The theory of recollection that Plato puts forth in Phaedo and Meno hinges on the supposition that all non-empirical “knowledge” is recalled from a communion with the Forms prior to birth; his theory stands myopic and venerable to the copious alterative possibilities for coming about such “knowledge.” Once it is seen that Plato’s Forms aren’t the contingent conclusion of the intuitive “reason” to which his character Simmias conveniently stipulates, it becomes clear that Plato’s subsequent epistemologies and proofs for God (and the immortal soul) are rendered unsound, if not invalid.
Wanting to be fair and charitable to Plato’s approach to “pre-epistemology”, it is important to establish his definition of knowledge. Plato makes two distinctions of knowledge. First, it could be said that Plato understands that there is an encounter with experience which is composed of events and facts which one observes once one is born. To know that Barrack Obama is the current president of the United States is an empirical fact which Plato will deemphasize in his epistemology if he can’t totally it reject as knowledge. Though Descartes will come later, and it can’t been argued that Plato has avoided the possibility of doubting even these “facts” as a certainty of life in the context of an Evil Deceiver, he at least permits it as an observation irrelevant to his own definition of knowledge. The types of knowledge which Plato chooses to say are valid are the concepts (such as equality, justice, et cetera) of which there appears to be no other way of knowing without it existing before the individual became aware of it. Here, Plato’s argument is that, referring to equality, it must exist in some perfect Form in order for our understanding of it to be possible since it is clear that it is inherently unavoidable to escape making such distinctions as part of human nature.
Whenever someone, on seeing something, realizes that that which he now sees wants to be like some other reality but falls short and cannot be like that other since it is inferior, do we agree that the one who thinks this must have prior knowledge of that which he says it is like?…this is possible only if our soul existed before it took on this human shape (Phaedo, 74e, 72e respectively).
This argument has also planted the seeds for later work such as St. Anselm’s powerful ontological argument which blooms into the conclusion, in short, that because one cannot dispute that he can conceive of a supreme being; a supreme being must exist. Though Plato does not go this route, his contention agrees that to conceive of a transcendent Form beyond our natural world, is to inherently necessitate its existence, and that by making the observation that as things in this world bear resemblance to such abstract notions as equality, is to prove that all knowledge of these things is a function of recalling them from an a priori communion with their Form.
Plato desires to use his theory of recollection as the proof which solidifies the existence of Forms and consequentially implies an immortal, transcendent nature of the soul even if nothing can be concluded about the nature of the longevity of the soul. In light of the originally mentioned vulnerabilities of such thinking, it seems sophomoric to say that the most important criticisms here are that Plato fails to answer how it is that the soul originally exists in order to relate to such Forms. And it is additionally superficial to find it constructive to say that this philosophy fails where Plato doesn’t propose a complete system for understanding how and why something in this world could and should embody an inferior Form of itself. These points are ancillary chidings which only allude to the incomprehensible nature of our complex existence which ends up giving the philosophy more credit than it deserves.
Beyond Plato’s validly suspicious assumption that the origin of knowledge must come through a recollection of a prior relationship to transcendent Forms, these thoughts are very interesting and should be taken seriously but only in the context that it is one of many possibilities rather than a freestanding proof. It is the other more plausible and even the exceedingly mystical alternatives of modern epistemology which throw Plato’s contention of proof into the quagmire of competing theory. One diametrically opposed view to this epistemology, but with many salient tenants, is that of modern existentialist Michel Foucault. Foucault argues that every human being, without being able to control it, enters into an existence without any fixed point of reference other than the current cultural context. And that, though time, history shows that all that has been done in the name of reaching a more enlightened understanding of the knowledge of human nature has been a regurgitation and reinvention of the same application of ideas and terms which were borrowed from some other point in history. Foucault, though having many problems with this view as well, has just as validly replaced Plato’s need for transcendence with an ignorant adaptation of history’s terms, definitions and values. Just for means of comparison, Foucault wishes to remove the individual from the marginalizing effects of such assumed and inherited ideas of knowledge by emphasizing the importance of the individual to create an original perspective concerning the nature of concepts so that it is the human cause that is progressed rather than the stagnation that has resulted in the preoccupation of generations to cling to enshrined ideas purported by past philosophers who claimed to have the proofs concerning the truth of what we know and how to go about knowing it. And briefly, another, though more fanciful idea about how we come to know things, is the theory of collective consciousness. Collective consciousness is an idea that wildly, but plausibly, adapts Leibniz’s metaphysics (that all of existence is connected by spiritual/biological cells called monads) and that these monads complexly react to each other throughout all that are so composed, linking every brain in some degree or another. Through this philosophy, it is believed that all of our knowledge is really shared (arguably in complex energy packets called photons receivable by the monad) subconsciously, eternally and continuously in relation with the ultimate monad called Lambda. Wild and unconventional as this latter philosophy may seem, it shares many obvious parallels and defining distinctions with Plato’s conjectures, and yet is just as plausible as the theory of recollection (especially if one invites the findings of the theoretical possibility of such waves and their receipt).
You may think that Plato’s was right, or it may be the case that our seemingly inherent sense of concepts are only a complex, naturalistic manifestation and evolution of the human brain. What is clear, however, is that it is human nature to be curious about the relationship of concepts to our existence and to discover the different implications along the way, but to date there is no proof, and humanity does not have to bear Plato’s mark as brilliant an option as it is. I see no need for conclusion here, actually. On a matter as important as this I think it is alright to treat certainty as an illusion.
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