Plato, Pre-Darwin Taxonomy, and a Cat
We’ve been reading Plato’s dialogues in my class on History of Ancient Philosophy, most recently Phaedro. In this story, Socrates, at this point more of a fictional character and mouthpiece for Plato’s own ideas, describes the concept of the Forms and the relationship of the soul and the body. The priority he gives to the soul over the body is contrary to popular Athenian beliefs of the time, and of course as is the nature of Plato’s dialogues, it requires some arguing and explanation.
At the same time, in my philosophy/biology class on the intersection of Science and Human Values, we’ve been reading David Quammen’s The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution. Quammen’s history of the two decades between Darwin’s brief stint as a field biologist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle and the publishing of his theory of evolution reads remarkably well, and it paints an explicit picture of both a man and a theory not yet widely understood.
I found a nice thread connecting these two topics, and I’d like to test its tensile strength.
Essential to his all-encompassing philosophy, Plato’s concept of the Forms is one that questions the very authenticity and degree of realism of our physical reality. A simple example of a Form would be that of a circle. Expressible through mathematics, the Form of a circle, Socrates argues for Plato, is more purely circular than anything that could exist in the real world, and thus is a more real circle than the silhouette of a soccer ball or a china dinner plate.
But these forms aren’t limited to simple mathematical representations, no, there is a form for everything. No matter the subject, be it a cat or the idea of pure beauty, any thing in this physical universe is but an imperfect simulacrum of its underlying Form. The Form of a cat will always be more cat-like than any real cat could be.
Plato believed that the Forms of the good, the true, and the beautiful are what we (as bodies controlled by immortal rational souls) desire and that they are the only things that can bring us happiness and fulfillment. The good, true, and beautiful, once you know how to find them, are at the root of all that gives meaning to life. It is through reason and recollection (of what our immortal souls already knew prior to our birth) that we are able to cast aside bodily distractions to pursue an understanding of these transcendent and unchanging Forms.
Prior to the 1859 publishing of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, contemporary Victorian (and by default theistic) understandings of natural philosophy (what we would now call natural or physical science) posited species to be immutable in form, cast by a creator just as they exist now. Slight variations among a population were considered to be imperfections that, if viewed within the group over time, would average out to reveal the archetype of the species. A cat with slightly thicker hair was merely a slightly incorrect representation of Felis silvestris catus, and nothing to be concerned about. By this understanding, the slight differences between individuals in a population were considered insignificant at best and at worst a hindrance to the strict work of taxonomy.
It was with this understanding of variations within species that Darwin was dissatisfied. His qualm was this, how can one determine where one species ends and another begins, or where to draw the line between varieties within a species? Darwin instead tackled variations within populations head on. As we currently understand the application of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, slight variation manifested in an individual within a population represent the expression of a genetic stock much wider than simply the parents’ traits alone, along with possible mutation(s), and may lead to variants that have an increased survivability. By accepting that variation within a species and the variation between species are merely different by degrees, Darwin revolutionized taxonomy in ways both exciting and frightening.
The same problem that Darwin saw in pre-evolutionary taxonomy, the arbitrary degree and resolution of classification, I see in the (albeit vague) description of Plato’s Forms. To say both that there are Forms for everything, from truth to cats, and also to say that the wide variations we encounter in reality are only imperfect representations of common Forms seems to me contradictory.
Let’s return to our exemplary circle. If there is a Form for a perfect circle, couldn’t there also be another Form for an imperfect circles? Then, shouldn’t there also be a Form for this very specificly imperfect circle? What about a Form for this plate as made by a specific potter and used by my grandmother and chipped on its edge during Thanksgiving ‘99?
If such a multitude of Forms exists that there are as many forms as there are identifiable subjects in existence (that amount being infinite), shouldn’t we conclude that there is at least one form for every possibly identifiable subject? As with species or variations, where do we draw the lines between Forms? If there is at least one form for every possibly identifiable subject, can’t we say that everything is the most pure representation of its own Form?
In this way we could say that my room mate’s cat Lola isn’t just an imperfect representation of the Form of a cat, or Felis silvestris catus, but rather that Lola is the purest representation of her own Form. She is the exact representation of her genes, of her upbringing, of her physical existence, of everything she was and will be, and of cuteness to boot. Too bad she knocked over a glass of water ruining my room mate’s laptop, such clumsy destruction is in rather poor form.