"Partaking Of The Intelligible" : Plato's Timaeus & Unwritten Doctrine

Metaphysics & Epistemology
41

I hear you, but basically I’m approaching Plato as something like a phenomenologist. Generally I’m even a positivist, and the issue of “the intelligibility of the sensory world” part of a fundamental explication of our basic situation, and of what meaning is. So sure it’s not empirical science. But it can be rational inquiry into what we already vaguely presuppose.

Now I am at the same time not averse to discussing mysticism, and really what exactly “is” mysticism ? I try to sort out empirical claims from explicative metaphors. I tend to call “superstition” the empirical claims I find unwarranted or reckless. But metaphorical language itself is fine, as I think you’ll grant, because we are talking about a master of it, Plato.

But also, finally more important, whatever insight we can get with the help of his texts. At least the more I read philosophy the more I see all the great philosophers’ ideas entangled. As if hovering around a few fundamental issues.

So I sort-of agree, in that the “identity” of the object is “ideal.” An “idea” gives “intelligible unity” to sensation, feeling, and so on. But the idea “has no reality or presence,” as far as I can make out, except through fugitive instantiations.

The father and the mother never exist in separation, but only as the child. Obviously that’s not an empirical claim. I offer it as what makes sense to me in this moment.

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The point is that the idea is the reality. The supposed independent sense object is not real.

I think that the father and mother analogy is a different issue, and we ought not confuse the two. The talk about sense objects as a reflection is from the cave allegory of The Republic. The mother/father metaphor is an attempt to justify the reality of individual things, in The Timaeus. The two are very much related, but the context is very different, so I think it’s unwise to bring the two together in this way.

43

Yes, visceral works for me, there is a visceral presence with us, as the experience of sense is delivered. Delivered by the mother (sound) while the father (word) is present in the form of the sense and the form of the mother delivering it. So in every act, all three are there.
When I look to the mother, sound, material, I realise that the forms they take are always moulded by the father, word, mind.
Also that when I look to father, word, mind, it always submits its form to mother, sound, material.
Such that we only sense that which is one and two together, all three. Which reveals that we are just as important in the mix as the two universals, father and mother.
So every sense experience is a three sided unity. That the visceral moment and presence of the sensory experience is where the son is to be found. All else is mother moulded by father, which is in turn moulded by mother.
This is why the mystic contemplates the concept of facing God (father), face to face, in the moment. That to see that face requires somehow seeing through the sounds, while accepting them.

44

Difficult passage!

I would say that Plato speaks about prime matter here. ‘Formless’ I would interpret as matter without form yet, thus pure matter in contrast to the Hegelian unity of content and form or matter and form.

From the first sight, Plato is right because the prime matter of our Universe - a vacuum - seemingly does not have any form. But science proves now that the vacuum is characterized by a set of certain physical constants: the speed of light in the vacuum, the Planck’s constant, the fine-structure constant, the gravitational constant, etc. Thus, the prime matter is not formless. It has a form, but such a form which we cannot measure with instruments.

This is how I would understand this passage.

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45

Awesome. We share this sense of the world. I connect this to the incarnation symbol. So I’m guilty of reading Plato like a phenomenologist who will sound like a Christian mystic. Oh but what is mysticism ? Am I making wacky empirical claims ?

“The world itself is metaphorical,” I might want to say, not so far from Lakoff. But this is explication, attempted disclosure.

Beautiful. I might frame it as “participating in God,” but maybe that’s also in what you say above.

I’m an atheist. In the usual language. But I like what Feuerbach was up to in his early work. Signs like “atheist” and “theist” and “mystic” and “positivist” don’t have, in my view, some context-independent “true meaning.”

46

Thanks for joining in !

So for you this is a quasi-empirical issue ? Like a form of “deep” physics ?

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47

Interesting! Anaximander already foreshadowed the idea of the quantum vaccuum with the “Apeiron”. ‘Apeiron’ is a Greek word meaning formless or infinite. It also suggests eternity in the sense of atemprorality. Anaximander understood it as denoting “primal matter”―which is an “everythingness” or a “nothingness” (no-thingness). Plato’s “Chora” seems to be a somewhat similar idea.

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48

Also the crucifixion symbol, incarnation is to a degree the mounting on to the cross of the son/divinity. Christ demonstrated this in a profound way. He was then transfigured and returned to heaven.

That’s your style, I find I’m even more unconventional. I’m guilty (if that’s the right word) of thinking in mystical terms to the extent that I barely fit in here and I’m only here because I like to do a bit of philosophising.
As for what mysticism is, well it’s a pursuit which emerged out of religious traditions. But these days has overlapped somewhat with New Age ideology. There is unfortunately no academic, or orthodox school at the moment. Just a rag tag dispersed group of people who are drawn to it and have to find their own way into it and shape it to their own needs.
The basic idea is that one develops an intuition for a deeper, closer understanding and interaction with nature. There is also a religious, or divine angle, but this and religious devotion are not a pre-requisite. But more a hangover(maybe not the right word) from it’s religious beginnings.

Yes, although for many mysticism is more about treading a path back to, or closer to, God. There is a whole system and practice of doing this, alongside the development of intuition.

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49

Well I am glad that you are here. I don’t like any narrowing of the concept of philosophy beyond the requirement of a basic civility. That civility is rationality.

FWIW, that’s how I feel about my own outsider approach to philosophy. Some of the thinkers I discuss are academically fashionable, but many are forgotten. For me there’s no great gulf between Heidegger and Whitman or Kerouac or whoever. A continuum of people trying to say what it is for them. There’s a hope in that saying that what it is for them is also what it is for others.

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50

Yes, it’s great that there is a forum like this for like minded people to interact. I find that I don’t have many people I know among my friends who like to discuss these ideas. I have only one at the moment, but that is ok if I can come here to discuss them.

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51

Yes, I see it as physics, as an answer to the question " how does the Universe work?". In Plato’s universe there are Forms (Ideas or Eidos), which are formulated as “the unchanging or invisible” in our passage. The Eidos are somewhere outside the space and time. Beside them, there is also the world, which we see, and it is “the visible or changing” in the text.

Then Plato requires some explanation of the connection between those two worlds, the way to explain how visible things actually appear. Sort of matter is required (and also some agent, who/which will initiate the process of forming of things). I believe it was logical for Plato to think that this matter, which takes all sorts of forms, initially was formless.

This is how I understand Plato’s universe. And I think that the passage goes about this intermediate part between two worlds.

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52

OK, thanks !

This reminds me of how some understand Kant.

As you may know better than I do, some see even space and time as “part of the internal matrix” that we are “trapped in,” so that what is beyond is almost unthinkable, or perhaps thinkable only in non-spatial eternal terms.

I love physics and the theory of science. But I make sense of physics in terms of a phenomenalism along the lines of Mach. But this phenomenalism doesn’t dig in to the basic intelligibility of the world, which I’d call its “articulation” into enduring things that show themselves, differently, in perspectival perceptions, to enduring subjects. So here I’m digging at the weird basis of the world as knowable, speakable, etc.

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53

Never occured to me, but the “Apeiron” is really comparable with the vaccuum in many aspects.

Sometimes it looks like the Greeks foreshadowed everything in our philosophy and physics: idealism, materialism, dialectics, concepts of vaccuum, molecule, atoms… It is difficult to say what they did not foreshadow. What an exiting time it must have been!

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54

With the difference that Plato represents golden age of rationalism, but Kant represents the pinnacle of scepticism of his time.

I am a dialectical materialist and see everything from that point of view. In the terms of dialectics, Plato’s Eidos are rather awkward constructions, but it was quite creative for his time, and he had other brilliant achievements.

I am trying to figure out how phenomenalism and Mach regard Plato. Eidos and formless matter, although invisible, existed in reality, according to Plato. Phenomenalism, on the other hand, will resist the existence of Eidos or formless matter, I think, since it is neither an object of perception nor associated with any subject. It cannot be compared with a rose, which is absent and which we remember. They are always invisible to us. Is this correct? There is no much knowable in Plato’s system then? Only things around us?

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Could you clarify this passage, please? How do you interpret this in terms of physics? Why does the passage connect to the unwritten doctrine?

56

I don’t think those constants have been proven by science, they are assumed.

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57

Well let me share some of Mach with you:

My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.

My friend may put on a different coat. His countenance may assume a serious or a cheerful expression. His complexion, under the effects of light or emotion, may change. His shape may be altered by motion, or be definitely changed. Yet the number of the permanent features presented, compared with the number of the gradual alterations, is always so great, that the latter may be overlooked. It is the same friend with whom I take my daily walk.

My coat may receive a stain, a tear. My very manner of expressing this shows that we are concerned here with a sum-total of permanency, to which the new element is added and from which that which is lacking is subsequently taken away.

So Mach grants the unity of enduring objects. He just doesn’t look for their reality “behind” their manifestation. This unity is performed temporally. And this is basically how I am reading Plato here. The eidos are not mysterious hidden beings. They are just the “intelligibility” of the world. Mach’s stained coat is the “same” coat that it was before being torn. We can step in the same river twice because of the “idea” of the river the unifies the rushing water that is ever new.

For me the “water” is “matter” and its “unity” as enduring river is the “idea.” So the river itself is matter (in this case water) unified by idea.

But the deepest layer of this would be thinking of “matter” as “quality itself.” The river is the unity of its “water.” But water is already a unification of “sensory-affective non-stuff.”

For me physics assumes or works with the intelligibility of the world that is “just there.” Einstein discusses this in Physics and Reality.

The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that by means of thinking (operations with concepts, and the creation and use of definite functional relations between them, and the coordination of sense experiences to these concepts) it can be put in order, this fact is one which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never understand. One may say " the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." It is one of the great realisations of Immanuel Kant that the setting up of a real external world would be senseless without this comprehensibility. In speaking here concerning “comprehensibility,” the expression is used in its most modest sense. It implies: the production of some sort of order among sense impressions, this order being produced by the creation of general concepts, relations between these concepts, and by relations between the concepts and sense experience, these relations being determined in any possible manner. It is in this sense that the world of our sense experiences is comprehensible. The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.

So my perhaps-eccentric reading of Plato is that he’s talking about “conceptualized sensation.” But not really as something “internal.” When I just live my practical life, I interact with enduring things. I am not dissolved in a chaos of ineffable sensation and feeling. For me any kind of physics concept of the void, just because it is concept, something intelligible, is not the “basis” or “mother” of the world. Instead it’s something like “sensation and feeling,” but not as concepts but what these concepts “point at.” Not the concept of “the smell of sardines” but what is “there” as we smell sardines — that we can’t really squeeze into concepts/words.

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58

Fair enough. I associate that with a dominant reading. But I suppose the question is what do “real” and “not real” mean here ?

Is this like The Matrix ? Perhaps the real ideas are not just numbers but ideas of horses and buttons and so on.

Basically I’d like to hear your big picture view on this.

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That’s a good question. I think it should be described as a hierarchy, or a higher degree of reality, like “more real”. If you look at the cave allegory, sensed thinks are like shadows, or reflections of the Ideas which are the cause of them, but are not seen. Of course shadows are “real”, but there is a certain priority assigned to the cause of them.

Yes, it’s everything. The sensible thing is a reflection of the idea. So in The Timaeus Plato attempts to describe how the sensible things could be produced from ideas.

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Chorology by John Sallis
60

I found this passage in Sallis’ book Chorology.

Even if as fire, it nonetheless appears; it appears, even if never as itself.

I suggest that what partakes of the intelligible is, for lack of a better word, “quality.” The fire before me is not only this label, this form or idea “fire.” The “quality” of “that fire” is unified and categorized by our taking it as “that fire.”

We might say that that fire is “constituted” by a sensory-affective “flesh” that is “stamped into” something intelligible.

Elsewhere I suggested that understanding being as only the most general and empty of concepts misses the point(ing.) Trivially a noun, a concept, is the pointer.

Even if as a being it appears, it nonetheless appears; it appears, even if never as itself.

Using the most general concept here strangely sharpens the pointing. What relentlessly appears only as a being ? Indeed, even “a being” conjures a minimal intelligibility. Pointing at “quality” (the sensory-affective surplus or overflowing of the category) occurs at the limit of intelligibility. It also, as Sallis sees, upsets a traditional interpretation of Plato as metaphysical in a naive or unwordly sense. source

Can it be said equally that Platonism is metaphysics? Is Platonism simply metaphysics? . . . Or is there in this origin a reserve, something held back from the metaphysics that it founds and determines, something withheld from all subsequent thought precisely to the degree that such thought remains metaphysical? . . . Would [such a reserve] not effect a certain transgression of the limits of metaphysics at the very origin of metaphysics?

The author of the paper adds:

Sallis concludes this chapter by seconding what he takes to be one of Scott’s key claims, and so Sallis says: “the chorology is thus an affirmation of sensible things as being without being. It is an affirmation of the lives of things in all that sets them apart from being itself, an affirmation of them and of their unappropriable quality and differential distance from the sense offered to us” (142).

From a different review we get a quote from Sallis:

The chōra is said to be everlasting, perpetual, always (aei ), not admitting destruction, that is, ruin, corruption, passing away (phthora ). This corresponds to its being rigorously distinguished from the generated: it is that in which that which is generated comes to be and from which that which is destroyed passes away, departs. It is presupposed by all generation and destruction and thus is not itself subject to generation and destruction”

To me this suggests “presence” in the sense of the “now.” Things come and go, but the now tarries. The now as we know it is haunted by memory and fantasy. The now is always on the way away from itself. This suggests Heidegger’s understanding of existence (dasein) as not in time but rather time itself. Of course he doesn’t mean physics time but what makes it possible and meaningful.

Saussure insisted on difference as fundamental. Two sonic signs can only be two signs if there is an “unheard difference” in their soundings. While these soundings are arbitrary, they must be differentiable by your ear or mine. Differences in “quality.” Differences in their “sensory presence.”

While Timaeus has given us several images (e.g., gold) through which the chōra can be partially disclosed, Sallis argues that we must now imagine the chōra as the very grounds through which images are imaged, or that which receives the images and, through itself, allows the images to show themselves. The strangeness and wonder that such showing occasions is, for Sallis, the central issue of the dialogue.

The “strangeness and wonder of that showing.” And yet how mundane and familiar too.

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