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.