As pointed out by A. C. Grayling in The History of Philosophy,1 Plato believed his Forms were real things:
In Plato’s philosophy, the Forms in the Realm of Being are real things: they are not mental objects only. They are Beauty, Truth, Goodness; but they are also Man, Tree, Horse, Mountain, and everything else—
A. C. Grayling—The History of Philosophy
So, there is a form of Beauty which beautiful people participate in or copy, a form Horse which horses participate in or copy, and so forth.
Ignoring the difficult question of what it means for something or someone to participate in or copy a form, there does seem to be something quite different between a property such as beauty and a thing such as a mountain, or as Grayling describes it, a universal vs. a particular?
So here we come to at least one challenge in thinking about health from a Platonic essentialist perspective: is the form Health—if there is such a thing— more akin to a universal (such a Beauty, Truth, Goodness), or a particular (such as Man, Tree, Horse, Mountain)?
My sense is Health falls somewhere in between. I suspect in the Realm of Being it has neither the ethereal quality of Beauty or the solidness of Horse or Mountain, but components of both, which, even if we, like most philosophers now, don’t believe there exists a Realm of Being I do think this offers useful insights into how we consider what health is in our real world.
For example, I would contend that—similar to beauty— there is a certain subjective nature to health, however, there are also elements of health that are measurable, not dissimilar to how someone could measure aspects of a horse and mountain.
Although I doubt we will find a definition of health contained within Plato’s Forms, I do think they do give us some insight into the difficulty of the task.
The search for a definition of health continues.
- A.C. Grayling, The History of Philosophy (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 74.