If a thing can be understood through several different categories, how should those categories be ordered?
If something becomes what it is, how can being and change be understood together?
If something has a potential that it does not yet actualise, what kind of reality belongs to what is possible but not yet actual?
The conceptual field is becoming dense enough that another transformation is approaching.
Philosophy has learned to make concepts into objects of inquiry.
The next question is what happens when those concepts begin to form a system of differences and relations.
That is where Aristotle enters.
The question has discovered the concept.
Now the concept must discover its relations.
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