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]

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.