Platonic form /pləˈtɒnɪk fɔːm/ (n.) An ideal. From Plato’s Republic. An idealised version of a thing, that exists only in intellectual strata reserved for philosophy graduates, of something that the rest of us find grubby, ungainly and ultimately disappointing when we encounter it in the real world. Hence, Plato’s cave. The human dilemma is that experience never quite meets expectation, but as memories fade, will asymptotically approach it again. Hence, people these days seem to find the idea of the forms as quite a good one, however disappointing it must have been at the time. They were right the first time.
