SPROUL: Plato said that the ultimate reality—the ultimate realities, I should say, plural,
are ideas. The truth is ultimately formal, not material.
The ideas that we have in our minds of various things are a recall of ideas
that actually exist in a spiritual realm, what we would call a “supratemporal realm,”
a realm above and beyond this world of physical things that we perceive every day.
Now, let me see, in order to illustrate that, the use of my prop that I brought here today.
I am going to ask for some help from our audience here to see if we can learn something about
Plato’s theory of ideas. I have my friend Roger, my super student who sits here in the front row,
and Roger never ceases to amaze me with his prodigious grasp of these difficult concepts
and complex ideas. I’m not going to embarrass the adults by asking them questions that they will
stumble over. Instead, I will go to Roger, because I know he'll be able to answer this question.
The question I have for you Roger is a very difficult question. You’re going to have to think
hard. I have this object in front of me. What is it? A chair! All right, Roger! Thank you. You got
it right on the button. He said, “That's a chair.” Here's the question. How do you know it’s a chair?
How do you know it’s a chair, Roger? You just grew up learning that that was a chair, right?
You never saw that chair before today. What do you mean you grew up learning that that was a chair?
But you came in here—you've never seen that chair before in your life. And yet,
as soon as I asked you what it was, what did you say? No hesitation:
“It's a chair.” How did you recognize it as a chair? It has four legs. All right, but you know,
horses have four legs. Don’t they, Roger? We’re going to do this in the Socratic dialogue here.
Horses have four legs, but you don’t call them chairs, do you? All right, so there must
be something else besides this having four legs that made you identify it as a chair.
What else? You can sit on it! But of course, you can't sit on a horse, can you, Roger?
Do you have anything at home that’s kind of long; it has like three sections to it; it has
four legs that you can sit on? Do you call it a sofa? But you
know the difference between a sofa and a chair, don't you? Yes, sir.
Well, I could pursue this a little bit further. Have you ever seen chairs that don't look exactly
like this, Roger? Yes sir, you’ve seen chairs that are upholstered and real comfortable,
right? You’ve seen wooden chairs, and soft chairs, and hard chairs, and
all different kinds of chairs. In fact, every one of us has probably seen literally thousands
of different kinds of chairs. Right? Different shapes, different sizes, different material.
And yet, when we see these thousands of different particular objects,
we can look at them and, in spite of the differences that are displayed among them,
we still have this uncanny ability to put all of these particulars, of these specific examples
into the same category called “chair.” All right?
And so, Plato would scratch his head and say, “Well, how can we do that?” How is it that we have
this ability as thinking creatures to recognize all these vastly different objects by the same
common universal term called a “chair?” Or I look out here in the audience and I see people. I see
young people and old people, male people and female people, thin people and heavy people,
don’t I? Blue eyes and brown eyes. Every person in this room has their unique identification,
and yet I can look at all of these particular examples of people, and somehow extrapolate
from these different individuals a class that we call “human beings” or “people” or “mankind.”