From a technical Platonist point of view, Forms are not essences; rather, they have essence. In the doctrine of the One and the Indefinite Dyad, in Plotinus' version at least, the dyad is Nous and Ousias. The latter is Being, Substance and Essence, depending on the context. In effect, it's "being-as," or the simultaneity of "is" and "what it is." So it's there from the first "moment" of emergence from the indivisible One, while the Forms follow from the further differentiation of the "what it is."

Much later, Martin Heidegger said that the original meaning of the word ousia was lost in its translation to the Latin, and, subsequently, in its translation to modern languages. For him, ousia means Being, not substance, that is, not some thing or some being that "stood"(-stance) "under"(sub-). Moreover, he also uses the bi-nomial parousia-apousia, denoting presence-absence, and hypostasis denoting existence.

Can't say I agree with much of what you said, but that's what a dialectic is for. I'll start from the fact that I do definitely agree that "we cannot explain all by way of materialism." As I indicated previously, the existence of a physical universe can't be explained by its internal laws or properties, so there must be some meta-physical laws or properties that do explain it.

As to meaning, I'm of the school that holds that the meaning is "there" in the order of the cosmos, so it's for us to discover, not to create. And we can discover it because (and only because) we are that order, along with everything else (analogous to a hologram, maybe).






This strikes me as getting pretty technical for a thread that's really just a personal introduction, but what the heck. From a technical Platonist point of view, Forms are not essences; rather, they have essence. In the doctrine of the One and the Indefinite Dyad, in Plotinus' version at least, the dyad is Nous and Ousias. The latter is Being, Substance and Essence, depending on the context. In effect, it's "being-as," or the simultaneity of "is" and "what it is." So it's there from the first "moment" of emergence from the indivisible One, while the Forms follow from the further differentiation of the "what it is."

Naturally, as a Platonist I disagree firmly with your suggestion that "In the moral world we have no thing to compare with our thought, so what is the meaning of the thought in question is the question... We cannot ask what is justice because there is no such thing." So I won't argue the point, because Plato et al. already have.

Yes... I see all concepts/forms/ideas/notions; what have you as essences... And they are not exact by any means... They stand in a certain relation to the thing, yet the thought is never the thing, but we have it as analogy, and we see our worlds -the physical and the moral- by way of analogy...

That is one thing I have had clarified by Rudiger Safranski's book on Heidegger... The difference between thought and thing is heterogeny, and the points of agreement are homogeny, and we resolve these differences through analogy...

In the moral world we have no thing to compare with our thought, so what is the meaning of the thought in question is the question... We cannot ask what is justice because there is no such thing, but we can ask: What is the meaning of Justice; and if we do so we find a confusion of subjective life experiences, so the homogeny of thought with thing eludes us... Of moral reality all we have is analogy... We do not see the essence of justice, which does not exist, but we instead see our essence, how we conceive of ourselves spiritually reflected in these forms of meaning, like justice, or goodness, or virtue, or their counterparts...

Reconstructo;173167 wrote:

All this is what I have been writing about lately. All of our essences are temporal, I would argue, except for the root-essence or rather the inborn capacity to create essences. You say that essences stand in a certain relation to the thing. You might mean this is two ways. Do you mean the sensation and emotion organized into a thing? Or do you feel the world is made of things in-itself, devoid our of essences? I argue that thing-hood is just essence imposed on sensation, emotion, or sub-essences. You know that kids sometimes draw the mustache above the nose. Because they don't even look. They are drawing on the left-side of the brain. Perhaps the brain hemispheres are deeply involved here. Heterogony and homogeny would seem to exist on a spectrum. In what way does the sensation or emotion clash with our project/remembered essence? Yes, analogy is crucial. Perhaps analogy is thinking with the entire brain, the "soul."

The concept, the ideal, stands in a certain relation to the thing, not in reality, but in the mind, another infinite...
As we collect information about any physical reality we expand upon our concept of it... And this knowledge we say is its essence, but what is that??? Is it the sense of the thing, its being, its meaning, or all of our judgement of it, which is finite knowledge??? You see that what is presumed of reality, that it was created by another, higher form of being, ends up in metaphysical statements that still plague us, like all men created equal... This presumption, that just like a workman building a structure with a perfect plan only imperfectly has been a disease of thought since the time of Plato...

What Plato was taking for fact was an accident of the mind, that when we see variations on a theme we resolve all difference into a single perfect form, but forms are only forms, mental gagets serving only a practical purpose... We take all cats and extract the essence of all cats, and say this is a cat, what a cat is; but that is the confusion of subject with object on a vast scale... The thought of what the thing is barely touches upon what the thing is, so we are left in the end with a certain fiction passing for fact, an allagory instead of a reality... And this is true of numbers which are a sort of perfect conception of reality, and even more true of conceptions of moral reality which can hardly be considered as conceptions at all... What Plato sought was a definition of good, of Justice, of virtue that could be taught; but he could not diiscover the ideal and not for want of trying... It was because he did not understand that infinites cannot be defined, and only finite knowledge, knowledge of finite reality- can be taught...We can talk about the good because we all have a vague sense of what it is, but vague senses of things undefined cannot be taught... It is not that such moral truths should not be pursued by philosophy; but rather, philosophers should understand that the methods and forms of physics do not apply to moral reality...

Math and logic work well as forms illuminating physical reality... To understand the essence of moral reality one must be more circumspect, and be willing to open the mind to emotions and their power over the actions of people... I think Nietzsche who I generally dispise was aware of the fact that people are rational only to a point, that their actions are rational, and that their motivations are anything but rational... The way he talks of criminals being more in touch with the immediacy of life, and here I hope not to represent him, says much about people and about nietzsche; for we cover our motivations with a veneer of justification that anyone can see through, but out of decency do not raise the issue upon which we all are at fault...

So you cannot teach morals, which are the big point in Plato; that Knowledge is Virtue, when the Sophists were more to he point, or as Aristippus showed, that the good is the pleasurable...

One cannot be taught the good because the essence of good cannot be found... Yet people are good without being taught... Is this an accident??? Is it possible that people are good by mistake, by a shot in the dark???

Good is a form, an ideal, but primarily a form of relationship... Good is an infinite moral form... Good is a meaning without a being... People learn good in their relationships before they are able to learn as a conscious activity... They learn the good unconscious of what they are learning as a precursur to all learning of a conscious nature, because what people learn consciously they learn out of a sense of the good that they bring to their subjects...and what is good and what is moral is not only prerational, but anti rational... The good, when people do good is often at their own expense; and there is no reason for it, so no reason can be extracted from it... So there, in the wasted metaphysical pursuit of good is the spent life of Plato... If he understood ideals in their proper relation to the objects considered as subjects in life, he would have seen that the ideals are formed out of the things as essences, senses of the thing rather than the other way around... Plato was a product of his prejudices which tainted all his judgements...

Quote:

I realize we may need to move this to another thread.

The Sun is described in a simile as the child or offspring (ekgonos) of the Form of the Good (508c-509a), in that, like the sun which makes physical objects visible and generates life on earth, the Good makes all other universals intelligible, and in some sense provides being to all other Forms, though the Good itself exceeds being.[1

If we are indeed forbidden to seek a fixed system of deduction in Plato's doctrines and if, on the contrary, Plato's doctrine of the indeterminate Two establishes precisely the impossibility of completing such a system, then Plato's doctrine of ideas turns out to be a general theory of the relationship from which it can be convincingly deduced that dialectic is unending and infinite. Underlying this theory would be the fact that the logos always requires that one idea be "there" together with another. Insight into one idea per se does not yet constitute knowledge. Only when the idea is "alluded" to in respect to another does it display itself as something.

Reading over the last several posts here, I thought about this passage from Hans-Georg Gadamer's essay on "Plato's Unwritten Doctrine," which I seem to be obsessed with lately:



This could help account for the impossibility of saying anything definite about the One, precisely because it is one alone. It's not rationalizable because rationality requires two (i.e., a ratio).

Also, I don't agree that the ideas or forms are only moral. The One may be the Good, but it's also the Beautiful.

I completely agree. The Good is the Beautiful. Any fixed ethical system is already a reduction, an idolatry, an ossification. And I also agree about the 2. Of course Hegel got his Dia-lectic from Plato (or someone before him?) I see the existence of two different "ones." I defer to your expertise on Plato and Plotinus. I came from a Hegel-Wittgenstein angle and moved backward. But here goes. The greater more important One is the Good and the Beautiful. Or from a Christian angle God as Love/Beauty. The second less important "one" is the root of conception, and the foundation of math and logic. I call this the Form of Forms or the Proto-Form. In my view, all conceptual Forms (ignoring for now spatial-geometric forms) are contingent upon sensation and emotion, or basically the 2's you mention. As Hegel might say, they are founded on negation in relation to other concepts. But if we negate a concept as far as possible, I think we end up with being or is-ness and unity. And I think all conception is unity, as even pluralities are also unities of sub-unities. What do you think?

Reading over the last several posts here, I thought about this passage from Hans-Georg Gadamer's essay on "Plato's Unwritten Doctrine," which I seem to be obsessed with lately:



This could help account for the impossibility of saying anything definite about the One, precisely because it is one alone. It's not rationalizable because rationality requires two (i.e., a ratio).

Also, I don't agree that the ideas or forms are only moral. The One may be the Good, but it's also the Beautiful.

One of the things I find most appealing about Plotinus is what's been called his "radical simplicity." Not his writings, obviously, which are notoriously opaque (although some of that is just bad translations). But his system is indeed simple in its basic structure, yet I think it pretty much covers what needs to be covered.

And at the apex of his system is the simplest thing of all, the One. There's only one One, and the one thing we can really be sure about is its oneness. Epithets like Good and Beautiful are in effect guesses we make based on what the One causes, but don't refer to what the One is in itself, which is unknowable and indescribable by its very nature.

What you call the "root of conception, and the foundation of math and logic" sounds like Nous in Plotinian/Neoplatonic thinking, i.e., Intellect or Spirit. Nous as such might well be the "Form of Forms," because Forms are in a sense the product of the activity of Nous, and Nous as a whole is the unity of all intellects and forms. (There's a lot in Plotinus that resembles systems theory.)

However, the actuality of the Forms in Nous is still the potentiality of the expressed forms in time, space and matter: The form of the human is potentially all humans - or perhaps better said, the form of the thinking animal, because I don't want to be geocentric; this is one reason I call myself a neo-Plotinian. And it's only in this latter realm of expression - which is Psyche in this system - that things like sensation and emotion are found.

Hi Mike,

Welcome to the forum. The first thing that ever existed? This would imply that prior to its' existence there was no thing (Nothing). This cannot be - for something cannot arise from nothing. So "there wasn't a first thing" - is my answer.

Thank you for the question, and have a great day.

Mark...

And at the apex of his system is the simplest thing of all, the One. There's only one One, and the one thing we can really be sure about is its oneness.

Mark; do you expect you have to know everything to know anything... If that is the case we are all lost... Isn't that the idea of metaphysics; to massage people with the false notion that they can know everything, that there is something beyond the physical that we can tie into to become enllightened... It is nonsense, if this is true... What we know will always be exactly what we know, never enough, and always enough to make us feel better about ourselves...

Hi Fido,

Strange place for a discussion, but, No - I expect to have to know Nothing to know anything. And if there is one thing I do profess to knowing - It's Nothing.
That may sound peculiar to you, but if it's any consolation - It sounds peculiar to me too.
Thank you Fido, have a brilliant evening.

Mark...