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 existence than by participating in the proper essence of each thing in which it participates, and therefore you accept no other cause of the existence of two than participation in duality, and things which are to be two must participate in duality, and whatever is to be one must participate in unity..."
--Socrates, in Plato's Phaedo (translated by Henry North Fowler)

Supposing I'd opened to this passage, not knowing it was by Plato, thinking it was some guy in the modern world, and not having read what comes before or follows it, I'd have thought "This is vacuous and this fellow's an idiot" and shut the book. So, for this reason, the passage is crucial to me. And in context it must be important to Plato too (and Socrates as well, if Socrates really said something like it) since it isn't simply an esoteric tangent. Socrates is just minutes away from being put to death, he's surrounded by his devoted friends, telling them not to grieve, giving his reasons for believing in the immortality of the soul and that the ideas are the sole cause of things.

The questions I'd ask about the apparently vacuous notion that the number two owes its existence to its "participation in duality" are:

(1) What's at stake in the notion? What's its role in a larger argument Plato is making, and if he'd left out the notion, what would the argument be missing?

(2) Why does the overall argument matter? What in his world does Plato think he's taking care of by making the argument? What problem does he think it is meeting, or what opportunity does he think it creates?

I'm following Thomas Kuhn's admonition in The Essential Tension:

When reading the works of an important thinker look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer..., when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.

I'll put some of my own thoughts in the comments; you can put yours there, too.

Comments

[koganbot]

I've so far not read the book's modern intro (modern as of 1908, that is), since I want to grapple with it on my own, first.

The apparent vacuity is that "duality" seems to add nothing to the concept "two," much less seems able to "cause" two. And what is being asked for when we ask for a cause of two, anyway? Must two be something that's caused? Plato might just as well be arguing that "two" is caused by its participation in absolute "twoness," which doesn't seem to explain anything whatsoever.

A bit earlier he says "if anything is beautiful besides absolute beauty it is beautiful for no other reason than because it partakes of absolute beauty." This would seem to be the same sort of empty argument, beauty causing beauty being no better than duality causing two. But actually with beauty he's creating a distinction that I can at least make some sense of, beauty as we experience it needing to partake of an absolute beauty, and he's confronting a problem that I can recognize: "If anyone tells me that what makes a thing beautiful is its lovely color, or its shape, or anything else of the sort, I let all that go, for all those things confuse me, and I hold simply and plainly and perhaps foolishly to this, that nothing else makes it beautiful but the presence or communion (call it which you please) of absolute beauty, however it may have been gained." Now I myself can make no use of the concept "absolute beauty," but I have an idea as to how he's trying to use it.

Some of you will remember the Boney Joan Rule, which goes: any reason I give for liking a performer will also be a reason I give for disliking some other performer. "E.g., I love Liz Mitchell's clear, empty tones (Liz Mitchell being the lead singer of Boney M). I can't stand Joan Baez's clear, empty tones. Of course, I can look for further reasons. For instance, Liz Mitchell's tone is light, whereas Joan Baez sounds soggy. Which gets rid of my inconsistency but produces another one when I recall that I love the thick soggy singing in freestyle songs such as Cynthia's "Change On Me" and Lisette Melendez's "A Day In My Life (Without You)."

"I can go on like that, digging further. My feeling is that we never do arrive at The Real Reason I Like Boney M and The Real Reason I Dislike Joan Baez - the opinions are more durable than any reason I give for them - but that in making the journey through successive explanations I learn about the music and my own tastes, and maybe I learn something about my own values, as I discover what I'm willing to count as a good reason and what I think is a bad but true reason."

So I seem to end with a value judgment that's as deep as any reason I could give for the judgment. The judgment has no roots or basis in something that is not itself a judgment, and it lives and breathes in the social world of other judgments, this judgment contrasting with other ones (other judgments of mine and other judgments by other people). Whereas, I assume Plato would be dissatisfied with the idea of such a judgment standing on its own two feet and dancing in its social whirl of other judgments. For him this would leave a gaping hole that needs to be filled by something that's neither a judgment nor an attribute, something that is not derivative or composed of anything else; so, an absolute beauty, indestructible and immutable, upon which all the beauty we experience takes its stand and from which all the beauty we experience gets its sustenance.

[koganbot]

The Boney Joan Rule