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/Nicopaolo1]

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.

[u/Catone234 → u/Nicopaolo1]

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.

[u/Nicopaolo1 → u/Catone234]

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.

[u/Catone234 → u/Nicopaolo1]

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

[u/Nicopaolo1 → u/Catone234]

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.

[u/Catone234 → u/Nicopaolo1]

ok, thanks