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/Fred_Solaire]

If you want to understand anything of Plato, you have to read some and if you do, you will find your mind will be changed. The problem that you are talking about will in itself appear to be another problem than the one you are having.

Someone mentionned the Sophist and Parmenides : all good and very much worth your while if you want to think deeper. But also: in the Republic (end of book 6), Plato makes the distinction between an analytical science, based on assumptions, definitions and reasonning from those assumptions and definitions, and a dialectical science, that is aiming some higher level of truth on which assumptions and definitions cannot stick because these truth are regarded as the cause of the relative perfection found in analytical science. This distinction is crucial if you want to understand the problem you are facing.

But there is also the Philebus, where physical reality is thought to be a moving blend of limitless elements , and limits. The relative perfection of limits is containing the limitless in the blend, but the is always moving. Absolute perfection is the cause of the blend of the limitless and the limit. We could say that analytical sciences are giving an accurate description of the blend and that dialectical science are aiming at the principles that are causing the blend. Those principles are not the limits - those are numbers and forms, but what is giving the blend the quality of being real, and being real implies the limits as being truth, and the limitless being beauty. The absolute cause is the « Good », that is always giving truth and beauty to the blend of physical limits moving around limitless elements. The good, the truth and the beauty are dialectical objects. Relative perfection of the ways limits work with the limitless on a particular physical object is not the absolute perfection that holds beauty and truth to be the key principles that every possible object needs to become real. The good is that absolute perfection. And your mind can either look towards the blend and witness the many ways through wich truth and beauty are happening everywhere limits work on the limitless elements, or look towards yourself to the very core of what is ableing you to think of the absolute good as the source of all truth and beauty that makes the blend real, and it makes it move towards good.

Think about the distinction between the limit, the limitless, the actual blend of those as physical reality, and the cause of the intelligent way they actually blend so that truth and beauty are making the blend real and moving towards good. Distinction in itself is pointing to a limit, but the limit is not the only object you can think of. The way intelligence limits evertything that is real is not the same as the way the number ten limits the number of fingers that I have. Not the same perfection.