Platonic tradition
So, this is how I understand the eight or so centuries of Platonic thought.
First, there is the One. Which is pure potentiality
Second, there is the Intellect. Whether it comes from the One or not is a mystery. It is the Demiurge
Lastly, there is the Forms and the gods, and finally earth.
My instinct is that they were not otherworldly people, but loved the rays of the sun. Ultimately, they may have believed that the One was subservient to matter. How this is possible wouldn't be dealt with in philosophy until phenomenology was born
First, there is the One. Which is pure potentiality
Second, there is the Intellect. Whether it comes from the One or not is a mystery. It is the Demiurge
Lastly, there is the Forms and the gods, and finally earth.
My instinct is that they were not otherworldly people, but loved the rays of the sun. Ultimately, they may have believed that the One was subservient to matter. How this is possible wouldn't be dealt with in philosophy until phenomenology was born
Comments (34)
aquinasonline.com/aquinas-on-knowing-gods-existence/
This is the most valiant effort offered on this issue from that side of the court.
I'm reading about the panentheism of John Erigena in "On the Division of Nature" by him. A Platonist of a special breed
Pierre Grimes and the Noetic Society
Pierre Grimes made many of his early lectures available in which he discusses a great deal of topics. He seems to have a real soft spot for Plato and Neoplatonic thinkers. His lectures really opened my eyes to the richness of Platonic thought, and how badly represented it is in contemporary education.
Thank you very much!
I think the "One" is purely actual, the primary actuality from which everything else emanates, like the Christian "God".
Maybe Plato was ambiguous, since he writes in dialogues. Plotinus for one wrote in the Anneads that the One is pure potentiality
Actually there is significant ambiguity in Plotinus concerning this issue. Aristotle through his cosmological argument had already demonstrated that anything eternal must be actual or else there would be no actual existence now. And, he defined "form" as actual, so Neo-Platonic Forms are actual.
Plotinus defined "One" as potentiality, but then he was forced to say that One had absolutely no movement, and so there was a problem which followed, as to how the One could engender the Intellect, and all else which follows, if the One consisted purely of potential. The One, is in some sense "the cause" of existence, and Aristotle's demonstration was that such a cause is necessarily actual. So Plotinus compared this cause to a type of "seeing".
[quote=Plotinus, Fifth Ennead, First Tractate, ch.6]
...and it must be the second of all existence, for it is that
which sees The One on which alone it leans while the First has no
need whatever of it. The offspring of the prior to Divine Mind can be
no other than that Mind itself and thus is the loftiest being in the
universe, all else following upon it- the soul, for example, being an
utterance and act of the Intellectual-Principle as that is an utterance
and act of The One.[/quote]
Notice that he is forced here to refer to the "act" of the One.
We should turn to Plotinus because Plato is ambiguous, and maybe we should continue the thought with a Heidegarrian interpretation of Plotinus. Potentiality-to-being is not strictly static. And further, it is untrue that Aristotle proved that the actual is prior to the potential. I've read his arguments via Aquinas, who wrote them more clearly. I find them faulty to be honest
I also wanted to add that phenomenology immediately preceded Heidegger, who took it to a new stage
The One is approached through dialectic, based on the experience that is called 'The Idea of the Good' (idea as in 'to behold'), where the One is said to be the source of this experience. This experience is also called 'the Perfection of Beauty' or 'Divine Luminousity'.
Good thoughts. But can perfection finally happen in the universe?
I see the Intellect as the "evil genius" of modern philosophy
If you are talking about 'the Perfection of Beauty', according to Plato it can certainly be experienced. If I'm not mistaken Plotinus also goes into great depth about these experiences and he states to have had them on multiple occasions.
It should be plain enough by now that the mathematical/logical model comes close, but does not quite close the gap through which something more, nominally ineffable, enters reality. And the thing is, how much of a deviation from the causal nexus, how much of a quantity untraceable in the calculus, how much of an ambiguity in the otherwise rigid progression of inference, is the downfall of these gods?
It's perfectly true that logical inference is the conservation of its premise, but this can only be so if a proposition is determinant rather than mere trope. But if the proposition is not a categorization, but a characterization, of the subject by the predicate, then it is not possible to assemble two propositions from a single premise in which that characterization is wholly in the same terms. But we must become convinced that terms are indeed conserved if we are to begin reasoning at all. And so, if we engage in critical reasoning together (dialectic), we can become aware of that lapse in the continuity of terms. Probably we will never individually recognize the lapse in ourselves, but, nevertheless, terms evolve, and if the reasoning throughout, on all sides, is competent and honest, then that evolution cannot be false. Certainly not as false as either one alone is bound to be. It's not that we learn what's real by hashing things out together, but that we evolve together in the terms by which that learning might become a real possibility. The remaining work is not philosophy, it's science or technology, but the fundamental issues that should consume us here is that that evolution of the terms we must become convicted of to reason is the real issue. Plato's views are not correctly understood as ontology, but as characterology. The person of the thinker is paramount. There is no quantifier that can reveal this.
Are you speaking of meaningless (or empty) categories? I'm not sure what a trope is
Let me state a simplified form of the argument, and you tell me where you believe the fault lies. The potential for a thing precedes its actual existence. But the potential for any particular thing requires something actual to actualize that specific thing rather than something else. This is contingency, the potential thing cannot come into actual existence without the required cause, which is something actual. If there ever was a time when there was infinite, or "pure" potential, then by the terms of that description it is impossible that there would be any actuality at that time. Without any actuality, this "pure" potential would never produce anything actual, therefore there would always be pure potential without ever being anything actual. What we observe however, is that there is actual existence. Therefore it is impossible that there ever was "pure", or infinite potential, and potential cannot be prior to actual in time.
I see your argument. Now my response is that there are two "things", pure potentiality and the avenue for it to become actual. You might want to think of it as if pure potentiality was the Confucian "Heaven" and the avenue is the Daost "Way". I almost think of it in physical terms. Potentiality flows or maybe even falls into actuality. Or maybe I've read too much Heidegger :) lol
You apparently have a substance-based metaphysics. So is pure actuality for you the perfect Platonic form, God, or the Trinity? I don't see what else it could be but one of those three. I could be wrong. I could be wrong about all of this
The problem I see here is that the way, avenue, or falling, is a path which must be chosen, that is why Plato's "good" becomes a first principle. Potentiality could be actualized in a vast multiplicity of ways, that is the nature of contingency. The way cannot be predetermined or else this would negate the nature of contingency, because then there would only be one way. So whatever it is, the way, or path, must be chosen from a vast multitude of possibilities. Consider falling, like sky diving. As you are falling you have time to consider what is coming up, your landing place. Therefore you have choices as to your path.
Quoting Gregory
Yes, I think some people understand God as a pure actuality. The point is that in Aristotelian physics and metaphysics, "form" is what is active, actual. So in Christian theology Forms are actualities which are independent from matter, acting on matter to make matter what it is (as the particular objects which exist). Matter provides the potential for existence of things. So there is a realm of these immaterial Forms starting from God, similar to Neo-Platonist emanation, without Plotinus' designation that the One is pure potential, having been substituted with the more consistent pure actuality.
Potentiality presumes wanting to be. Isn't it fatuous to want to be anything if we don't know what being means? Socrates was pretty emphatic that we don't, and that a complete and certain proof we don't know is the only knowledge possible to us!
Do you really mean to challenge me on a simple term like that? Or are you really saying you are not familiar with the word? I find neither credible. Do you suppose Plato viewed a proposition in the same technical sense today's logicians and computer programmers do? How do you suppose Plato meant the word "category"? Kat-agora, in the manner of the market, not the tech lab.
Aristotle emerged from a lecture by Plato saying he hadn't a clue what it was all about. As soon as Plato died he was gone, to set up his own rival school. It is not a stretch to suppose, then, that he never understood Plato at all, and was not well liked at the Academy. It is also telling that none of Plato's immediate successors left a written record of their views, presumably taking Socrates at his word that writing was the murder of language, and dialectic. It was not for several centuries that we get Proclus and Plotinus, and with them "Platonism".
I'm generally familiar with Plato's ideas, but I'm not a scholar. Where did Plato discuss the topic that you are calling "the One". I did a Google search and found nothing relatable. How is "the One" different from the "Logos". My interest is primarily in the notion of "pure potentiality". In my own thesis I call that abstract concept "BEING", the power or potential to exist. from which all "beings" come to be. I hadn't thought of BEING as "wanting to be" (Washburn), but in order for Potential to become Actual, there must be some Motivation and/or Intention. If so, The One, begins to take-on some characteristics of a universal creative deity. Is that what Plato had in mind?
Also, where did the sequence of "One", "Intellect" (demiurge?), Forms, Gods, and Earth come from? Was this hierarchy from Plato, or from later commentators --- or from your own interpretation?
I think you'll find a discussion of 'one' in book four of Polus. I seem to remember a discussion, too, of the oneness of the hand so clearly made up of disparate parts. How is this possible? Surely there is more than meets the eye to being 'one'! That discussion, I believe, is in Theatetus, I could track this down, but won't bother unless your interest is serious. I do wish others would study Plato by reading Plato and not the idiots that suppose they understand him but only cherry pick what supports their convictions, and that we would stop using contemporary notions "as a lens", as if he were an interesting but archaic version of our more sophisticated methods and norms. We haven't caught up to him yet, and there are going to be a lot of red faces if and when we do.
Plato talks about the One in Parmenides but as far as I know never says what is most prior of all. I wrote what I thought the Platonic tradition was aiming at in ancient times. No interpretation of ancient documents is dogma
My understanding of pure potentiality as the prime first reality of our universe is very physical in nature. It's like Sean Carroll's ideas of the universe coming from a contingent wave form. You might say that, since it's physical, it is substance based. But this is a mistake. Aristotle's men just don't have a good grasp of what the universe is because Aristotle himself tripped them up
So what did you think of the argument I presented as to why pure potentiality as the prime first reality of our universe is impossible? Did you follow the argument? Have you found faults in it? Consider your analogy of an avenue, path, or way. Do you see the need for someone to select the path? If so wouldn't this decision maker be some type of actuality which would more appropriately be called "the prime first reality"?
I've actually seen your argument many times, having read a lot of Edward Feser after studying Thomas Aquinas. If the avenue is infinite, any possibility can fly thru it in any way. The one we came up with is random. I believe most physicists hold this position. They call pure potentiality "nothing", but they are not philosophers, and there is hardly a difference anyway. Is an infinitesimal something or nothing?
Wait a minute. How could an avenue be infinite. It is one path, one way, out of many possible ways. There might be an infinite number of possible avenues, but an avenue is a definite thing. You go through it in the way that it is, and no other way.
Infinite worlds are a tempting theory for many physicists these days because they hold my theory. Or rather, I hold theirs'
Take a look at "The Analyst" by George Berkeley. He accuses mathematicians of making just that error in the invention of the calculus. First, they take the infinitesimal as a small but positive value to support the integration, but then take it as zero to support the differential. That critique quite aside, the infinitesimal is a blatant attempt to reduce an irrational quantity to a rational equivalence amongst a myriad but countable values, plus a "negligible" left-over. But the neglected value is precisely what we are trying to discover and understand! Why is reality so stubbornly resistant to the mathematical model? What if the neglected value is the whole shebang?
If you really want a bellyful of "Being is...," talk, take a look at Euthydemus. It's as if Plato anticipated Heidegger and all his 'One' talk. Somewhere, maybe in the Intro to Metaphysics, Heidegger quotes Parmenides saying "Let it not be said that Being is not." Fact is, if you don't know a little something of what anything isn't you don't have a clue what it is. This goes for "Being". Does Heidegger ever speak a word of what "Being" isn't, anywhere? The Euthydemus also is a reminder that philosophers take themselves much too seriously! Socrates really and literally means it when he says that if you haven't been proven wrong in your views you don't really know them at all. Rigorous recognition of our being wrong is our only real knowledge. It's the terms of that rigor alone that is the issue of philosophy. If there is anything to be proved true it is something else, not philosophy.
Physics is dogmatically convicted in the mathematical model and hence is no place to look for methods or answers in doing philosophy. String theory and multiple universes reflect that dogmatic commitment. Some weeks ago there was a discussion here about dark matter, the whole thing orbited around a theory of ballistics, very much a terrestrial principle. A bomb on earth creates a spherical pressure wave and cloud of ejecta. But cosmologically this model does not hold. There is no center to the universe. As Steven Hawking put it, "the center of the universe is the tip of your nose!" If there is no center, if every point in space is the center, there can be no spherical cloud of mass pulling the universe apart from just outside our ability to sense it. We need to look closer to home, and take into account all the strangest behavior of matter space and time we have learned of in the past century, and stop thinking like Enlightenment Protestants.
In Gorgias, Plato explains how ideas come into view as analogy. But, of course, like everything else about him, we get this wrong too. An analogy is not a comparison of likes. It is a likening of differentiation. "The doctor is to the cook as the personal trainer is to the tailor." That is, one cures, the other merely disguises, infirmity. In Lysis, we are entertained for a while in the aspirations of a young man to be befriended by the most popular kid in class. In the end Socrates laments, in the standard translation: "we still don't know what the friend is!" But a little time spent with my Liddell and Scott reveals another possibility: "we still do not know which one is the friend!" In this, as in so many other dialogues, this is the point he is making, one we seem incapable of getting though our thick skulls, that it is not by being one there is anything at all, but by not being the one that oneness is. And even by being so quite deliberately. The friend is the friend by not being the friendship. The apple is red by not being what redness is. The wise philosopher has done all the rigor required of him only when he or she has completely proven he or she does not know. What one means is no more philosophically interesting than what "Being" is. It's what it ain't that matters! And, even, what meaning is.
Ok. Thanks for the post
Please remember that for Plato there was no established codified set of rational rules or principles. The “Law” of the “excluded middle” had not been invented, though Plato did endeavor to break the ambiguity between the example or experience and the idea. The red apple is not what redness is. But when Aristotle invented that “law” and began to codify a logic on the basis of it, he had not understood the contradiction inherent in his invention because he did not recognize the positive role the departure from or that idea or active negation of that role in identifying both. In Statesman there is a discussion of the identity of a class (somewhere around page 264 if my notes are correct). The unity of a class is traced to a reductive process. That reduction, comically, at first proceeds as a simple intuition of what names the group as a group, but then the Stranger insists the reduction should proceed by a more arduous route, by dividing the group “roughly by half”. But the result turns out, actually, to be shorter that the shortcut. It also, comically, defines humanity as a biped without feathers. This is clearly playing with our minds. Why?
Again, if my notes are right, it is shown that only the shepherd knows what makes his flock a flock, and, by implication perhaps, only the statesman knows what makes the polity a polity. But the overall point is that number does not name or identify anything. It can only count, and count as a unified whole or oneness, what some personal responsibility or engagement has identified. And without that identity there is a contradiction between the concept of class and of its membership. That engagement that gets the count going by instituting a dialectical epochal terrain around it, is the infinitesimal. The least term in the reduction not capable of being identified or included by it. But since that neglected term brackets the whole and sets the context of the count of what is within it, it is the sine qua non, the most inclusive term of all. It makes all the difference. That is, as Socrates claims in Parmenides, moment is the only ends of time. The rest, though it span forever, is just empty terms. There is no one there identifiable between which one it is and there is no 'how many' there to that otherwise presumptive oneness.
This should read:
Quoting Gary M Washburn
Great posts ! Sounds like you're enjoying Plato as much as I do.
Plato is as deep as the ocean, and one can fish for insights at all depths. Translation of key terms and interpretation, the mindset of both the translator and the reader can turn our reading in a number of directions. I find that reading Plato is very different than arguing with and against him on each point. Neither is right or wrong, just different. What is clearly wrong is to read Plato as spouting a Socratic or Platonic dogma.
I agree with you that Plato is not and has not been understood, especially not by the brain of the Academy. Throughout the dialogues many of Plato's predecessors are both philosophically incorporated and unfairly excoriated. Aristotle followed this practice but now against his master.
By today, misrepresenting Plato has become a well-established habit. Even the superb Platonic analytic writings of the past 50 years have not had a measurable effect on the classroom or on the majority of philosophers. Plato is often seen as a misguided predecessor of Aristotle just waiting to be set right.