I’m glad you final agree then.
To me this seeing-it-as-a-unity is already its “intelligibility.” Etymologically, intelligence is a “picking out.”
We can work from this “grasped unity” of the thing to be explained as we discuss gravity and so on as a finding of patterns between entities in experience. But “gravity” is another “ideal” unity or “picking out.” And so on.
Thank you for clarifying.
We can however read the unity of the object as its being. The one is good as the possibility of knowledge in a fluctuating world.
This suggests that reality can be known strictly in terms of its form.
This suggests that knowledge is dialectically or dialogically available —not a mysticism beyond conceptuality and conversation.
Thanks for this quote.
To me suggests that “the good” is the principle of intelligibility, which is the unity or being of objects as gatherings of difference.
But “picking out” does not imply a grasped unity. It implies a created unity, one created by that act of picking something out. That is the problem of individualization and the nature of an object in general. The sense of sight appears to provide us with individual unities which are grasped as distinct things. But, as Plato teaches us, the senses deceive, and this individualization, this perception of distinct things, may just be a creation of sensation. It is simply how things appear to us.
That is why we need an intelligible principle which justifies “unity”, and individualization, rather than just that things appear this way in sensation. Seeing it as a unity is not grasping its “intelligibility”, it is grasping its “sensibility”.
I don’t see that. The unity of the object is sensed, and the being of the object is its intelligibility. So the unity of the object is not necessarily its being, it’s what appears to be its being through sensation. But knowledge relates to intelligibility, not sensibility, for Plato. So “the one” is an empirical principle derived from sensation rather than a principle of intelligibility.
I’d say that it grasps a flux of sensibility as a unity. This is why mundane objects are “between being and non-being.” Continuous sensibility as chora or dyad is “made discrete” by the “operation” of the one or the good. Knowledge cannot “grab” pure flux, pure sensibility. It needs enduring unities, “concepts” or “forms.”
This is of course just one approach.
My copy is translated by Donald J. Zeyl (commented by J.M. Cooper), and it reads totally different on the same part of the quote.
Here is the issue I have. Many participants in this thread seemed inclined to equate “the good” with “the one”. I use “equate”, to indicate a specific type of association. I do not deny that there is an association between the two, but I see no indication from Plato that the good ought to be equated with the one. In Plato I see the one as more closely associated with “the many”, and this is a sort of relation of opposition. Further, the good is associated with both the one and the many, but I see nothing significant to indicate that it ought to be more closely related to the one than to the many.
This is an example of how problematic the issue is. You describe how knowledge grasps the flux with reference to unities, concepts, and forms. each of these words is pluralized, indicating that what you refer to is “the many” rather than 'the one".
The issue being that if the entire flux of “pure sensibility” is reduced to individual unities, than you are talking about the sensible realm as “the Many”. This conceptualization therefore requires, and is based in, a principle of difference, which is used as the basis of individuation. Individuation is taken for granted. This is a principle of division rather than a principle of unity, and the claim that each differentiated individual is a distinct “unity” is unsupported. Then, as we see in modern science the divisibility of the flux appears to be endless (our mathematics of infinite divisibility supports endless scientific reductionism).
The other direction is to take the entire flux of pure sensibility as One, and employ a principle such as absolute time, “the present” to establish unity. Then we are properly talking about “the One”, perhaps Parmenides’ “being”. Now unity is taken for granted. From this perspective though, we need principles to establish distinct entities, individual objects, to conceive of “many”. If we employ “difference” the unity is automatically dissolved, and we have the many instead of the one.
The “things that are known” are the Forms. The Good is the cause of their being and their being known. See the Divided Line from the Republic (509d-510a) It divides the visible and intelligible “worlds” or “realms”. Objects of sense are not known, they are matters of belief or opinion (pistis).
Of course, we do not have to accept this distinction, but if we are to understand Plato we must, for the sake of the argument, accept his distinctions. And, of course, we can take from him or appropriate whatever we want, but in doing so we leave the rest behind and thus misunderstand him.
I am looking at the mountain visible from my window. It is about 20 km away from where I am. It appears as a picture of landscape to me.
But when drive up to there, park the car, and climb up the mountain. It is no longer a mountain that I was seeing through my window.
All I see is the soil and plants and some trees and rocks. Of course I also see space stretched out and covering the sky above it. And when I reach the top of the mountain, I can see all the houses, roads and rivers appearing as a tiny toy world.
So, what does it tell us? The world is nothing but our perception.
What has been presented by the world to my sense organs are organsing the shape of the world depending where I am existing.
But the point here is that every being in the world must be in the same situation. What they see in front of them is their world view, and it is all different depending on where they are standing in the world. No single being is having the same world view.
I am not sure if chora is something we all have in our minds, even if it is depicted as receptacle or space. Could it be something universal condition what makes possible for us having the world view in the Kantian sense?
Because Plato being an idealist couldn’t have been talking about something material or particular. He must have been talking about something ideal and universal. Then chora must be receptable in general and universal condition, which makes the reception and positing in the memory possible after perception of all the existing beings. In other words, without chora, perception and recollection of the world for human mind wouldn’t be possible.
I might be making a wild assumption here, but the fact Kant read Plato a lot and was in much influence of his ideas leads me into the speculation.
If Timaeus is about the creation of the world and universe and its origin, and the world and universe is regarded as soul with perception and knowledge which works intelligently with all the scientific laws and principles in the world, then chora must be its sense organ receiving, collecting, recollecting, nursing and regenerating the operational data around and in it.
When you mistake disagreement for agreement then I agree:
“Exactly what you are doing” refers to what you claim you have no interest in doing. If you had no interest in doing it then you would not have attempted to. But, fortunately for you, your misunderstanding of this key passage from the text means that you have after all managed to fail to accomplish what you say you have no interest in doing. So, well done!
Plato argued that God is the One, and is also not only the Good, but the Perfect, the Good to the highest degree. The One True God is the God of perfect goodness, perfect power, and perfect desire. Plato alluded to this in the Republic:
- “The good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils, the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in Him.”
- “Surely, God and the things of God are in every way perfect.”
- “I believe that God is perfectly simple and true both in word and deed, if the poets say otherwise, then the lying poets have no place in our idea of God.”
This is the evolution, in ancient Greece, of the idea of God(s) from the songs of the Greek poets sung in the language of mythos, to the discourse of the Greek philosophers argued in the language of logos.
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Kant proposed that space and time were intuitions that were conditions of individual experience. As integral to our process, the Critique separates that individual view point from those elements as questions of science. This leads to a sort of a double vision when Kant discusses the cosmological.
That framework is far from Plato presenting the distinction between Being and Becoming. Seth Bernadete has a helpful description:
The making of world-soul culminates in the establishment of time. Time is the way in which the cosmos becomes one and as close as possible to the whole that is its paradigm. 11 The oneness time imparts is in the counting of time. The intervals of time can always be brought together into one, whether it be the one of day and night, the days of one month, the months of one year, or the coincidence of all the instruments of time in one great year.12 The one of time belongs, Timaeus says, to the parts of time. They are at odds with the species of time, for there are only two species of time, past and future, and the present between is a false insertion by men, for “is” in precise speech belongs to that which is always. The insertion of “is” between “was” and “will be” exemplifies perfectly our necessary mistaking of the other for the same. The one of time counts the past and the future. They count what is no longer and what is not yet. Time is the ultimate expression of the nonbeing of becoming. It is the truth of the myth that Kronos castrated Ouranos. Becoming only is if one speaks imprecisely. Becoming only is if the images of being can hold onto the being of space, and the being of space can be spoken of only imprecisely, by way of images, and can only be grasped by a bastard kind of reasoning.13 All the becomings in space are bastards; their father cannot recognize them as his. The demiurge as the maker of time splits apart from the demiurge as the father of becoming, for everything that becomes is at the expense of its recognizability.
The footnote 13:
- Despite the number of images Timaeus applies to space, he never likens it to a mirror, for it is the ground of all orientation and consequently stands in the way of any isomorphism between being and image: the image (eikon), since that for which it has come into being does not belong to itself, is a constantly moving phantom (phantasma) of some other (heteron ti) (52c2-3). We attach a condition to anything we believe to be: to be something is to be something somewhere. This somewhere (pou) is our acknowledgment that every something depends on something other than itself in order to be.
Benardete, Seth. The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy (p. 388).
This echoes the previous quotes made regarding the Divided Line and the dialectic. Perhaps Timaeus’ account can become part of the pursuit of the good but there is always the danger of:
“but if he happens to come across any image anywhere, he does so by using his belief, not his knowledge, and he dreams his way through this present life fast asleep and before he wakes up here he’ll first arrive in Hades and there fall permanently asleep?” (Republic 534a)
Maybe it is due to the fact that Plato was a dualist and idealist. But Kant was a dualist and realist?
Plato thought the world of idea is real, while Kant thought the world of material is real.
In Cosmology, what Kant was asking was whether we can know the world in full. But the asking the question was antinomy of reason, because the world is too large and has too many diversities of events and objects existing and happening for human reason to grasp the full existence.
Those designations are comparisons of opinions upon the nature of the world. With the Divided Line, Plato is saying there is an engagement of understanding where either one is awake or asleep. Having the “right” opinion is no substitute for being awake. The dialectic does not end in an explanation.
I would add to this the importance of Socrates “second sailing” as narrated in the Phaedo (99d). I do not know if this influenced Kant but there is an interesting parallel with Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Both Plato and Kant turn toward things as they are arranged by the human mind.
You cannot have the right opinion without being awake. Having the right opinion presupposes being awake.
An explanation is not the dialectic. Explanation is for clarification and better understanding.
Yes, so we can have knowledge about objects only insofar as they “partake in the intelligible.” In a different lingo, only as “tokens” are objects “for knowledge.” There are no tokens without types (forms.)
I agree that we should consider the text, yes, but I’d stress that we also need a coherent paraphrase that makes sense to us. So I’d ask how you make sense of
The ‘things that are known’ are the Forms.
What does this mean to you ? Are the forms ever grasped as “pure” form ?
Copleston seems to approach the issue as I do, to some degree.
I read “true being” as not “material,” because of the “ideal” or “categorical” component of experience.