Plato 1: Participation In Duality
Aug. 31st, 2008 09:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotI'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.
"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.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-01 03:26 am (UTC)But anyway for Plato, attributing something's beauty to its color or shape or some such is confusing. He doesn't say why, but a reason might be that color and shape that are similar to the color and shape of a beautiful object are perfectly capable of giving rise to ugliness or nonbeauty in another object, and also that beauty can apparently be caused by one thing (such as color) in one circumstance and another thing (such as shape) in another circumstance; even if the two things have nothing to do with each other - and therefore, if we say that beauty can arise from this, or that, or yet something else, we've just confused ourselves and not arrived at the actual cause of beauty. So for Plato, a cause must be singular and consistent. Why? (E.g., think of the phrase "causes of war"; I would not expect there to be a singular, consistent cause of war.)
Well, if what gives rise to beauty is multiple and variable, then can't beauty flit from here to there and flicker in and out of existence, being evanescent and only half real? For if its causes are multiple, then isn't beauty a composite of other things, liable to disintegrate from the mere absence of one of its constituents? And if its causes are variable, today color, tomorrow shape, then what right do we have to say that we're speaking of anything when we speak of beauty? How can we know what we're saying, and how can we ever come to any conclusions?
(Of course, buried in those questions are some bad assumptions: that something that's not 100% stable is unstable, that something has to be indestructible to be real, and so on. Several questions to pose and then put aside for the time being are: (i) what drove Greek philosophers to those assumptions, (ii) did the assumptions have much cultural presence among the Greeks when they weren't doing philosophy, and (iii) what were the instabilities that actually did matter to the Greeks when they weren't doing philosophy?)
If I could transport myself back to Plato's time, I'd ask him how one uses the concept of "absolute essence of beauty." Other than being a (theoretically) invariable source for the beauty that we actually experience, what else does "absolute essence" do? So far, it seems inaccessible and unusable.