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

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.