Explain Plato's Notion Of The Forms

Plato’s notion of the Forms comes to us as an answer. In Phaedo, Socrates is prisoned and put to death, which ought to be a tragedy and naturally a fearful experience for most. Strikingly, Socrates is open to being executed, which begs the question of why? Socrates believes that the body and the soul are separate entities that are combined to create what we see on earth as life. According to him, there are two components that we face; visible and invisible. The body is “the visible kind” (79b) and the soul is “not visible” (79b). The purpose of the soul is to investigate. But involving our senses interferes with this need to discover. We must separate from our bodies as much as possible if we desire to seek the truth of the unseen. A contemporary example of this was raised in class about wearing a ‘hair shirt’ to remind us that our body is a prison. The idea behind this notion is that our souls have different fates and what we do on earth determines their destiny in the afterlife. If we are driven to act carnally, we
We are subconsciously aware of the forms, but need to recall them post birth. In the Republic, Plato uses the ‘Allegory of the Cave’ as a metaphor to illustrate this idea of us in relation to the Forms. Here, we begin as bound prisoners at the bottom of a cave staring at a wall of shadows (Rep. 514a-521d). The goal is to reach heights beyond the cave and see using the sun, which represents the Forms . I see this analogy as inaccurate but reasonable. While the specifics of the story can be attacked based on its representation of life, the general notion of seeing beyond what we believe to be reality is of sound logic because we in fact do use these Forms constantly, whether we are aware of it or not. Without being recalled, the Forms would exist in our minds without our