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]

The American Heritage Dictionary confirms this (etymology of "idea" says "Latin, from Greek, form, model, class, notion"). But it's hard to make sense of "largeness," for instance, as a form, or even a class, rather than as a comparative judgment.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

isn't the "form of largeness" another way of saying "the idea of size"*? in other words, the "form" indicates what species of comparative judgment th discussion will employ: viz one to which we sensibly choose to bring the term "larger than" (rather than say the term "brighter than")

*ie there wouldn't a separate "form of largeness" and "form of smallness" -- "largeness" is (in this particular context) a synonym for size or scale?

if you're not bothered about spoilers, i will later today try and summarise what i think the issues at stake in platonism are, based on what i remember from other stuff and think about it -- unless you want to be rigorous about building up from our encounter with these fragments as you introduce them

(i've never read plato raw either; if english plato can ever be raw plato)

[koganbot]

isn't the "form of largeness" another way of saying "the idea of size"*

*ie there wouldn't a separate "form of largeness" and "form of smallness" -- "largeness" is (in this particular context) a synonym for size or scale?

No. Unless I'm misunderstanding, he's saying that there is a separate form of largeness, separate from smallness - which I think he'd have to say if he wants beauty to be an idea or form in itself separate from ugliness, duality separate from unity, and so forth. And this passage (among other things) would argue against "largeness" - or "greatness," here - being just a synonym for size or scale: "I think it is evident not only that greatness itself will never be great and also small, but that the greatness in us will never admit the small or allow itself to be exceeded. One of two things must take place: either it flees or withdraws when its opposite, smallness, advances toward it, or it has already ceased to exist by the time smallness comes near it."

BUT there's an interesting wrinkle, which is that at first glance he seems to be contradicting himself, since earlier in the very same dialogue** he had Socrates say that opposites generate each other and he used smallness and greatness as a specific example! But that will be the subject of its own livejournal entry, if I get to it today.

**Phaedo isn't literally a dialogue, since it's Phaedo recounting to someone else in another city the discussion that Socrates and his friends had had right before Socrates' execution.

[koganbot]

Not bothered about spoilers, since of course I'd already read shitloads of references to "Platonism" and read two or three of the dialogues over the years. But one important thing about Plato that I gather from the reading is that he - and maybe Socrates more than he - thought that wisdom included knowing when you don't know something. Questioning assertions, after all, is his basic method (at least it's his basic literary form, though a lot of his "don't you think" might as well be assertions rather than questions). Euthyphro, which we also read, ends up emphatically inconclusive on the subject "What is piety?" So in Plato's hands there isn't necessarily a full-scale doctrine "Platonism."