Plato 1: Participation In Duality

[koganbot]

I'm auditing a class in introductory philosophy at Metro State. So I might toss some of my notes in here, from time-to-time.

"Well, then, if one is added to one or if one is divided, you would avoid saying that the addition or the division is the cause of two? You would exclaim loudly that you know no other way by which anything can come into

Comments

By Zeus

[koganbot]

That an essence can be a cause or source doesn't match up with how I'd use the term "essence" in everyday life (or anywhere, actually). For me, to identify an essence is to identify a crucial feature or ingredient and to distinguish it from less crucial features or ingredients. So, an essential use of the word "essence" is that it distinguishes the more important from the less important. But Plato here, in making absolute beauty the essence of beauty, is in effect distinguishing absolute beauty from any feature or ingredient - since when philosophizing he finds features and ingredients problematic, or at least that's what I'm surmising.

I'm wondering whether, when they weren't philosophizing, the Greeks, in using whatever word of theirs we're translating as "essence," gave the word this double duty, not only to be a crucial characteristic but a source or a cause. Seems to me that the second role destroys the first and would make the term unusable in everyday life. So a question I'd have for someone who knows ancient Greek is whether the use of [Greek word that's translated as "essence" here] to mean "source" or "cause" is Plato's add-on, or whether it is indeed tied to the word; and, if the latter, whether the word ever had this second use outside of philosophy.

To return to my train of thought, and the word "two," I can make at least some vague sense of the idea that the beauty we experience is but a wavering, uncertain approximation of an imperishable, absolute beauty that we don't experience directly but that stands behind it as its source. But I have no feeling at all for what a "duality" could be that's more certain and less wavering than the number two we've already got. Two seems as two as it can be, already, in its normal functioning, neither perishable nor wavering. It would seem to have no need to draw on an absolute essence for strength and nourishment. Or, if we're wedded to the idea of essences, we can say that in its normal functioning two is already there in its essence. What difficulty do we eliminate by positing an absolute duality that the actual two participates in, given that two already seems to be fully and absolutely two?

In a passage a few pages earlier Socrates says:

"Now listen to this, too. I thought I was sure enough, when I saw a tall man standing by a short one, the he was, say, taller by a head than the other, and that one horse was larger by a head than another horse; and, to mention still clearer things than those, I thought ten were more than eight because two had been added to the eight, and I thought a two-cubit rule was longer than a one-cubit rule because it exceeded it by half its length."

"And now," said Cebes, "what do you think about them?"

"By Zeus," said he, "I am far from thinking that I know the cause of any of these things, I who do not even dare to say, when one is added to one, whether the one to which the addition was made has become two, or the one which was added, or the one which was added and the one to which it was added became two by the addition of each to the other. I think it is wonderful that when each of them was separate from the other, each was one and they were not then two, and when they were brought near each other this juxtaposition was the cause of their becoming two. And I cannot yet believe that if one is divided, the division causes it to become two; for this is the opposite of the cause which produced two in the former case; for then two arose because one was brought near and added to another one, and now because one is removed and separated from another. And I no longer believe that I know by this method even how one is generated or, in a word, how anything is generated or destroyed or exists, and I no longer admit this method..."

Re: By Zeus

[koganbot]

Actually, I'm quite fascinated by the "were" in "ten were more than eight"; I'm assuming that it comes courtesy of Fowler, the translator, and I'm guessing that he's a Brit.

Re: By Zeus

[koganbot]

the he was, say, taller by a head than the other

THAT he was, say, taller by a head than the other