The perfect Chair, or Cat, or Anything. more Plato

[Gadget nee Jemcheeta]

In the 'your philosophy' thread, it was kicked off with the idea, courtesy of Foul, that plato suggested there was an 'ideal' chair, and all other chairs are inferior to that chair. In the same way, people talk about the ideal Cat, etc...

I think this is a misinterpretation of Plato (I am not popular in this, but I am also not alone)

I think it might have something to do with what people mean when they say 'perfect' or 'ideal'.

Here's an example that has to do with the 'perfect' cat:

Say you have a housecat, a chair, and a dog.
A Chair is not much like a Cat.

A Dog is obviously more like a Cat than A chair (I think. You can disagree if you like)

now, you could say a housecat IS a cat, or you could say a housecat is more like a cat than a dog.

but remember, when we say a cat is a cat, we're using a classification system... what we mean is that a housecat exhibits enough feline traits to be classified as a feline.

I think when Plato uses the 'ideal' cat, or the 'form of cat' or whatever, he isn't saying that there is a 'perfect' cat in quality, but merely in likeness... the 'form' of cat would be the specific exhibition of EVERY feline trait...


Of course, I don't think he really believed that. I read a dialogue that suggested to me that he didn't believe there could be a form for something like a specific animal. I think the forms he believed in were more like the 'form of large or small' or 'rough' or 'smooth'. Specific quality forms, not animal forms or anything of the like.

So, if we see a cat, to Plato, I believe we are seeing a combination of ideas, or 'forms' that make up this thing we call 'cat'. The ideas are all non-spatial temporal... you can't look at 'rough' or 'smooth' without it being associated to an object. You can't look at large or small without associating it to an object. But if you remove all of these 'quality' descriptions, you don't have anything left.... if you take a rock, then take away it's texture (which only exists in association to the rock) it's color (likewise only associated to the rock, not alone) and every other quality... you don't have anything left.

That's why he didn't believe in the spatial temporal world. I don't exactly agree with him, but I see where he's coming from. If all of the qualities we speak of only exist in ideas until associated with objects, where the heck do the objects come from?!


...
see what I mean about the whole 'perfect chair' thing?

[Avatar]

But surely the qualities only started to exist once it became necessary to be able to define pre-existing objects?

The objects were there, but our attempts to quantify them, to describe them, gave rise to the qualities that you're talking about?

Hell, I think a more important question may be: "where did the ideas come from?"

Afterall, if you have a rock, you can't take away it's physical texture, all you can do is omit it from a description. The "qualities" are more an "ease of use" idea than anything else aren't they?

"It's next to the rock"
"Which rock?"
"The ..... one"

Hmm, dunno if I'm making myself perfectly clear here.

--Avatar

[[Syl]]

The heart Sutra teaches that "form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. "Many people don't know what that means--even some long time students of meditation. But there is a very easy way to see this in our every day lives. For example, here is a wooden chair. It is brown. You sit in the chair, and it holds you up. You can place things on it. But then you light the chair on fire, then leave. When you come back later, the chair is no longer there! This thing that seemed so solid and string and real is now just a pile of cinder and ash which the wind blows around. This example shows how the chair is empty: It as no independent existence. Over a long or short time, the chair will eventually change and become something other than it appears. So, the brown chair is complete emptiness. But though it always has the quality of emptiness, this emptiness is form: you can sit in the chair, and it will hold you up. "Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form."

-Seun Sahn, The Compass of Zen

[Fist and Faith]

I don't know the first thing about Plato. But when I get back from Cold Stone Creamery, I'll try to figure out what you're talking about.

[Kymbierlee]

Don't bother- it is all giving me headaches. LOL- just kidding guys!

BTW, what is Stone Cold Creamery?

[matrixman]

I haven't read any of Plato's works, but I've read enough about him to see that he had an anti-democratic view of how society should be run, and I don't agree with that view. (To be fair, it was the Athenian democratic system's own unjust treatment of Plato's teacher, the great Socrates, that led to Plato's bitter contempt for democratic rule...but that's a whole other topic.)

As for this business with the "ideal" or "perfect" thing, I'm not sure I entirely follow Jemcheeta's explanation, but my take on it is this: Plato says there is an absolute, abstract "version" of any given object, and that the actual, physical one in the "real" world is merely a degraded or lesser version of its "true" state.

So...there is a pre-eminent, ideal reality "out there" and we in our physical actuality are just rough simulations of it?

I think I got the hang of Syl's post, though. I think.

Kymbierlee, you're getting headaches, too? Could you spare me some aspirin? No, no, I want real aspirin, not its abstract version.

[Alynna Lis Eachann]

From mike.eterry.net/crit01.htm

According to Plato, the nature of the universe is imitation (or mimesis). Plato was an idealist. That is, he believed that reality consists of various layers. The top layer is made up of ideas, and all the lower levels imitate those ideas. Actually, according to Plato, the top layer is made up of one idea, The Good, and that all things and ideas only existed insofar as they participated in The Good, which was the ultimate reality. Therefore, the further one got from The Good, the further one was from reality, and the deeper into evil. (According to Plato, evil came from mistaking appearance for reality, or accident for essence.)

Let's look at an example. My chair is made up of a series of accidents. For instance, it is brown and mostly soft. It has wheels on it, and its height can be adjusted. What makes my chair real, however, is that it imitates the form Chair. All chairs, no matter what accidents might make up their existence, have essential Chairness. Hence, no accidental chair is really real, only Chair is really real. Because only reason allows us to approach the world of forms, then reason is the highest element in the mind of man.

Art, then, is bad because it imitates the accidents of life, and is therefore one step further removed from the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Art is dangerous because when human beings see or hear art, they want to imitate it, and therefore are led further away from the Good, the True and the Beautiful.

So, you see, it was never about the chair at all. Plato was an ardent critic of poetry (literature) because it warped or misrepresented the truth of existence. The chair was a physical analogy for the way he viewed reality.

[Avatar]

Great post Syl.

While I've always disagreed with Plato's "ideal" (of anything), I've always been pretty much equally enamoured with his idea of how a country should be run.

There is only one big problem with it, and that's the fact that even if you hand-pick the best candiates, the most noble, selfless, knowledgeable, half will be corrupted by power, and the other half will only be effective for their life-times. Once you're dead, there is no way of ensuring suitable people take over.

I do think he had an excellent point though in suggesting that it be the learned, the philosophers, the sociologists, etc. that should rule. Unfortunately, depsite Plato's fondly held beliefs, the learned are no more immune to the weaknesses of humanity than anybody else.

Wouldn't be long before we were going to war over the "aesthetic hypothesis" instead of "deomcracy" and "human rights".

--Avatar

[matrixman]

Well, I think the more pessimistically-minded among us might say that the Platonists have already won and the elitists have triumphed over democracy. It could be argued that today's entrenched corporate society works to educate and create the kind of elites who do not believe in democracy.

[Avatar]

A good point MM, but they're not the kind of "elite" that Plato had in mind. He envisaged a scholarly, altruistic elite. What we're getting now is the greedy corporate "robber baron" sort of elite.

In fact, I wonder about a return to a type of Feudalism sometimes.

--A

[matrixman]

It's just as well that I said "Platonists" and not Plato, then. Plato himself may have had a more virtuous kind of elite in mind, but his followers in their zealotry could have corrupted the original meaning of his ideas. Socrates, Plato, Darwin...and so on. You have the original thinker, and then come the followers who bend the thinker's ideas to their own agenda.

[Avatar]

Another telling point. I think that such is the fate of any philosophy though, and relates exactly back to the one problem I have with running the country in a "platonic" fashion.

--A

[matrixman]

Cool! Did we just have a nice circular discussion? I wasn't even trying!

Alrighty then, back to this ideal object thingamajix. Thanks for the article, Alynna! Unfortunately (for Plato), that summation just makes me even less of a fan of his worldview.

[Gadget nee Jemcheeta]

Wait, does that mean that the Platonists are a false, accidental version of the 'Form' of the 'Platonist'? Heheheh....

That quote was good though, and so is the conclusion about how it was never about the chair...

[Avatar]

According to Plato, it probably would mean that. I think my real problem with the idea is the emphasis on "reality". It treats reality as a solid, objective thing, that is the same, no matter what. It effectively says that no matter how you interpret something, it still remains the same, while I believe the interpretation is what is real, for every person who interprets it that way.

--A

[matrixman]

Carl Sagan said in Cosmos that intellectual brilliance is "no guarantee against being dead wrong." I don't recall who exactly he may have been referring to, but I'll apply that statement to Plato, heh.

After Einstein showed us that everything is relative, and after quantum mechanics has shown us that the observer affects what is observed, Plato's idea of an absolute reality seems...quaint.

Having elaborate philosophical constructs is fine and dandy (and I guess it helps kill time when you're bored), but sometimes I think it's all just so much BS. Especially when these constructs don't hold up against what modern scientific investigation has revealed about the nature of the cosmos and reality itself.

I'm just not a fan of Plato. Hmm, I think I said that already.

[Avatar]

I agree on the whole. The nature of Reality has always been of particular interest to me, and I'm firmly in the camp of Reality being pretty much infinitely malleable. (And that the moulding is done by us.)

--A

[Gadget nee Jemcheeta]

Actually, Plato felt exactly that physical reality was totally malleable. My professor called it 'spatial temporal goo' where we create everything we see from our ideas of reality. You change the idea, you change reality.
Good example: You think thin girls are attractive, I think thin girls are disgusting. We're seeing two different girls when we both look at the same thin girl. MY idea of the beautiful is different than yours, so we are participating in two seperate realities.

[Plissken]

How thin, exactly?

[Gadget nee Jemcheeta]

I don't know. 3 cubits. Whatever :p Howyadoin Plissken?