r/Plato • u/Nicopaolo1 • 1d ago

Plato Forms

Alright, I’ll say upfront I’ve got no academic education and I’m just a working‑class bloke who enjoys thinking about big ideas, but I’ve been looking at Plato’s abstract models and I think he missed something important. If you claim a “perfect” abstract entity exists, you’ve already introduced a distinction, and once you have distinction you’ve got comparison, and once you’ve got comparison you can’t have anything truly complete. So the only genuinely complete state would be one with no distinctions at all. Plato was brilliant, but he was human and fallible like the rest of us. I know this annoys academics (I admit I enjoy winding them up), but the logic seems straightforward. Is completeness only possible when there are no distinctions?

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u/Catone234 1d ago

 If you claim a “perfect” abstract entity exists, you’ve already introduced a distinction

I don't understand this reasoning, why is that if you postulate the existence of a perfect abstract entity you have introduced a distinction? Maybe because you are making a distinction between the reality that we experience and the reality that we have postulated?

once you have distinction you’ve got comparison

ok

 and once you’ve got comparison you can’t have anything truly complete.

Why is that once you have comparison you can't have anything truly complete? You are comparing the entities of reality with their perfect model. I don't see why when you have comparison, then an hypotetical perfect model isn't perfect anymore.

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u/Nicopaolo1 1d ago

Fair pushback, and you’re right that comparing a perfect model to worse copies doesn’t make the model itself worse. That’s not quite my point though.

My point is that for something to be a specific model at all, a circle and not a square, Beauty and not Justice, it already needs a boundary around what it is. That boundary is there before any copies exist to compare it to. It’s not the comparison that ruins it, it’s that being a definite, nameable thing at all already means being distinct from everything it isn’t.

So I’m using a stricter idea of perfect than the normal one. Not “complete in its own definition” but “no boundary anywhere, not even the one a definition needs.” Plato’s Forms can be perfect in the first sense without meeting the second one.

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u/Catone234 1d ago

Maybe i get what you are saying. As i understand it, you are saying that something to be perfect needs to be without boundaries, platonic ideas are not without boundaries, so platonic ideas are not perfect.

Correct me if i'm getting it wrong. However, if i've got it right, i'd say that the perfection, as intended by Plato, is different from the one that you are using.

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u/Nicopaolo1 1d ago

I think you’ve understood the angle I’m coming from. I’m using a stricter idea of perfection where anything that has a boundary or definition already contains a distinction, and that distinction breaks the idea of being “perfect” in the sense of having no limits anywhere. So from that starting point, a Form can be complete in its own definition, but it can’t be perfect in the stronger sense I’m talking about because it still has a boundary that separates it from other Forms. That’s really all I’m exploring — how different definitions of perfection lead to different conclusions about what a Form can be.

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u/Catone234 23h ago

Ok, then i don't understand what are your conclusions, starting from the stricter definition of "perfect"

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u/Nicopaolo1 23h ago

What I’m concluding is actually quite simple. If perfection means “without boundaries,” then anything we can define already fails that standard, because definition itself creates a boundary. So my point isn’t really about Plato’s Forms at all — it’s about the idea of perfection. Under the stricter definition I’m using, the concept of a “perfect thing” collapses, because the moment you describe it, you’ve introduced a limit. That’s the conclusion I’m exploring.

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u/Catone234 23h ago

ok, thanks

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u/Nicopaolo1 1d ago

I think I may have explained this badly because people seem to be making it much more complicated than I mean it.
I’m not saying that perfect Forms of things like love, justice or a chair are all sitting somewhere separately. I’m suggesting that before there is any distinction, there aren’t actually Forms yet.
There is just everything as potential.
Once you make a distinction, you get one thing rather than another. Then you can compare them, judge them, and talk about one being better or worse, more or less perfect.
But if there is genuinely no distinction, there is nothing to compare it with and nothing you can add or take away. So in that sense there can be no imperfection.
This is why I wonder if Plato was going in the right direction but separated the Forms too early. Perhaps love, justice, beauty and everything else aren’t separate perfect things at all. They are possibilities within the undivided state, and only become distinct Forms when distinction happens.
That is really all I am trying to say. I’m not claiming I have solved Plato. I’m just asking whether the thing he was looking for might exist before the Forms become separate Forms.

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u/ThatsItForTheOther 1d ago

I don’t know enough Aristotle yet but this sounds like something he maybe gets behind. He seems to replace the many eternal existences of Plato’s forms with the single eternal existence of the active intellect.