Forms

The Forms (eidos or idea, “look” or “shape”) are, in Plato’s dialogues, the eternal and unchanging realities that the mind knows and the senses cannot reach: Beauty itself, Justice itself, Equality itself. Particular things are beautiful or just by “participating” in them, imperfectly and for a time. The Forms are what truly is; the world of becoming is their image.

The Symposium describes the ascent of love from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself, pure and unmixed with anything mortal; the Phaedo argues that the soul is akin to the Forms and that learning is recollection of them; the Republic places above them the Form of the Good, which gives them their being and intelligibility as the sun gives light and growth, and which is itself “beyond being”. In the Parmenides Plato raises serious objections to his own theory, and Aristotle rejected the separate existence of the Forms.

The Neoplatonists placed the Forms in Intellect, the second level of reality after the One, where each is a living thought; Augustine made them the ideas in the mind of God. Through them the theory of Forms shaped the whole tradition of Western contemplation, as the conviction that true knowledge is of what is eternal.