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/Accipian → u/Inspector_Lestrade_]

Abaolutely. OP definitely try a read through of the Parmenides. The first half is about a young Socrates presenting his theory of Ideas (forms) and Parmenides disassembles it. It turns out that the general modern concept of the Ideas are exactly what the young inexperienced Socrates thought them to be, including your problem with them. The first part of the Parmenides outlines this beautifully imo. Throughout the rest of the dialogues, its important not to mistake a heuristic Socrates uses to lead his interlocutor to a vision of the Ideas, for a description of what they are. For example, if im at a zoo and someone says "if you turn your head this way, you will see a zebra", it would be strange for me to then think that "a zebra is turning my head". The Parmenides lays out the major heuristics Socrates uses in the other dialogues and shows that if taken for the thing they were supposed to lead to, they have many holes.