Yes, in a beautiful way.
Come now. Are you conjuring up Heidegger’s shade over there ? Gadamer learned from Heidegger in person. You can make a case, but this is a suspiciously grand claim.
I get it your attitude toward the situation, which is not unreasonable. But it seems to me that you lack any projection on the text at all, at least that you are willing to share. If my projection doesn’t make sense to you, that’s fine. I understand that you take Plato to be a skeptic, so perhaps for you the proper appropriation is unresolved ambiguity. Interesting, but even here we need to feel the tension between tempting, mostly coherent, but ultimately incompatible projections.
The metaphysics of presence doesn’t just refer to eternally present essences. It can equally refer to an entity which appears for just a split second, never to repeat itself again. Heidegger’s depiction of the ordinary concept of time captures this metaphysical idea in terms of what what arise, lingers for a while and then passes away.
“In asking after what happens, we have in mind a being, even when we name it a “becoming” and attend only to its arising, approaching and decaying.” “This passing away is conceived more precisely as the successive flowing away of the “now” out of the “not yet now” into the “no longer now.”… Time persists, consists in passing. It is, in that it constantly is not. This is the representational idea of time that characterizes the concept of time, which is standard throughout the metaphysics of the West.
A being is either here or it is gone, it is either something or it is nothing, it either shines forth or it vanishes, there is meaning or absence of meaning. Even if a being lingers for only a split second before it is gone, it is never both present and absent at the same time, as the same identity.
“In being, present in time at the given moment is only that narrow ridge of the momentary fugitive “now,” rising out of the"not yet now’’ and falling away into the "no longer now”.
We are historically situated, but this does not mean that our assumptions and understanding is superior or fixed or not subject to correction.
I do take Plato to be a skeptic, but given the history of this term what you might take this to mean may not be what I mean by the term. Yes, I recognize unresolved ambiguity as well as aporia. Again, what you take this to mean may not align with how I understand it.
Put simply, we can learn from Plato if we listen carefully and open-mindedly rather than as an act of appropriation.
I mosstly agree.
Our historical situatedness, to the degree that it is personal, even delivers us over to relativism. Decontextualized, de-situated superiority is nonsense, taste without a tongue.
The relative fixity of an elaborated projection, if maintained in the genuine facing criticism just is its relative superiority.
I take thrown projection to include our basic comportment to the other with whom I speak. Do I comport myself as master to acolyte, as teacher to student ? Is the time of miracles behind us ? Are we merely keepers of the sacred ashes ?
I’m curious about your understanding of Plato as a skeptic. It would further the dialogue if you show your cards.
Your last statements, as I see it, does not sufficiently emphasize that learning from Plato precisely is an always-situated appropriation. I agree with Gadamer and Heidegger that an open mind is the opposite of ( the pretense of ) an ‘empty’ mind. Instead we become as explicit and honest as possible about our own fore-having —our initial, mostly unrecognized comportment toward the object.
This is a common accusation against those who attempt to read Plato carefully.
It is an acknowledgement of our ignorance.
If by appropriation you mean taking something you find in the work of someone else and making it your own for your own purposes, then I do not only not emphasize appropriation I attempt to avoid it. What Plato says is much more valuable and interesting then anything that I can say.
I completely agree that it is much larger than that.
For example: sometimes you speak as if the “total meaning of Heidegger” is present for you without absence. Or you might speak as if “the metaphysics of presence” is itself completely present to you.
Being is time because it reveals transcendent objects. Does this exhaust the meaning of being ? Of course not. Does this exhaust Heidegger or Derrida ? Of course not. They too are transcendent objects that never quite arrive.
Every seeing is a blindness. The presence of one aspect occludes all the others. You mention the taking-as structure. I am also interested in this. We comport ourselves toward the object in one way rather than in many possible other ways. The metaphysics of presence, includes, as I see it, a forgetting of situatedness. I pretend that I engulf the transcendent object. I pretend that I access the eternal true essences. Then I speak as if for God, in a comportment that suggests a forgetting of its finitude.
I comportment myself to the language of others monologically. Indeed, as if they must mean by their signs what I would mean. I may comport myself toward them fundamentally as one-to-be-corrected, as one-to-be-instructed. In some cases, this is appropriate. But those who comport themselves toward me like this are appropriated by me as those who don’t yet see me. ( I didn’t mention Whitman and Emerson thoughtlessly, but for those with ears to hear. )
But one can comport oneself toward the other not as worth hearing as such but only or at least primarily as the prop in a performance for “the third who walks among us.”
This critique is no more aimed at you than it is at myself. Inauthenticity is a constant temptation. Disowned perspectival belief is stuffed in the mouth of a phony omniscient narrator. Or in the mouths of “completely present for me” idols like our favorite thinkers.
I agree with Shaw here:
Effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him.
It’s not an accusation. I don’t mean to imply that such a comportment is wrong or bad.
I think this is a great topic. As I see it, “the One” as the ideal unifying component of entities gives them their transcendence. The object is only ever partially present. Plato, one more transcendent entity, is likewise only ever partially present. Moreover this presence is historical and perspectival. Transcendent objects are fundamentally “ajar” or unfinished and unfinishable. All knowledge is conjecture or projection. Typically “we” call “knowledge” the conjectures “we” lean on and regard more than others.
The Plato-Heidegger connection is beautiful. It’s the ideality or transcendence of objects that ensures that all seeing is also blindness, all disclosure also concealment, and that all presence is also absence. The object, as transcendent, is always more that I have of it of it now. On the other hand, the object has no being apart from its actual and future manifestations in chora/quality. The idea is not some desiccated fetish object, a “flower in the skuy.” It is rather the guarantor of the inexhaustible richness of the object in this world, which is never done arriving.
Even in terms of itself, my appropriation is self-consciously partial, tentative, and doomed to “failure,” if success is understood in terms of some eternally secured closure. Is it virtuous to resent the audacity of a projection that confesses its own situatedness and finitude ?
I respect your directness. But why do you expect something profound from Plato, set him above yourself — and me, implicitly — like this, if you haven’t already appropriated/projected something from/on his work ? Presumably it’s not just his fame.
As I see it, we expect more from a philosopher in whose work we’ve already found something of value to us. I assume of course that you have found plenty of value in Plato’s work already.
But the direction of the comportment is not from subject to world, but from world to self. The self doesn’t pre-exist its comportment. This is what thrown protection means. Our fore-having is not primarily something we possess. It is the way a world already possesses us.The fore-structure belongs as much to the world as to the self.
This is a key difference between Gadamer and Heidegger. Gadamer often sounds as if prejudices are “ours” and that understanding advances by becoming aware of them. Heidegger’s account is more radical. The fore-structure of understanding is not primarily a set of subjective assumptions. It is an ontological structure of being-in-the-world itself.
Yes. Of course. That’s what I’ve been emphasizing. You “correct” me with paraphrases of what I’ve just said, possessed by an unpossessed comportment.
A set of subjective assumptions ? Presumably you are suggesting that conscious, articulated presuppositions are important for Gadamer. I disagree.
The prejudice that “constitutes” us is enacted as blind comportment that is only revealed, always only partially, through a collision with the object. The revelation of the object is simultaneously a revelation of the subject.
The subject, however, is no less in the world than the object. The subject is the empirical ego.
You are critical perhaps of my use of the ontological difference, but this minimal notion of consciousness as being itself makes being-in-the-world more like being-the-world, in the “style” of an empirical subject. Consciousness it the being of a streaming aspect of the world. There is only world. Nothing genuinely or absolutely “internal” remains. “From-a-point-of-view-ness” is there in the “how” of the manifestation of the object toward which the empirical subject comports itself. But it’s late and this is a sketch, an indication.
The “subject” that is revealed through collision is that particular “object” that is “always around,” the “empirical self” that figures in sense-making as a primary node in the nexus/world.
If it is a matter of being a keeper of sacred ashes then I think is both an accusation and a misunderstanding.
It is not that I expect something profound from Plato but that I find him to be profound. I am not looking to “bring something home to the hive”. My engagement with reading Plato is a mode of thinking, not of getting something or using something I get from him.
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Returning to the OP, I am exploring how we might understand partaking of the intelligible. Every interpretation is just one projection among others that does not even begin to exhaust the richness of these texts, but I present my own current and emphatically situated appropriate here.
First, I read Plato’s unwritten doctrine as phenomenological in the sense of foregrounding the basic intelligibility of world through a description of the structure of a world in which dialogue about shared objects is possible.
I understand this doctrine as a sophisticated variant of hylomorphism. Entities are “compounds” of matter and form. But this quasi-hylomorphism is only sophisticated if we properly grasp this “matter” and “form.”
We must avoid reifying this “matter.” For this matter or ὕλη (hyle) is chora, the “mother” or “matrix” “in which” determinate beings appear and “of which” they are “made.” For instance, to understand this as the matter discussed by physics is to idealize it, to impose form on precisely what is intended as formless.
The Indeterminate Dyad is χώρα (chora) is the “sensory-affective pre-stuff” that “overflows” categoricity or conceptuality. So chora plays the role of “matter” in this quasi-hylomorphism.
Given the spatial associations of (the) chora, I will call it-under-erasure “the qualitative continuum.”
Opposed to the “continuity” of the qualitative continuum is the principle of the discrete, which is The One in the unwritten doctrine. This “one” is the component of ideality or categoricity in the world. The qualitative continuum is “articulated” by “discrete” ideality or form.
In more ordinary language, we live in a world of things that we share with others. These things matter to us. They are colorful, noisy, stinky, hot, cold, big, small, and so on. The world is qualitative in a large sense that include value and yet “articulated” in the sense that we find many enduring objects in it, like fire-hydrants, kittens, and tornados. But also integers, daydreams, and Plato.
The idea of a particular kitten is not an internal concept. The very unity or “identity” of the kitten is instead this “idea.” The principle of form is called “the one” because ideas are the unity or synthesis of an unbounded plurality of qualitative manifestations. If the kitten runs by me chasing a ball of yarn, my perception of the kitten as kitten is not only fugitive quality of the kitten — the optical and auditory manifestation — but also the recognition of that qualitative manifestation as manifestation of a kitten that endures not only beyond that instant but beyond me as perceiver.
That fugitive informed or categorized perception is a moment of the kitten. The metaphor of aspect has some advantages here, but “moment” better emphasizes the idea or identity of kitten as a temporal synthesis which is simultaneously interpersonal or intersubjective.
Kant tackled a similar issue, offering his own quasi-hylomorphism, and made the point that
[T]houghts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
But I think we should read Plato away from the Cartesian tendency to put the world inside subjects. The kitten is out there between us. Language itself, appealing to the unity or identity of therefore shared objects, is also out there and between us. Consciousness is not internal mediating stuff but the situated “presencing” or “streaming” of the world itself.
So my perception of the kitten is not an internal representation but a genuine “moment” or revelation of the kitten itself. Because the kitten is the ideal unity, necessarily open and futural, of its actual as well as possible moments, it is “transcendent” in the phenomenological sense. In ordinary language, I see the kitten in the world between us as a kitten in the world between us. My seeing is not “purely categorical.” It is quality ( sensation, etc.) “grasped” as the flashing and fugitive revelation of something not inside me but before me, and also something conditionally before you.
A typical reading of Kant’s “thing in itself” is a misreading of the idea of the thing. The “substance” of the object is “logical.” The “thing in itself” is just the transcendence of the idea of the thing. Instead of the thing-in-itself quasi-spatially concealed from us as “external” to enclosed subjects, we have the idea which is transcendent in terms of the “darkness of its future.” This “darkness” also includes moments of the kitten “given” to others but not to me.
Returning to the visual metaphor, each aspect of the kitten occludes all other possible aspects of that same kitten. So each revelation or disclosure of the kitten is also a concealing. Time shows only by hiding. To show a transcendent object, one articulated “on” the qualitative continuum by its “idea,” is always also to hide it, precisely because this transcendent object is an ongoing temporal and interpersonal synthesis.
So Plato’s discrete principle is also the principle of intelligibly through synthesis or unity. Objects as intelligible are always transcendent or logically between-us, for this interpersonal synthesis of their fugitive perspectival showings — their moments — is what makes them speakable and shared. This is why he calls the principle of intelligibility “the one.”
The “father” is not so problematic, The “one” is just the maximally general concept of being. This being is “no (particular )thing” because it lacks all determination. All we can say is that being is one. This “unity” of being is just there. To indicate an object is to point at a “one” that unifies its sensory-affective quality as quality of that object which is also for others and also beyond this instant of manifestation.
Plato takes the father to be less mysterious than the mother. The child we know. The child is the world of even the non-philosopher, who has not yet considered the father, who has not yet considered “ideality” itself while living always within it.
I read “invisible” as the logical “invisibility” of “the mother.” The mother is “ineffable” and yet “here” as the redness of the rose that can not be stuffed in the merely public concept of red. Even if we confirm that we all call the same things “red,” you can’t see the ripe tomato through my eyes. Indeed, you cannot prove that I am “conscious” in the sense of the world being there for me. How shall you discover in the world from your point of view the world from my point of view ? And yet language helps us do this somehow.
The “One” is the cosmos, the ordered whole.
The Forms are each one. The Forms and things of that Form are an indeterminate dyad, one and indeterminate many. The One, however, is not one of many. It is the unity of the multiplicity. It has no other.
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I don’t presume to be getting either Gadamer or Heidegger ‘right’. I’m just aligning myself with readings of them that make the most sense to me. In the case of Heidegger, I resonate with Derrida’s interpretation of him, because I find it exciting and important. Central to this interpretation is how it conceives of the relation between my past and my involvement in an event of meaning. Common to writers working with a hermeneutic tradition is the belief that the past in the form of historical tradition which we participate can act to constrain and prejudice us.
This past is often described as something which burdens us. For instance, Jan Slaby depicts a “factual past in the form of sedimented remainders that infuse, burden, and potentially suffocate ongoing comportment. The past is there, merciless, like a hand on our shoulder, a weight dragging us down, the stage and props of our life’s unfolding drama.“
I know that for Gadamer the historical past is always reinterpreted in relation to the current forward-looking context of discursive practices. But there is still a certain assumed ‘stickiness’ about the traditions we inhabit that requires vigilance to extricate ourselves from. This is where I see writers like Gendlin, Rouse, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida as offering an alternative account of how the present occurs into the implying past, not as a sedimented weight, but as always refigured.
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That sounds like a coherent reading to me.
The One is the All. The One or All is articulated in terms forms. If we consider form f, then the instantiations of f are indeterminately many. Is this merely the indeterminacy of quantity ? Or might it include “edge cases” ? As in things that are hard to classify or “determine the form of” ?
Do you have any thoughts about the role of sensation and feeling ? Can you speak to the “tension” between the form f and its sensory-affective instantiations ?
Can you connect what you presented above to “the gold” and/or chora ?
I hear you, and I respect. It’s nice to see that pronoun “I.” In theory, the “I” is implicit, but it’s not always clear if someone is committed to what they paraphrase.
Right. We want to be able to say “thus I willed it.” Bloom talks about the Mormon myth that a child chooses its own parents. That’s a profound little myth. Almost a self-creation myth. My older-wiser not-yet-arrived self knew what he was doing he plunked me down with these maniacs.
I understand Heidegger’s authenticity (to give an aspect) as an “owning” of one’s singular existence. For me, part of that owning is connected to a liberated creativity. I also see it as an overcoming of “transference” on even one’s primary influences. Whitman is great symbol for this, and so is Emerson. I like Nietzsche’s metaphor. The spirit is a stomach that transforms disaster into opportunity, and fate perhaps into destiny.
I also connect authenticity to Eric Berne’s work. The “authentic” person is autonomous but (ideally) not parental. Free beings seek other free beings. This is even the beginning of science in its highest or authentic mode.
To connect all this, I think one’s past, the inherited sediment, has to lose its viscosity, primarily through a stronger and stronger sense that reality is here and now with me. But not only with me, because it’s the kind of thing you want to share in. Hence the peer to peer, the “to and fro” of “the spirit” in Hegel.
In the Parmenides Socrates denies that things such as hair, dirt, and mud have forms. He says that they are “just what we see them to be”. (130d) The obvious problem is, are the things we see around us just what we see them to be? Socrates’ admits that he is perplexed as to whether there is a form of human being separate from us. He readily claims, however, that there are forms of things like the just, beautiful, and good. (130c)
In the Symposium the soul is moved by beauty. For most of the speeches it is erotic, desire in the physical sense, but Socrates extends it the form of beauty.
Gold is used as an example. I don’t think it has any direct relation to the chora. As I understand it the chora is within the whole.
Have you read any of Eugene Gendlin’s work? His concepts of explication, occurring into implying and the felt experiential intricacy of the body tap into the dimension of Heidegger that I see as enriching and perhaps surpassing the hermeneutics of Dilthey and Gadamer.
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It seems to me that Plato is not really giving an answer here, but rather posing a question. If we translate this into modern language — although it is obvious that Plato did not think in modern concepts — it could be expressed as follows: why do models of thought find a correspondence in reality? Or, as Wigner put it, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.
Plato here thinks more in terms of beings or essences than processes, and the process of form-giving is also expressed by him as a special kind: something that does not possess properties of its own, because it is what makes the appearance of properties possible in the first place.
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