Ancient Philosophy
In Plato there is a supra-celestial sphere in which you can see truth. But then of course the problem of parmenides returns. If you start to indicate the spatial place of the ideas, you make them material again. So you need to read Plato as speaking metaphorically there. These are layers of the same reality that you can look at from different angles.
We talk about intelligible reality. And you have to construe it as nothing but intelligible. In the myth of Phaedrus, where he describes the supracelestial sphere, you need to give some kind of spatial determination otherwise it doesn’t properly make sense.
It is not like Husserl in which you have the ideas in yourself and project them to yourself. It is rather that the ideas have a seperate existence outside of mind, which can be grasped.
You could then say that that’s the divine sphere, but God and the divine are not really identical. The metaphysical description of the world in which being is divine, is unlike that of the gods.
Knowledge – ideas – being
Opinion – sense – becoming
The one over many problem: what is the unity that exists and gives its characteristics to a multitude of things?
Participation; having a share. The question is now what is the relation between our world of becoming and the world of being if we are dealing with objects which can never be grasped in the sensible world? There are instances of things down in the world, but it is unclear what it is specifically in each thing that makes it related to a given idea.
In Symposium a solution is proposed. He explains how eros, longing, desire or, love: the distance that makes you want something, is philosophically. There is this specific greek institution of an older man taking care of a younger man for sexual services. What Plato and Socrates is doing is spiritualising this relationship. It is not in the service of the body, but in the service of the soul. So true love and eros is not a desire of the body, but a desire of the beauty of the soul, beauty in itself. He imagines that by seeing a lot of beautiful bodies you start grasping physical beauty generally, which then sets you in the direction of understanding beauty as such. You need to grasp the universality of a plurality, which can get you closer to the real idea in which all other beautiful things share.
In any case he seems to say that things down here have their share in what the idea in itself has. If I recognise beauty in something it is because it shares in the Beauty in itself. The ideas are then termed the things in themselves, or the essences, but which Plato does not have the terminology for. Essence is an arabic term that comes later.
In the Symposium the priestess Diotima initiates Socrates in the mysteries of desire. She says that true longing is found in transcendent beauty.
In the end of the text, Alcibiades, completely drunk, gives a kind of reversal of the argument by praising the beauty of Socrates despite being factually ugly, and the sexual eros he feels towards Socrates. Alcibiades gives basically the same proof but from the opposite side.
In the Laws Plato fiercely rejects homosexuality. He does not like having sex with men because they are men.
The greek word for participation is metexis.
Even though we have been taking over Heraclitus’ analysis of the sensible world, it isn’t actually a permanent flux. There is something that allows us to explain how humans are human. How circular things have a circular shape for as long as they exist. It seems to be a wrong systematisation of Plato to consider it is purely outside. In Aristotle forms are only within the thing in which it exists. In Plato you have the advantage of having an idea beyond all things which remain the same. If you have only the lower layer of the scheme, without having the form itself, it is difficult to explain how it remains the same form. It could then be susceptible to evolution for example, which Aristotle fiercely rejects.
You have to reduce every instance of a thing into the thing itself and describe it in its abstract characteristics. Beware of the word abstract because that’s what Aristotle calls it. Abstractions should be mind-dependent, but the ideas are not mind-dependent, they exist despite minds. It should be understood as a seperate existence of something intelligible.
It is a feasible metaphysics that in some ways underlie our current scientific system.
In order for God to have created something he must have all the ideas in his head. So in the christian tradition of the early fathers, basically say that the ideas are the concepts in the mind of God. It is from there that the platonic ideas remain in the christian world. God initially create each kind, and then each kind gets the message to procreate itself. In creation you need an intelligent design which is then laid out. The earliest instance of this is Philo in interpreting the jewish bible. Later traditions, like the platonists of the early roman empire, focused on cosmology again – explaining the sensible world out of platonic ideas.
In early science you see that the laws of reality are basically like the ’ideals’ of reality. Even if you don’t believe that Platonic ideas exist somewhere in the outside world, you still have this platonic scheme which dictates laws as some kind of self-existing laws outside of the mind.
If the ideas are eternal models that are then repeated down here, and every instance falls short of it, then when you analyse justice is in itself, you should say that it is good. This means that in many ways the ideas share in each other. If Plato said there was an idea of cowness, then that would be the perfect cow, and that would be good. So there is a kind of interconnected net between the ideas. If you say the idea of three, there is also the idea of 1 in that thing. So oneness is inherent in threeness. But also twoness is part of threeness, does the oneness disappear depending on how we consider it? Not really, because the ideas are always 1 single idea. This may be the reason why Plato had announced a lecture on the good and it was a lecture on the one, that the point he wanted to make is that all ideas are interconnected. If we want to talk about a good, we would also have to talk about oneness.
In Sophist Plato thematises this in the kind of union of ideas. Here he doesn’t use the word participation, He is basically trying to discuss the kind of interconnectedness described above.
Plato refuses the idea that every single thing has its own idea. But only genera have intelligible existence.
The carpenter isn’t the source of the idea of a bed. This means that the idea itself is not limited to the mind of the carpenter, but to God. It is God that thinks, and invents, the bed as such. The Demiurge. Or rather the divine. The realm of the ideas and intelligible world is a divine reality, in which the ultimate true bed resides. There is the bed that is the form, there is the bed that is designed by the carpenter, and there is the bed that is made by the carpenter, and then there is the bed painted by a painter; this is why every step down from the ideal bed is one step away from reality. This is why we don’t have poets in the ideal reality because poets only imitate things. You don’t actually experience the emotion that a real event contains. Poetry is at a very low stage of truth, of reality.
Plato in most contexts deny that artifacts correspond to an idea. If I invent something new like a bicycle, does it mean I invented the idea? No that’s impossible. Or was it the case that the idea bicycle was lying there waiting for someone to discover it? That is very strange. So instead it is an application of different ideas which you combine to form something new. But why does he use artefacts to exemplify this?
For humans, ideas are in fact inaccessible.
The 10 books of the republic is constructed in an intricate way. The first book was written before the rest and which ends in Aporia about justice. The 2-10 you find an interesting onion structure whereby the theme of book 2 is taken up in 10, 3 and 9, 4 and 8 (in which Socrates says that we have built up the ideal society, lets discuss 4 types of perverted society). Halfway 5 is how the guardians live and the second is what a philosopher is. In 5-6-7 He gives a dicussion of what a philosopher needs to know in order to be a ruler of the state: basically what must be on the educational program of philosophers in order to make them good rulers. Professor thinks that 5,6,7 was actually written later and was added as a center-piece of the republic. The style of these three books is much more complicated than the rest of republic.
In 6th book of republic, he explains that as the sun stands overagainst the sensible world, so the good stands overagainst the intelligible world.
The sun has two functions in the sensible world. It gives warmth so that by the rays of the sun this world can exist, so it provides existence, but by the same fact, by being light, it illuminates the world in such a way that it becomes sensible. So the sensible world both owes its existence to the sun but also its perceptability. The same with the good, or the world of knowledge generally. In the same way, not only do the objects of knowledge owe their intelligibility to the good, but also their being as such. We are not talking about the idea of the good, because as an idea it would be part of the intelligible world, of the world of being. And why is there an idea of the good? Because there is some kind of intelligibility to the good. If you approach a river full of dead fish, you know it cannot be good. So you have an immediate notion of the good. But this good, without the determination ’the idea of’, is now said to literally be something beyond being. So just like the sun is not part of the sensible world, so the good is not part of the world of being. If an idea is what it is, it must be desirable. It must be something that attracts our attention and we want to reach it. The desirability of a thing is always connected with goodness. If you love your partner you perceive goodness or beauty in them, and you are attracted to them because you see goodness there. Imagine what it must be what you are dealing with the good in itself. Hence it must be responsible for the ideas being attractive as such, being the object of desires. If you want to reach true beauty it means you are attracted to the goodness in it. Being known also coheres with that. Inteligibility and being are connected through goodness.
This is referring to transcendence. Someone like Augustine values Plato because he refers to transcendence. Many people, the majority of interpreters will say that this is adding a new level to what we already had. Good would be the final thing towards which you are striving in recognising the intelligible world. This creates a closed pyramid in which after all you are saying the good is part of the system. Most of these interpreters will say that there is no difference between the idea of the good and the good as such. Professor does not like this interpretation.
Many 20th century philosophers have critiqued Plato for having a closed view of the world, where this world of ideas has an eternal normative existence to which all of us fall short. Nietzsche talks about dead notions behind reality. Dead bodies preserved for eternity who have no interference with the world, are causally inert, a kind of hinterwelt. Patocka talks about the priority of the eternal over the temporal, and the transcendent reality is reified. You have justice, and those who know justice also know good, and they become dictators; if you know the good you become a fanaticist – someone who imposes their views on others because they know better. Popper talks about Plato as the father of totallitarianism because Plato’s system is fundamentally closed. They may be correct on the closed interpretation of Plato.
Professor presents an open metaphysics in which what the good is is an open question. Plato never defines the good as such. Because it is not an idea so has no definition. We lost the notion of idea when he says it is beyond, so there should rather be a kind of openness to it. The whole system is not about having final access to reality, but rather about keeping open the final access to reality. Whatever we have, as a notion of good, is our notion of good, it may be the ideal structure of the good, but we have no access beyond that structure. So the top of the pyramid must lay open. You can never have claim to final truth. Underneath the good you have access to clear ontology, but what holds it all together is unknowable. That infects all the rest of course. So this is not a plea for totallitarianism but actually a plea against it. Rather it is showing the philosophers that there is always a final uncertainty about the answers to reality: taking transcendence seriously. This is similar to what Heidegger tries to do in Sein und Zeit, there it is transcendence as viewed by the Dasein, not transcendence as such.
Is Plato then agnostic or a mystic? No. A religion needs its basic truth claims, but certain things also have to stay unclear, like when you ask a theologian who God is – they’ll say idk.
In the end, the ideas are just words, and they are of very little value in terms of understanding what is behind. The words just throws you back when it comes to answering the final answers. The ideas however are entirely graspable. But we always fall short in explaining what makes them good.