Participation

Plato faced a puzzle: if there is one perfect, unchanging Form of Beauty (or Justice, or Equality), how do the many ordinary things we see come to be beautiful at all? His answer was participation — particular things "share in" or partake of the Forms, deriving their character from a reality beyond the senses. In the Phaedo he offers this as the safest explanation of why anything is what it is, yet in the Parmenides he raises sharp objections against his own idea, and Aristotle later dismissed it as "empty words and poetic metaphors." The term has anchored debate about Forms ever since.