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

[koganbot]

Presumably, Plato would argue that a boy growing into a man is growing into the form that it is best for a male to be. So its being the best form is what causes the growth that leads to it, food and drink merely being fuel for this growth. I'm extrapolating here, since this is not part of the dialogue, but I'm probably right, though maybe this idea is more Aristotelian than Platonic (or maybe it's both; Plato was Aristotle's teacher, after all). Given that the Greeks knew nothing about genetics or biochemistry, I can see how regular cause-and-effect reasoning would seem inadequate and why teleological explanations would be attractive - a "teleological explanation" being where an outcome, what we'd consider an effect, can be a cause of what leads up to it. The form is already there, and a man grows into it.

So I'm getting in Plato not just the need to maintain fixity in the face of a world full of variation, but that he feels the need for an order or propriety behind the world as we know it, and it's through this greater order that this world gets the solidity and order that it has. It explains the roles and forms that things take, the roles and forms needing to already be there in advance and always, as it were. No, I'm not sure that's what his vision is, actually, and anyway I don't think Plato or his mentor Socrates were doctrinaire. There is always a feeling of trying out different thoughts in the dialogues. Are the concepts behind (or above) the world, somehow, as its cause, or are they in the world - and nonetheless its cause? I don't think this was worked out, at least not here. I still don't get why Plato can't just say that the beauty we've got is beauty, is its own cause, what the distinction is that he's drawing between beauty and partaking of beauty, what the distinction is between two and the duality that two participates in, etc. Is it that the beauty we know through our senses is tied to its opposite - ugliness, decay - whereas absolute beauty is not? (That's a subject for a another set of notes, perhaps.) So the concept of absolute beauty would repel its opposite concept and be disassociated from it, just as the concept of heat repels cold, but neither the concept of beauty nor the concept of heat is dependent on its respective opposite for its existence. Whereas I'd say that the concepts heat and cold absolutely need each other to be intelligible, ditto beauty and ugliness, but then I'm fine with their being comparative terms.