Nicole's Question on Plato

My question is, what about inventors? The person who came up with the couch, wheel, table, iPod? Does an "inventor" as such even exist?


Looking at it in the "Platonic world", I do believe that an inventor does exist, to a certain extent.  Yes, it is true that that which the inventor creates may not exist in nature, and therefore that object itself may not have a form in the realm of forms, but what that object represents does.


What I mean by this is that what that object may be used for or its importance to the one inventing is not a creation of the inventor.  Take the couch, for example.  While the couch itself has no essence in the realm of forms, exhaustion does, and sleep does, these things with which a couch is used for and associated with.  What causes the inventor to make the couch?  The necessity for rest and to sleep to overcome tiredness and exhaustion.  These necessities of man are found in nature, and therefore are a creation of the gods, and because of these characteristics that humans possess due to the gods, they must create objects like the couch, the wheel, the table, the iPod in order to accomplish these god-given things.


So in this sense, an inventor does and doesn't exist.  He creates that which he needs in order to comply with these things such as exhaustion, or a place to satisfy hunger (table), or the desire to listen to music (iPod) out of his own mind, but these objects are just imitations of these desires and needs that the inventor has.  His creation is his own, but what it represents is not.