Plato 2: Opposites Generating Opposites

[koganbot]

dubdobdee asked on yesterday's thread:

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

*ie there wouldn't be 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, Plato is 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 a form in itself separate from ugliness, duality separate from unity, and so forth.

BUT there's a wrinkle! Earlier on in the very same dialogue, the Phaedo, Socrates says something that I would not have expected. The question is whether the soul can exist when the body is dead.

"Now," said he, "if you wish to find this out easily, do not consider the question with regard to men only, but with regard to all animals and plants, and, in short, to all things which may be said to have birth. Let us see with regard to all of these, whether it is true that they are all born or generated only from their opposites, in case they have opposites, as for instance, the noble is the opposite of the disgraceful, the just of the unjust, and there are countless other similar pairs. Let us consider the question whether it is inevitable that everything which has an opposite be generated from its opposite and it only. For instance, when anything becomes greater it must inevitably have been smaller and then have become greater."

"Yes."

"And if it becomes smaller, it must have been greater and then have become smaller?"

"This is true," said he.

"And the weaker is generated from the stronger, and the slower from the quicker?"

"Certainly."

"And the worse from the better and the more just from the more unjust?

"Of course.

And on like that, being dead being generated from being alive and vice versa, and if the latter (life being generated from death), then the souls of the dead must exist even when the body is dead. Also, if death didn't generate life, eventually nothing would be alive (and all opposites would come to have the same form and so nothing would be generated at all, if opposites didn't continue to generate each other).

Meanwhile I'm scribbling madly in my notebook, "But wait wait wait. If opposites generate each other, then existence and nonexistence must generate each other, the existence and nonexistence of the soul must generate each other, soul and absence of soul must generate each other, etc., so you can't say that the soul is there continuously throughout death and life." And so when fifteen pages later Socrates is saying that the things that are always the same and unchanging are the uncompounded things and that the things that are changing and never the same are the composites, I'm going, "But what about opposites generating opposites? Shouldn't the compounded and the uncompounded generate each other? And the absolute and the ephemeral? The essential and the accidental? Stasis and change?"

In any event, I was not expecting "opposites generating opposites" to be a doctrine of Plato's - seems more like the Heraclitean unity of opposites (whatever that is), a circle beginning and ending at the same point, the road you go up being the same one you go down, etc.

So I'm strolling along through the text, thinking smugly that Plato has fallen into a major contradiction and blindness, as if he's not attending to his own assertion, when FINALLY, about fifty-five pages on, after all the stuff I quoted yesterday about two being caused by duality, the greatness of size being caused by greatness of size, etc. (with my whispering malignantly all through this, "Guy, you're contradicting yourself, you're contradicting yourself, you're contradicting yourself"), Socrates saying "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 it will not receive and admit smallness, thereby becoming other than what it was." ...So as I said, FINALLY one of Socrates' friends pipes up and says, "In Heavan's name, is not this present doctrine the exact opposite of what was admitted in our earlier discussion, that the greater is generated from the less and the less from the greater and that opposites are always generated from their opposites? But now it seems to me we are saying that this can never happen."

And Socrates says, "You have spoken up like a man." To find out what Socrates then said, you'll have to click on the comments; but when I read this I almost got up and did a little dance, to celebrate that the point hadn't been dropped after all, that Plato was aware of his own difficulties. (I would have danced, too, but I was sitting on the grass across from the Auraria Campus's Facilities Annex, with students streaming in and out, and I didn't want everyone to stare at me.)

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

there's a modern school of nu-platonists -- the straussians -- who argue that these subtle seeming contradictions, and their resolutions, mean that's there's another almost-secret story going on underneath the surface of what plato is generall argued to be claiming (viz the vulgar summary of platonism, i guess), and that only the wise and learned are able to think through to this level of brainwork (and only they should try); in other words, that the elite will think and understand one set of things, higher thoughts, and that the rest can be fobbed off and kept happy with what straussians apparently call the "noble lie"

(this is a bit of a hostile reading of straussianism, which has a number of disciples in the pro-war faction of the bush administration, esp. paul wolfowitz, which doesn't incline a lot of ppl to be that fond of strauss) (i've never read anything by strauss himself; tho i have read an essay by a less compromised pupil, mark lilla, on derrida, which i didn't regard as particularly well-informed or honest)

anyway i just got to the bit where they're talking about recollection, and how our grasp of the Equal must be a memory from when we're not alive and in our bodies, because when we are, we only ever encounter things which aren't quite equal; but we know what equality would be even when we never encounter it... i must say i don't find the idea of recollection (in this beyond-body sense) even slightly persuasive...

[koganbot]

I think skyecaptain has a friend who's high on Strauss. And Richard Rorty, who went to U. of Chicago real young as a teenager, aspired to be "as learned and clever as the Straussians." ("Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," an essay I recommend from Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope: "Platonism had all the advantages of religion, without requiring the humility which Christianity demanded, and of which I was apparently incapable." He gave up the attempt to be a Platonist around age 20.)

As for recollection, I wasn't expecting to be persuaded, and my notes on that section go, "Plato doesn't seem to believe in extrapolation or imagination or the ability to combine in the mind things you do know so as to picture or conceive of things that you've never encountered - though to my way of thinking he's doing exactly that in his various analogies and speculations." I like that last thought of mine (the stuff after the dash) a lot, that his writing style seems to do that which he says is undoable, to take us to thoughts we'd never had. Of course, he can turn around and say, "It only takes us to those thoughts because we have already had them." So his premises are different from mine, and what he's arguing for is really already the premise of his argument. Yes, if you think that you can't imagine something you're not already acquainted with, then indeed the fact that you have a notion of equality even though nothing in your experience is actually equal will prove that you must have knowledge of it prior to your experience, which proves that all knowledge is recollection. Completely circular reasoning. Whereas if you start with my premise, that we can imagine things that we haven't previously experienced, then the fact that we have a notion of equality despite never having exactly experienced it* proves that we can imagine things we've never experienced. Just as circular in its reasoning. Interestingly, Socrates'/Plato's reasoning would have been a lot stronger as an argument that the notion of "equality" that we abstract from various instances of equality is a universal that has a being separate from any of its instances. That would take much more thought to refute or set aside. But the thing is, what I think I'm uncovering in Plato is the need for, e.g., abstract equality to cause the equality we actually experience in life and therefore, somehow, to cause our knowledge of it. (Am I going too far with those last six words? They seem to fit.) So it makes sense he'd want to believe we have a knowledge of equality already within ourselves, already there.

So Plato - perhaps - thinks of the abstract ideas (or forms or concepts or essences or absolutes) as actors and agents. Maybe that's a stronger statement than Plato would actually make, but it does seem to pull a lot of concerns of the Phaedo together.

The next question would be, why does he want the abstract ideas to be sources and causes, actors and agents?

*Not that I think we've never exactly experienced it, but that's a different point.

[koganbot]

The other main charge against Socrates was that he was introducing new gods, and if one thinks of the ideas/forms/concepts/absolutes as agents, this could be where the charges come from. (Though I also remember someone telling me that the ideas/etc. are much more from Plato than from Socrates.)

By the way, have you read A. Bloom? I haven't, but I'm under the impression that he was hardly intending his writing only for a charmed circle. Wasn't Closing quite polemical? Anyway, Rorty describes Strauss as attracting "the best of the Chicago students (including my classmate Allan Bloom)."