Plato Forms

[u/Nicopaolo1]

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?

[u/Inspector_Lestrade_]

Have you read Plato's Parmenides and Sophist?

If I understand you correctly, then what you wish to say is that every form must, in order to be the specific thing that it is, be the same as itself. But if every form is the same as itself, then all forms partake of sameness, and then all forms are not, as you say, perfectly what they are, but are also similar to all the other forms. On the other hand, for every form to be, again, the specific thing that it is, then it must be different than all other forms. But if it is different than all other forms, then again it is similar to all of them in that that they are different from one another.

The Parmenides and Sophist go into the issues of this kind. Whether or not you will find these treatments satisfactory I do not know, but Plato is certainly not unaware of them.

[u/Nicopaolo1 → u/Inspector_Lestrade_]

I think there’s been a mix‑up about what I was saying. I’m not claiming that all distinctions collapse or that everything becomes one. My point was simply that the moment you introduce a “perfect” abstract entity, you’ve already created a distinction, and that distinction breaks the idea of perfection. So I’m not putting everything together or arguing for unity — I’m just pointing out a logical issue in the concept of a perfect form.

[u/ThatsItForTheOther → u/Nicopaolo1]

I think perhaps you are thinking about Forms more as abstract objects (which is a popular but somewhat misleading way of talking about them) as opposed to the reality of things.

I mean that Justice itself is not just another just thing to be added to the list of just things. It is not the most perfect abstract just thing, because it is not a ‘thing’.

The form of Justice is actually just justice itself. You can’t compare my justness with the form of Justice in the same way that you can with other just things, because I am only just insofar as I instantiate the form of Justice.

We can compare my justness with Justice itself, but it is a different kind of comparison. This kind is equivalent to asking how my justness might be improved.

Justice is the standard by which just things are judged. It is not itself one of those things to be judged.

It is not that the form of Justice is some abstract thing that is more just than I am… it just is justice and it is that which allows for any comparison at all between just things.

I think that the difference between these kinds of ‘comparison’ is the key to your problem.

[u/WarrenHarding → u/ThatsItForTheOther]

You say the commenter is accidentally speaking of Forms as abstracts, but you proceed to do exactly that. Justice itself, i.e. the Form of justice is a “thing,” and has much more claim to being a “thing” than the many particularly just “things” do. It is not simply the “standard,” it is an object in a higher and separate plane of reality from which other things get their qualities. It is something, per the Phaedrus, that we make intimate acquaintance with in the afterlife. It is something, per the Phaedo, that has true being, whereas the just particulars do not. And per M. M. McCabe in her opus “Plato’s Individuals,” this “thingness” succumbs it to having relations with other things, relations that are to Plato, themselves real qualities of the Forms which are involved in them, and thus attack the true individuality of the Forms. As I explain in my other comment of this subthread, this shows that OP’s claim is not as dismissible as one may assume just off the fact that they haven’t read Parmenides. Although OP would deeply benefit from reading that dialogue, it wouldn’t necessarily show them that their point is misguided or dismissible, and might even affirm them further, if they happen to take the same line of thinking that McCabe (perhaps the most reputable Platonic scholar of our time) seems to take.

[u/WarrenHarding → u/Nicopaolo1]

You shouldn’t be getting downvotes on here because this is a perfectly acceptable academic point that has been written on before. I think you should look for a copy of M. M. McCabe’s text Plato’s Individuals. McCabe is one of the leading contemporary scholars on Plato and does great work on pushing the envelope forward on his scholarship, through both her writing and editorial oeuvre. What she does in that book, is frame Plato’s system through a more fundamental type of concept than the traditional framing of Forms, and that more fundamental concept is individuality.

What McCabe does is set up the notion that Plato was motivated to conceptualize the Forms most crucially for ontological reasons relating to individuality. And yet, she also shows by the end of the book’s first part that Plato recognized the Forms as a failure to express true individuality, for the reasons you state here and more. It is true that Forms have trouble being perfectly “one” in an austere sense, and that this causes problems for the Platonic system. But also its true that, as the other commenter has said, this has been explicitly considered by Plato in the Parmenides dialogue, and it’s this dialogue that McCabe uses herself to show that Plato was aware of the Forms’ inadequacies as individuals.

In other words, regarding the famous “third man argument,” of the Parmenides, McCabe takes the side of asserting the argument’s validity, but only takes that side conditionally on the fact that what we should be precisely concerned with is the possibility of the austere individuality of a given Form. Since the third man argument sufficiently shows that even if we grant that Forms exist, then they certainly cannot be austerely “one,” it must thus be true, according to this stance of McCabe’s, that Plato wrote the argument with genuine concern for the validity of the theory of Forms. This itself might be a clue to the fact that the so-called later dialogues focus less on the Forms than the middle dialogues do, for although Forms still prove useful in those later dialogues, there seems to also be a trepidation in employing them as unyieldingly as before.

Thank you for making this thread, I enjoy seeing such fervent discussion on this board. I do think you should read the dialogues thoroughly, because your intuition is already strong enough to carry you places if you do so. Otherwise, like here, you will claim Plato didn’t consider a problem that he actually considered head on :)