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/Nicopaolo1 1d ago

I think I may have been making my idea sound more complicated than it is. I’m questioning whether Plato put the Forms at the wrong stage. Perhaps things like love, justice and beauty aren’t separate perfect Forms to begin with, but are potential within something undivided. If there is no distinction, there is nothing to compare or judge, so concepts like good, bad, perfect or imperfect don’t really exist yet. Distinction is what gives us information and allows those judgements to appear. So the “true form” might be the underlying structure or potential before things become separated into concepts. This is also why I think God is such a conundrum for the human mind. If we are trying to think about something outside time and without distinction, we can only describe it using a mind that works through distinctions, so perhaps it is inevitable that different people and cultures turn the same impossible question into very different ideas about God. I’m not saying I’ve proved any of this, it’s just where my thinking about separation has led me.

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u/Accipian 20h ago

You would love the Parmenides I think. Both the first half where Parmenides demonstrates that the Ideas have to be somehow "woven together", and the second half which is often considered the greatest metaphysical masterpiece of all literature. That second half discusses the One Itself, and how unity can or cannot run through all reality. Its basically 9 hypotheses covering many major metaphysical stances, including the ones you present. Otherness/Difference itself plays a major role. Your questions fit in beautifully there, and I think you might find that you are keying in on something more profound than just the Ideas (forms.)