OK, going back to Plato, what do you make of this part? I gather you have been discussing about “the receptacle or nurse of generation”, which is the third kind of being.
Have you come to any agreement or conclusion on what it could be?
But we’re talking Plato though, not our personal opinions.
The issue in the cave allegory was that the philosopher recognizes that artificial sensible objects are a reflection of the ideas which create them. Then the philosopher extends this principle to all natural sensible objects, to recognize that these are created by ideas. “The good” is the intention behind these acts of creation. Later, in The Timaeus, Plato attempts to understand how this creative act occurs in nature, how Forms, which he understands as universals, could cause the existence of particular individual, natural things.
The issue of sensation itself, does not seem to be as important of an issue for the ancient Greeks as it is for modern philosophers. Plato described it briefly in The Theaetetus, where he talked about an illustrious philosophy which described vision as occurring by something being emitted from the eye, meeting up with something emitted from the object. So he understood sensation as an interaction between the subject and the object. Therefore “beauty” in your analogy would be neither in the face seen, nor in the eye of the beholder, but somewhere between.
This is why the idea of "Beauty’ had been posited as a medium between the two. That was Pythagorean idealism. But Plato turns this around in The Republic (cave allegory), to understand the Idea as the active cause of the sense object. This makes the sense object the medium between the Idea and the sensing subject.
It was also Plato who wrote the Timaeus. Once again, the Timaeus begins with Socrates’ desire to see the city he creates in the Republic at war. He wants to see the city in action. The story of the city in the Republic is incomplete. It is a city created by intellect without necessity, that is, a city without chance and contingency. A city that could never be.
Plato’s own cave wall images continue to captivate us, to hold us as captive prisoners, but in the Timaeus that hyperuranion city is revealed to be lifeless.
I agree with Paine. Most of what is in the topic could have been written without even looking at Timaeus.
Gadamer was a careful, dialectical reader of Plato’s dialectical writings. Interpretation is grounded by textual support.
All too often, as seen on this forum and elsewhere, the text is used as a jumping off place. If that is where one’s interests lie, I won’t fault it, but in doing so the text is left behind and ignored.
In his Seventh Letter Plato says:
There is no treatise (suggramma) by me on these subjects, nor will there ever be.(341c)
That is, no written doctrine. One might turn to his “unwritten teachings” but this is problematic. The unwritten teachings do not become written teachings by writing them down.
I would argue that the issue of reification of consciousness is a red herring with regard to what I have been claiming Husserl has in common with writers like Wittgenstein, Focault, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. It is true that consciousness is the a priori ground of experience formHusserl, but it is critiqued and deconstructed by these other philosophers. What I am arguing they all have in common , and what is necessary to understand how consciousness works for Husserl, is a rejection of the idea of world as a space of pre-existing entities, properties or relations in favor of world as becoming.
At this point, it may be helpful to bring into the discussion at the ideas of performative new materialism, as articulated by physicist Karen Barad.
They exemplify the notion of world as creative self-transformation, and they do it without grounding it in a subjective idealism of language or consciousness. Even if there were no humans in the world, it would still have these fundamental characteristics. Barad writes:
In an agential realist account, matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is
substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity. Phenomena—the smallest material units (relational “atoms”)—come to matter through this process of ongoing intra-activity. “Matter” does not refer to an inherent, fixed property of abstract, independently existing objects; rather, “matter” refers to phenomena in their ongoing materialization.On my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components.” That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive
relations—relations without preexisting relata. The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual
“interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a
profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and
properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful.In my agential realist account, scientific practices do not reveal what is already there; rather,
what is ‘‘disclosed’’ is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world’s differential becoming. Which is not to say that humans are the condition of possibility for the existence of phenomena. Phenomena do not require cognizing minds for their existence; on the contrary, ‘‘minds’’ are themselves material phenomena that emerge through specific intra-actions. Phenomena are real material beings. What is made manifest through technoscientific practices is an expression of the objective existence of particular material phenomena.This is, after all, a realist conception of scientific practices. But unlike in traditional conceptions of realism, ‘‘objectivity’’ is not preexistence (in the ontological sense) or the preexistent made manifest to the cognitive mind (in the epistemological sense). Objectivity is a matter of accountability for what materializes, for what comes to be. It matters which cuts are enacted: different cuts enact different materialized becomings….
Diffraction is an ethico-onto-epistemological matter. We are not merely differently situated in the world; ‘‘each of us’’ is part of the intra active ongoing articulation of the world in its differential mattering. Diffraction is a material-discursive phenomenon that challenges the presumed inherent separability of subject and object, nature and culture, fact and value, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, epistemology and ontology, materiality and discursivity.” (Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007)
Based on what you have said about your approach, I imagine this may come across to you as a return to a form of idealism or Romanticism, but then your form of realism may come across to Barad as harboring a series of idealist prejudices.
Well I’m quite ready to insist on the endless becoming of the world. The river can only change because it is also “static” as a thing between us. The water is ever-new, but this ever-new water is grasped as “the same old river.”
Being is time because being/consciousness is the always partial revelation of transcendent objects. Revelation is partial precisely because of this transcendence. Showing is always also hiding because the revelation of one moment or aspect is the occlusion or concealment of all others, especially those in the darkness of the future.
I suggest that Plato’s One in the unwritten doctrine is precisely this “transcendence” as temporal-interpersonal synthesis of otherwise indeterminate “sensory-affective prestuff” (chora or the indeterminate dyad or the qualitative continuum.)
I agree with this also, and it sounds like Braver’s Hegel.
I like this also. Again it sounds like Hegel, or what I ended up projecting on Hegel. For instance, here’s Kojeve:
"Scientific knowledge” gives itself or abandons itself without reserve, without preconceived ideas or afterthoughts, to the “life” and the “dialectical movement” of the Real. Thus, this truly true knowledge has nothing to do with the “Reflection” of pseudo-philosophy (i.e., pre-Hegelian philosophy) and of pseudo-science (Newtonian science), which reflects on the Real while placing itself outside of the Real, without one’s being able to say precisely where; Reflection which pretends to give an “overview” of the Real on the basis of a knowing Subject that calls itself autonomous or independent of the Object of knowledge; a Subject that, according to Hegel, is but an artificially isolated aspect of the known or revealed Real.
The Real itself is what organises itself and makes itself concrete so as to become a determinate “species,” capable of being revealed by a general notion; the Real itself reveals itself through articulate knowledge and thereby becomes a known object that has the knowing subject as its necessary complement, so that "empirical existence” is divided into beings that speak and beings that are spoken of. For real Being existing as Nature is what produces Man who reveals that Nature (and himself) by speaking of it. Real Being thus transforms itself into “truth” or into reality revealed by speech, and becomes a “higher” and “higher” truth as its discursive revelation becomes ever more adequate and complete.
It is by following this “dialectical movement” of the Real that Knowledge is present at its own birth and contemplates its own evolution. And thus it finally attains its end, which is the adequate and complete understanding of itself — i.e., of the progressive revelation of the Real and of Being by Speech — of the Real and Being which engender, in and by their “dialectical movement,” the Speech that reveals them.
The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought. In particular, if the thought and the discourse of the Hegelian Scientist or the Wise Man are dialectical, it is only because they faithfully reflect the “dialectical movement” of the Real of which they are a part and which they experience adequately by giving themselves to it without any preconceived method.
Hey now I’ll all about Romanticism and self-creation. The “feeling” of philosophy for me is that of Whitman, Blake, and Emerson. I can “afford” to assimilate positivism.
To me this sounds like something from Kant. The idea as thing-in-itself as the non-empirical “cause” of internal representations.
From my POV, this interpretation makes Plato far less interesting, as I take such representational realism to be basically incoherent. Or, at the least, the dreary default.
If you tell me what you think of Plato, then you are giving me your personal opinion on Plato. If tell me that authorial intention is paramount, that too is your personal opinion. Which is fine, because I am actually here to talk with other living people anyway.
Too much reverence toward the dead is like a bunch of “scientists” who fail to make any progress on the issues but settle instead for keeping the candles lit beneath their idols.
As I see it, it’s only creative paraphrases that demonstrate engagement with the text, so I’m glad that you have provided your own interpretation above, even if our interpretations differ.
I have been sharing a what I take to be coherent interpretation that connects Plato to later thinkers. But I’ll let others say how much they agree or disagree.
I’ll summarize where I’m at. Here’s the crucial passage for me:
They may be compared to images made of gold, which are continually assuming new forms. Somebody asks what they are; if you do not know, the safest answer is to reply that they are gold. In like manner there is a universal nature out of which all things are made, and which is like none of them; but they enter into and pass out of her, and are made after patterns of the true in a wonderful and inexplicable manner. The containing principle may be likened to a mother, the source or spring to a father, the intermediate nature to a child; and we may also remark that the matter which receives every variety of form must be formless, like the inodorous liquids which are prepared to receive scents, or the smooth and soft materials on which figures are impressed. In the same way space or matter is neither earth nor fire nor air nor water, but an invisible and formless being which receives all things, and in an incomprehensible manner partakes of the intelligible. But we may say, speaking generally, that fire is that part of this nature which is inflamed, water that which is moistened, and the like.
I think this is close to what Kant means by “space.”
Space is nothing else than the form of all phenomena of the external sense, that is, the subjective condition of the sensibility, under which alone external intuition is possible. Now, because the receptivity or capacity of the subject to be affected by objects necessarily antecedes all intuitions of these objects, it is easily understood how the form of all phenomena can be given in the mind previous to all actual perceptions, therefore à priori, and how it, as a pure intuition, in which all objects must be determined, can contain principles of the relations of these objects prior to all experience.
But what is space here for Kant ? Colors appear in space, but so do sounds, that come from the left or the right. And I can touch furniture in the dark as I make my way to bed without a light on. When I walk down a city street, I don’t walk dizzy through swirling meaningless colors and sounds and smells. I walk instead through a lifeworld of recognized things that are also there for others. So space/chora is “articulated” by “ideas.”
Or consider the “sensory-affective non-stuff” that becomes a stuff known as Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, through the “idea” or “identity” that “unifies” sounds and feelings into a recognizable piece of music that others can enjoy elsewhere and elsewhen.
So “ideas” organize space/chora into a world that I share with others in terms of objects that exceed my perception of them now and exceed my consciousness altogether inasmuch as I understand them to show themselves to others when I am not around. All philosophy and science presupposes “ideas” implicitly as it begins to discuss the shared world and things within that world.
IMV, this connects to Heraclitus’ discussion of the river, which we can step into more than once. Though the rushing water is ever-new ( the sensory-affective prestuff is ever new), it is grasped or experienced as the-enduring-river-shared-with-others.
But this is clearly what the Timaeus is about, how it is possible that Forms act causally to create the existence of individual material things. What could that process be?
I mean, you can have as much license in your interpretation as you want, but what’s the point? If you do not see authorial intention as paramount, then you read the material with an intention other than understanding what the author meant. What would be your intention behind such a reading. Are you wanting to say that Plato’s work supports some philosophical principles you believe in, and find interesting, so you interpret him in a way which supports what you believe, regardless of whether it is what Plato actually meant.
This is also what I’m interested in. If we read the passage about the gold in the light of the unwritten doctrine, then the “One” is the principle of ideas and the dyad is the chora.
In my view, we read an author charitably when we find the strongest interpretation of their words. In the end, the goal is a deeper understanding of the world itself. Understanding Plato becomes interesting as part of that goal. The interpretation that appeals to me makes Plato as sophisticated as relatively recent thinkers.
Very interesting interpretation. Almost poetic, and I can see your point.
According to Derrida, every interpretation is dangerous and writing is even more so, perhaps due to possible disagreement from others reading it. Every worthwhile project and endeavour can also be dangerous, but the end result could be eternal rewarding for whole humanity.
All interpretation is at the end of the day deconstructing the original texts, and giving a birth to new one. And that process can be painful just like giving birth to anything they say.
Kant has read Plato a lot, and had been deeply influenced by him. After all, Kant’s dualism (I wonder if you agree to that), and idealism and thing-in-itself, all comes from Plato’s ideas, some say.
So, “receptacle and nurse of regeneration” to Kant’s space makes sense, and I can see where you are coming from.
Although Kant’s space was a priori intuition, which was the precondition for all perception, and therefore it sounds like totally passive form, rather than the active process taking place in partaking of the Intelligible in Plato, passing on, nursing, regenerating and receivng.
To me, it sounds more like “knowledge” and the act of “knowing” which are the copies of the objects and the world itself. Knowing is active process of humans, and knowledge is the nursed and regenerated existence from either the visible and invisible which are the contents of the world.
Knowledge we nursed and regenerated in our mind also gets received by other folks who want to learn about the world, when we pass them onto their receptacles (desire for recollection, regeneration).
Knowledge is also passed onto us by the higher beings such as Demiurge and received by us in our receptacles.
To me, Heraclitus’ river is time. We cannot be in the same time twice in the world because it is constantly fleeting. We cannot be in the past because it has gone and flown away in the material world.
However, the water of time is still flowing leaving the impact in our mind of the past, present.
The future is not here yet. But we know and anticipate it will be here, like the water from the top of the stream, which will reach to the point where we are standing.
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Well said !
Even those who only want to follow the author are stuck reactivating the old words in a new context. All quoting is quoting out of context. We conjure ghosts but they show up in clothes from our closets.
So unlike Kant, I am not a dualist. For me experience is just directly world world world. No internal mediation.
So for me the chora is not just space but all sensation and feeling in the world itself that gets “articulated” into things we share with others, including our words. All identity, anything speakable, depends on “the One.”
But “the One” is not some agent that does things. IMV, it’s just Plato pointing out the “intelligibility” of the world. Perhaps later thinkers can’t help but read this in dualist terms. But I came upon it as knee-deep in phenomenalism and the idea that consciousness is best understood as being itself and no some kind of stuff in heads. Because beings are “present” with “quality,” being is very close to quality/chora. Yet beings are also speakable, identifiable.
Time is time because things are enduring things. And the reverse. So yeah I read some Heidegger into Plato.
So I basically agree. I just think that signs carry this knowledge. Not in our heads but in the way that signs show up for us, like the way these very words are immediately significant for you. In front of you, on the monitor, are these signs that signify in time, like music.
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence
That’s T. S. Eliot, a great poet IMO.
Yes. And a literal river endures. The water is ever-new. But we still visit the “same” river. Likewise my face is still “my face,” thought really it’s different every morning. So we “enact” “things” in this sense. We “articulate” the rushing waters/chora of time.
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This interpretation is not logically consistent. The “One” cannot be the principle of “ideas”, because “ideas” and “forms” signify multiplicity. And, “dyad” is the base concept of multiplicity, but “chora” is said to be “a universal nature out of which all things are made”, and this implies “one”. Therefore your interpretation has these terms reversed, such that there is logical inconsistency.
Assigning logical inconsistency to the author’s words is not a strong, charitable interpretation.
There is a significant bifurcation of interpretations of Plato, the Neo-Platonic route and the Aristotelian route. The Neo-Platonist’s sought to maintain the mathematical prevalence of Pythagorean idealism, while Aristotle apprehended within Plato’s revelations the subject matter required to refute this form of idealism.
In my interpretation of Plato, “the One” of Pythagoreanism is replaced by “the good”, as the top principle of Plato, in The Republic. Attempts to maintain the significance of “the One”, and make it consistent with “the good”, in interpretations of Plato’s later work, fail for the reason demonstrated above. A good book to consider is “The Parmenides”.
Fair enough. We agree on some, but naturally we also seem to be looking at the ideas from different perspectives.
To my understanding, chora is not space at all. Because space is both abstract and physical, both visible and invisible. It is not either abstract or physical, not either visible or invisible.
Space is not something what receives or being receptacle either, because space contains every object in the universe already.
It seems not quite making sense to say, space receives something, when space already contains and includes everything in the universe.
Whatever moved or changed, they are still in space. Space must have existed before any objects in the universe, or universe itself couldn’t exist at all. Or is the universe itself actually space with all the solids in it?
Plus how does space regenerates? The only way space regenerates is by destroying the material objects which are occupying part of the space, or cutting through holes into the mass of material objects.
Hence space only generates itself by some physical force, not by mental operation.
Can space be place? It is not clear to confirm that. Because place is some confined area in the geographical location. Space is far too wide for being place. Every place in the universe is somewhere in space, but they cannot fill the whole space in the universe.
Hence space must be both physical and ideal in nature, which is not place, not receptacle, not objects, not words or sensations. Space is an entity of its own, which is not part of any objects in the world.
Space on its own sounds far too passive, cold, abstract and physical to be able to partake of the intelligible. It could be an object of our investigation and analysis for scientific or philosophical knowledge
But space on its own seems not quite capable of offering us anything apart from the physical place for all the objects to be born, reside, live, work and die in it.
Idea can contain anything in the universe in it. Even the whole universe can fit nicely in the idea of space.
All that is just a piece of knowledge or understanding. Because without it, really nothing is at issue. There would be no thoughts about space, objects, the universe or words, and what fits to where, and what could be this or that. All of these objects and their workings and compositions and nature is happening in the knowledge and understanding.
Knowledge and understanding are more than just signs and words. They require explanations, stories, logic, reasoning, insights, intuitions, perceptual sensations and understandings.
Signs and words can only carry messages, not knowledge or understanding.
I am not quite seeing your use of the concept “the One”, as to what it implies, means and indicates in the context.
The safest answer, however, is inadequate. The same was the case with the safest answer in the Phaedo, that is, Forms. (100e)
Many things are made of gold but a ring is not a statue. Gold does not differentiate itself. The gold receives a shape or form. It is:
“the mother and receptacle of what is generated, visible and in every respect perceptible, should not be called earth or air or fire or water, or anything they produce or that from which they arise. Yet we should not deceive ourselves if we say that it is an invisible and shapeless form, all-receiving, participating in a most baffling way in that which is known by nous, and hard to understand.” (51a, Horan online translation)
The Chora is not Kantian space. It exists independent of the human mind. In addition, eidos (Forms) are seen by the mind but are not products of the mind. They are causal and independent of human mind. Both εἶδος and ιδέα (transliterated into English as ‘idea’) are Greek terms derived from the Greek verb ‘to see’. As used by Plato an idea is the look of something as seen by the mind. Obviously, the term underwent a transformation. What was originally something seen by the mind became something produced by the mind.
When a philosophy of becoming involves concepts of progress or evolution, when a dialectical process of historical unfolding depends on a notion of subsumption or unification, this implies the preservation of the negated within the developing whole. It is rational to the extent that its past is transparent, overcome but taken up within the totality. There is no such past for Barad to be dialectically overcome, only the creation of new and different ways in matter now matters.
Of course the Chora isn’t Kant’s space. I thought it was clear that I was linking an analogous but different concept. But Ortega and Heidegger suggest the etymology of “look” or “aspect.” I take that to be important.
I don’t agree that forms are causally independent of the human mind. In my view, we don’t want a pseudo-physics. We might use “mind” with caution, but I’d be slow to project post-Cartesian dualism on Plato.
This is one reason I would not associate Kant’s space with Plato’s chora. On the other hand, the world itself is “spatial.” The world presents itself as a “field” of color sound emotion value and so on. The field is “articulated” into enduring objects shared with others. The One articulates the otherwise unarticulated sensory-affective qualitative continuum ( the indeterminate dyad.) That’s my suggested reading. The same “gold” ( colors and sounds in lived world-space) can be articulated in ever-new ways.
More’s the pity for Barad, for they would not be intelligible or relevant.
Intelligibility and relevance isn’t found, it’s produced. I thought that was the point of your critique of ‘the’ past, that the only past which matters is the past which is already changed by the present events it is involved in.
Creation of “new” ways from the old is a dialectical overcoming. If you just mean we need not assume an “end of history” or single goal, then I agree.
My point is that we are thrown projection. Our comportment changes, but not without a continuity.
Or we could say that the “self-articulating world” has a sort of continuity.