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Home , Analogy of the sun, Parmenides (dialogue), Third man argument, Timaeus (dialogue)

Lecture 5.2: and : The Fate of the Forms

The traditional interpretation of is fairly clear, by now. He started out replicating what he describes to us as ’ method of examining his contemporaries, in search of the good life, the best life, the virtuous life, for man. He got caught up in speculating, hypothesizing, I suggested Tuesday, about what it might require, what the world and human beings must be like, in order to find answers to Socrates’ questions, guarantors of virtue and our capacity to achieve it. He starts where we all start: in this world, the world of experience, of perceptible, moving, growing, changing, discrete things, of arranged in various ways; the world about which we think, which we understand, which we strive to know about. And knowing about it means thinking about it, talking about it. And that seems to require using—talking or thinking in—general terms. He asks: what do, how do, general terms mean? So he posits objects of meaning. Plato says at 596a, on the first page of the excerpt from X that I posted for you on the website, “Whenever a number of individuals have a common name, we assume them to have also a corresponding idea or form.” This ‘corresponding idea or form’ takes on a life of its own. By observing the world carefully and thinking about it, he seems to have moved away from it somehow. To understand the world we need to look behind it, through it. The things that explain it are in it but not of it. He seems, in the and in the Republic , as well as a few other , to have been brought to develop a theory, a unifying explanation—what is usually described as his “,” or Theory of Ideas. When we talk about it, what we say, is not so much an account of what he says, of the sort that I give when I analyze an argument from a ; rather it is a rational reconstruction, on the basis of what Plato did say.. Because it is a rational reconstruction rather than a description, there are various ways of interpreting it. I am trying to give you a fairly agreed upon version; but as we will see, there are at least two ways we can go with it.

The Theory of Forms Tuesday we looked at the 3 central images of the Republic: The Sun, the Line and the Cave. Examining those images we have found something like a two-world . A: One world: the world of Forms Names—general terms, of the sort of which all language is composed—are the names of Forms. Red; hot; just; horse; equal… Things of this sort are characterized (in the Phaedo and Republic, mainly) as: • Immutable (Phaedo 79d, 80b) • Changeless (Phaedo 78d, also Timaeus 27e, 28a) • Objects of thought (Phaedo 79a, also the Line passage) • Not body (79 b-c): immaterial; not spatial; non-temporal • Pure, simple, uniform • Not (79 b-c); uncreated, even by mind • Superior to particular things (74 d-e) • Divine (84 a 9) They are separate from their instances—certainly definitionally, and probably ontologically as well. The Form of X is what it is to be X, apart from viewpoint or circumstance; it is the essence of X, a character or attribute, a nuclear identity. B: The Other World: the world of particulars There is another kind of thing: the kind of being or thing that participates in, or partakes; particulars, constituted by their properties. Call them ‘phenomena.’ Things of this sort are • Material, concrete • Extended in , located in time • Changing • Complex, composite • Determinate, specific • Contingent; now they are, at another time they are not • Can present contrary appearances (Rep 523 b-c, 524d-525a) • Can have contrary properties simultaneously • Can have different properties at different times o In one way but not another o In reference to one thing but not another o Here but not there o To one person but not another, depending on perspective and circumstances Particular things are different from one another, but they are all the same kind of being, and differentiated not so much by relation to one another, but by their relation to that other kind of being. C: The relation between the two worlds: The partakers, the participators, the phenomena, are dependent upon the forms. They acquire, they have, their properties or characteristics through participating in, partaking of, that other kind of existence. Being versus having: Socrates is white by partaking of, participating in, having, the feature of white-ness White, the Form of white, is white by being white, by being this sort of feature. It is what makes Socrates white, what gives him his whiteness, what we mean when we say “Socrates is white--” because it is the Form that the common word ‘white’ is the name of. They are not only dependent upon the Forms for what they are; there are suggestions as well that they are dependent upon them for that they are; we are told in the that it is responsible not only for the visibility, but the very being, existence, of the visible world; and in the Timaeus at 52c, images (putatively the phenomena) are spoken of as ‘clinging to being, lest they be nothing at all.’ Phenomena are deficient , compared to the Forms. “Real” is an honorific; it is a good thing to be, and the phenomena are less real than the forms. They hover between being and non-being. And they are deceptive , as well; by virtue of their changability, their mutability, they can be deceptive (although they are not always so).

D: Two worlds—or none? There is a passage in the Parmenides which is in your texts, about which we tradesmen make a great deal of fuss. It’s often called “The Third Man” argument; and it is considered crucial for our understanding, our rational reconstruction, of P’s , his theory about the nature of reality, his ToF. The question it poses is: How real, according to Plato, IS this world? CAN the ToF as I have scetched it, serve as an explanation of what he wanted it to explain? Or does he have to abandon it, and proceed (in the rest of his 36-42 dialogues)on a different basis? To put the question in another way: how substantial—how ‘real’—is this world? He’s connected the two worlds I talked about by virtue of a relationship that I’ve talked about in several ways. --Tuesday I gave a list of 5 roles the forms play in the dialogues. --Today I’ve waved my hands a lot and talked about phenomena ‘partaking of’ and ‘participating in’ F. But what IS that relationship? And specifically: can it be spelled out in a way that doesn’t force Plato into an infinite regress? Central to this question is the question of self-predication: Is the form of X itself X? --Is the form of justice just? --is the form of beautiful? --Is the form of red red, or of hot, hot? If the form of hot isn’t hot, how does participating in it, or partaking of it, explain why things are hot? Why things that are red, are red? If the F don’t serve an explanatory function, we wouldn’t have hypothesized them in the first place. There is something that is the name of that which all things that are hot or red have in common. Is it something in them—the white-in-Socrates—or is it something else? Is it an indwelling, immanent form, or an external, intelligible-but-not-material form?* [I phrase it this way because Plato and , to whom we turn next, answer this question differently.] *[For other alternatives you’ll have to take other classes.] Plato says: It’s something else—an external, intelligible-but-not-material Form. So: the next question is: what is the relation between Socrates’ whiteness and this something else? Do they share that characteristic—or not? [text]

There are two answers to the problem that the poses to Plato. (1) That’s a deal-breaker. Plato abandoned the ToF of his middle period, and generated a different kind of explanation. Or; (2) That’s NO problem for our boy! He had a way of understanding the relationship ready to hand, already in place. Interestingly enough, both answers rely on the Timaeus for the next stage of Plato’s later ToF, which is why I wanted you to have the Receptacle passage for reference. There are two articles in the supplementary readings that address this issue, and IF anyone wishes to write on Plato’s metaphysics for their final paper, I can certainly recommend both. One is by Waterlow; the other by Allen. If we were doing a seminar on Plato’s metaphysics, we’d probably spend a week on each of them; but – the quarter moves on, and we must move with it… (2) Alternative 2: It’s no problem for our boy. Allen says: Yah. If the form of red was a big pot of redness that was itself red; if the forms were the kind of thing that shared with the red particulars a thing which they both had—a regress would be generated. But that misunderstands the nature of the ontological distinction that Plato is drawing. The phenomenal world is not of the same kind as the intelligible world, only just less so. It represents a different KIND of thing. We have to take that horizontal line in the middle of the Divided Line that separates one realm from the other VERY seriously! (And, I suppose, that means to take the vertical less seriously; it’s not a continuum.) And what is that kind of thing? The relationship between the Forms and the particulars, Allen suggests, is that of an image and its original. But: not the kind of image of an original that a photograph is, or a painting, or a statue. Those things are real things in their own right, they have a substantial reality independent of that of which they are images or copies. Consider instead your image as you look at yourself in the mirror. It’s not something different than you; it is you. It has no substantial reality in its own right. When you leave, it is no longer there; and there is no trace of it left in the mirror, either. Yes, it is epistemologically useful—you can say ‘that’s my pimple!’ You can maybe draw some information about exactly where on your face that pimple is, and how obvious it is to the observer—but there’s a sense in which it’s nonsense to say that the pimple on your face and the pimple you see in the mirror ‘resemble,’ because they are not enough the same kind of thing to be able to draw resemblances. Allen says “the reflection does not resemble the original. Rather, it is a resemblance of the original.” Does my pimple, seen in the mirror, have enough in common with the pimple on my face (which is what I’m seeing in the mirror) to generate a regress? Not really… Now I’m not saying that the ontology of reflections is itself transparent. What IS the ontology of reflections, anyway? But Allen, and other commentators as well, can use this mysterious relation—the difference between resembling, and being a resemblance—to avoid the regress of the Parmenides.

Allen concludes that the Third Man argument is not a problem for Plato. He does not need to abandon the Theory of Forms, because that theory was making a logical point about the versatility of language, and all the different things you can do with it. It wasn’t just a stupid hypostatization of ‘naming’ so that names of abstract characteristics had to have a concrete object of which they were the name; it was better than that. To put it in more contemporary, linguistic or logical, terms: the predicates ‘r’ or ‘h’ are not univocally applied to both phenomena and Forms; they don’t mean the same thing when a form is called r and a particular thing is called r. [The red thing is called red because it has red; the form is called red because it IS red. Or: the “is” of predication is different than the “is” of identity.] Interestingly enough, whether you are persuaded by Allen or not, the Timaeu s passage I asked you to download does invoke the language of mirror-images to explain the nature of the reality created by the Demi-urge.

Rorty’s problem with Allen’s solution: So: Allen sez: the relation between this world and the world of forms does not create an infinite regress. But: does it explain this world? He avoids regress by cutting the connection between the worlds; by emphasizing the horizontal in the Divided Line he dismembers the vertical, and cuts this world away from that which was supposed to explain it. The one thing you can say about the image in the mirror: it doesn’t have any substantial reality at all. It doesn’t exist at all! It’s just an image of something else, that really exists! The things that exists in Plato’s ontology are the Forms; so we have avoided a regress by completely dissolving this world, the phenomenal world. Not much of an explanation, babe.

(1) Alternative 1: It’s a deal breaker. The logic of explanation demands that: if F is an explanation of the resemblance of f and f and f—there must be some explanation of the relation of F to f and f and f. We saw this in Republic X where P himself says that P bed and R bed and Fbed generates a regress. Heck—we saw it in the , where that sniveler Rorty complained about the ‘explanation’ of learning by recollection. It’s just the elephant-turtle problem all over again. Now Plato thought that he could solve it by positing, through his description of the nature of the Forms, that FBed1 and FBed2 collapse into each other: on the level of the intelligibles, the Forms, Being, there were no criteria to differentiate them, so they are all just one, unitary; not spatial, like phenomenal beds, not combined with other characteristics… But: that leaves as the explanans, the thing that is supposed to explain, something that has no characteristics of the explanandum, the thing that is supposed to be explained. It leaves us, actually—in a Parmenidean world. Remember what Parmenides said about “what was?” That it had no change, no motion, no characteristics…In short, it dissolves the phenomenal world, eliminates that which it is supposed to explain. So: on this arm of our dilemma, Plato abandons the middle-dialogue theory of forms: or at least, he modifies it. He ceases considering the Forms the all-and-only explanation. He doesn’t need to scrap them entirely; they remain for what they can explain; but he does admit that they are not enough to explain this world. We need something else. What is that? Consider our original situation, from which we generated the hypothesis of the forms in the first place. I see similarities between things. I compare. I abstract. I have the idea. (Indeed, I have the Idea-idea.) In the ToF as I’ve been describing it, we have the phenomena; we have the forms; but—where am I? Where is the thinking agent, the anima, the seer, comparer, abstractor? The Tof F is not adequate, not complete, unless we pay more attention than my description so far has done to the role of the soul in Plato’s Theory of Forms. And if we do, we may be more inclined to call it “the Theory of Ideas”—despite some of Plato’s own disclaimers. Waterlow’s article, which is available on the supplementary reading list on the website, takes this line. I don’t have the time to go through it in detail, but I will put my reading notes up on that list. To fit the soul into its proper place in the ToF does require picking and choosing among the functions the forms play in the early and middle dialogues; and also giving up some of the characteristics of forms that I listed earlier.

The other thing to which we are not going to have the time to pay enough attention is the Timaeus. We have to move on, through our relentless quarter, to Aristotle next week. I will tell you that some of us, and I include myself in that number, consider the receptacle passage in the Timaeus the crowning achievement of Plato’s ToF. But-- that is another story. For Tuesday: get started on Aristotle readings; and expect sometime next week another unannounced and unanticipated pop quiz. We only have a few lectures for Aristotle’s metaphysics, and I’d like to be able to make some sense of the vocabulary in which he discusses Plato’s problems. We will consider SUBSTANCE and the categories of properties/predication; For that read the Categories and (if it helps) de Interpretatione; Aristotle’s explanation of change; matter and form in Aristotle; potentiality and actuality; and the 4 causes.