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PART II Being and Reality

Introduction

      One of the oldest aspirations of philosophy has been to enquire into the ultimate nature of reality. The phrase sounds impressive enough, but what does it mean? Nowadays most people would say that investigating what there is, or what the world is like, is the job of the scientist, not the philosopher. But in earlier times the two roles were not clearly separated. When the writers of the Middle Ages described Aristotle as a philosopher (indeed he was known as The Philosopher), they were thinking partly of his accounts of the natural world, his physics, biology and so on. But Aristotle also aimed to investigate the nature of ‘being qua being’, or being as such; he wanted to analyse the basic notions that are involved in our understanding of the world. The book in which he presents this idea of a general study of being is called the Metaphysics. The term originally derives from the position to which the book was assigned by early Greek editors of Aristotle, who placed it after his various writings on physics (in Greek meta ta physica, ‘after the physics’). But since the Greek preposition meta can also mean ‘beyond’, the term ‘metaphysics’ came to be used as an apt label for philosophical inquiry that goes beyond the particular sciences and asks very general questions about the nature of reality and the ultimate conceptual categories in terms of which we are to understand it. The history of metaphysics is the history of various fundamental theories about ‘ontology’ or being, and it is some of the most influential of these theories that form the subject matter of this part of the volume.

1 The Allegory of the Cave: Plato, Republic^*

      Though the systematic study of metaphysics was inaugurated by Aristotle, metaphysical theorizing did not begin with him. A variety of different theories about the ultimate nature of the world had been developed by those earlier Greek philosophers known as the ‘Presocratics’; Aristotle’s own teacher, Plato, was famous for his theory of Forms, an account of a realm of abstract reality to be apprehended by the intellect – a realm ‘above and beyond’ the ordinary world of particular objects that we perceive by the senses. Plato’s metaphysics is intimately linked to his theory of knowledge (see Part I, introduction to extract 2, above); he believed that in order to attain genuine knowledge we need to go beyond the changing world of day-to-day particulars and grasp the timeless and unchanging universals of which ordinary objects are imperfect instances (thus, a particular beautiful object is only beautiful in a limited and passing way – a mere copy of the Form of Beauty, the ‘beautiful itself’).

      In our first extract, from the Republic (written in the early fourth century BC), Plato compares the noblest Form, the Form of the Good, to the sun: just as the sun makes ordinary objects visible, so the Form of the Good is the source of the intelligibility and reality of the Forms. Next, in the simile of the ‘Divided Line’, Plato suggests that ordinary everyday objects stand in the same relationship to the Forms as shadows do to their originals. And finally, in his famous allegory of the Cave, Plato compares the gradual ascent of the mind towards the Forms with a journey from darkness to light.

      Within the cave (the ordinary world of the five senses), most of us are like chained prisoners watching shadows thrown by a fire. We adopt our opinions second-hand, manipulated and controlled by others. But even if we get free and look around the cave for ourselves, we are still only operating within the ordinary visible world, the world of particular objects. We need to struggle upwards, out of the cave, into the higher world of universals, grasped not by the senses but by the intellect. Our eyes dazzled by the brightness, we first can look only at reflections in pools (perhaps corresponding to mathematical objects, which help the mind to move away from particulars and towards abstract universals); but eventually we will be able to turn our eyes to the light of the stars and finally the Sun itself. The heavenly bodies here stand for the Forms, and the Sun represents the ultimate source of truth, the Form of the Good. In the upper world of Plato’s parable, we are not dealing with ordinary visible light; illumination comes instead at an intellectual level, from the supreme Form which ‘is the controlling source of all reality and understanding’. As always, Plato presents his argument in dialogue form: Socrates (representing Plato’s own views) speaks first; the respondent is Glaucon.