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

The shape causes the orbit

[koganbot]

Again, I'm not certain that these are the questions he's posing, and maybe he isn't altogether sure of what question is being posed when one asks "What causes X?" But he does seem to be giving an answer that's far different from how I'd answer it, and that's because he's using - or at least veering towards, or introducing at various times - a notion of causation that's different from the "cause and effect" that I use.

E.g., after this passage, Socrates immediately shifts to expressing the disappointment he'd felt when reading Anaxagoras, that Anaxagoras "did not assign any real causes for the ordering of things, but mentioned as causes air and ether and water and many other absurdities." For Socrates had been hoping to get something different from Anaxagoras: "I thought he would tell me whether the earth is flat or round, and when he had told me that, would go on to explain the cause and the necessity of it, and would tell me the nature of the best and why it is best for the earth to be as it is; and if he said the earth was in the center, he would proceed to show that it is best for it to be in the center; and I had made up my mind that if he made those things clear to me, I would no longer yearn for any other kind of cause. And I had determined that I would find out in the same way about the sun and the moon and the other stars, their relative speed, their revolutions, and their other changes, and why the active or passive condition of each of them is for the best. For I never imagined that, when he said they were ordered by the intelligence, he would introduce any other cause for these things than that it is best for them to be as they are."

So for Plato, "it is best for X to be as it is" isn't just a judgment, as I would have it, but a cause. X is the way it is because it is best that it be this way. If it's proper for something to be so, that will be what causes it to be so. This isn't exactly an argument for absolute beauty causing the beauty we experience, or duality causing the number two, but the arguments can be of a similar species. Beauty as an idea can cause the beauty we experience just as the best can cause the order of the world as we experience it. Not sure what an analogous argument for duality would be, but I imagine it would consist of showing that it is somehow appropriate for two to be the way it is, so this proper duality, and not the fact that, say, when you add one stick to another stick you get two sticks, or when you break one stick in half you get two sticks, would be the genuine cause of two. Two is in accord with duality, and is averse to that which is not duality. In any event, two being as it should be would be the cause of two.

For reasoning similar to this, jump ahead a couple of millennia to Johannes Kepler, a Platonist, who (if I've got him right) believed not just that the simplicity and elegance of the elliptical orbit that he'd calculated for Mars going around the sun was a good reason to believe that he was right, that Mars did indeed revolve around the sun in an elliptical orbit, but that the elliptical shape, in its simplicity and elegance, was itself a cause of the orbit.

Re: The shape causes the orbit

[koganbot]

In any event, two being as it should be would be the cause of two.

No "should be," just "would be."