Sublunary Existence
I felt like I had a revelation recently toward understanding Plato and the realm of forms. Upon re-reading my previous blog entries (here and here), I actually expressed pretty much the same ideas that I am going to say here, except that I now understand them somewhat differently.
To be brief: Plato says that things on earth are not real, they are poor copies of the "real" things from the realm of ideas. This has never made sense to me before, because I could not understand what the real idea behind common things (chairs, rocks, dogs, etc.) would be. And that was the problem: I had been trained to look from the realm of the immanent to the transcendent. This is natural, because we can see the immanent, but it is also backwards, because we are looking for the essences of things that don't have a permanent existence.
What Plato meant, I now feel certain, was not that there was an ideal corresponding to a particular object, but that representations of ideal concepts are imperfectly represented in the world. In particular, geometry: circles, squares, triangles, cones, spheres, etc. A square is an idea. It is defined as a shape with four equal sides and four equal angles. The "lines" of a geometrical square have no thickness, as they are composed of points that take up no space. This enables a square to be always the same and allows us to draw conclusions from combinations of squares (and other shapes) that are by definition true in all cases. A square is absolutely a square, and never departs from its definition.
On earth, there is no such thing as a square. There are many things that look like squares, but they all have this problem, that their lines have thickness, and therefore they aren't 100% square. It is true that you could take a well-drawn square shape and say that there is a square in it: that is, if I didn't have to take the whole line with its width, I could trace a square along the line that would fulfill the definition of a true square. But it still wouldn't be a square, because squares only exist in concept. I could say, "a square would be here, if I could trace this line perfectly accurately." I would be, however, only tracing the outline of the square I imagine in my mind; the actual path of my finger (or pencil) cannot correspond exactly to a square. If you think about it at the atomic and subatomic levels, there is no such thing as a point. No matter how finely I sharpen that pencil, it will still have thickness to it; and, in fact, the closer I look at it, the less like a point will it appear. At the subatomic level, it won't even exist continuously at one point in space.
In fact, everything that has a material existence is in constant flux. The rate of flux of most things at a macro level is very small, small enough that we do not notice the changes from moment to moment. Nevertheless, they are changing. Therefore, not only are things imperfect copies of concepts in space, they are also imperfect copies in time. If I want to say that this is a square, I have to specify when it is as well as where it is. Hence my reference to "sublunary" in the title of this post. Every material thing is only contingently what it is; it is only in a particular form or configuration for a limited time. A "real" square, however, is always a real square. It is defined as such and never changes.
I am still not ready to say that Plato is right, that the "real" things are in the realm of ideas and we are only experiencing poor copies. The main reason is that I don't think material things are copies of conceptual things. If we find, say, a sphere in nature, say, a bubble, I do not think it was created as a poor copy of a real sphere defined as all the points in space equidistant from a given point. There is some interesting relationship between the concept of a sphere and a material object that is roughly spherical, but I don't think that relationship is as "template" to "copy."
On the other hand, this way of approaching things at least makes Plato seem rational. When I was taught as a first-year undergraduate that, according to Plato, a chair is only a poor copy of a real chair in the realm of ideas, it seemed frankly silly. Now I understand where he was coming from, even if I don't accept his conclusion. I believe there is something fundamentally important about our ideas, especially mathematical ideas, and, to carry it further, about ideas that are intended to represent things in the material world. Plato seems to be probing that significance, and it makes him appear much more worthy of study than I had previous thought.
To be brief: Plato says that things on earth are not real, they are poor copies of the "real" things from the realm of ideas. This has never made sense to me before, because I could not understand what the real idea behind common things (chairs, rocks, dogs, etc.) would be. And that was the problem: I had been trained to look from the realm of the immanent to the transcendent. This is natural, because we can see the immanent, but it is also backwards, because we are looking for the essences of things that don't have a permanent existence.
What Plato meant, I now feel certain, was not that there was an ideal corresponding to a particular object, but that representations of ideal concepts are imperfectly represented in the world. In particular, geometry: circles, squares, triangles, cones, spheres, etc. A square is an idea. It is defined as a shape with four equal sides and four equal angles. The "lines" of a geometrical square have no thickness, as they are composed of points that take up no space. This enables a square to be always the same and allows us to draw conclusions from combinations of squares (and other shapes) that are by definition true in all cases. A square is absolutely a square, and never departs from its definition.
On earth, there is no such thing as a square. There are many things that look like squares, but they all have this problem, that their lines have thickness, and therefore they aren't 100% square. It is true that you could take a well-drawn square shape and say that there is a square in it: that is, if I didn't have to take the whole line with its width, I could trace a square along the line that would fulfill the definition of a true square. But it still wouldn't be a square, because squares only exist in concept. I could say, "a square would be here, if I could trace this line perfectly accurately." I would be, however, only tracing the outline of the square I imagine in my mind; the actual path of my finger (or pencil) cannot correspond exactly to a square. If you think about it at the atomic and subatomic levels, there is no such thing as a point. No matter how finely I sharpen that pencil, it will still have thickness to it; and, in fact, the closer I look at it, the less like a point will it appear. At the subatomic level, it won't even exist continuously at one point in space.
In fact, everything that has a material existence is in constant flux. The rate of flux of most things at a macro level is very small, small enough that we do not notice the changes from moment to moment. Nevertheless, they are changing. Therefore, not only are things imperfect copies of concepts in space, they are also imperfect copies in time. If I want to say that this is a square, I have to specify when it is as well as where it is. Hence my reference to "sublunary" in the title of this post. Every material thing is only contingently what it is; it is only in a particular form or configuration for a limited time. A "real" square, however, is always a real square. It is defined as such and never changes.
I am still not ready to say that Plato is right, that the "real" things are in the realm of ideas and we are only experiencing poor copies. The main reason is that I don't think material things are copies of conceptual things. If we find, say, a sphere in nature, say, a bubble, I do not think it was created as a poor copy of a real sphere defined as all the points in space equidistant from a given point. There is some interesting relationship between the concept of a sphere and a material object that is roughly spherical, but I don't think that relationship is as "template" to "copy."
On the other hand, this way of approaching things at least makes Plato seem rational. When I was taught as a first-year undergraduate that, according to Plato, a chair is only a poor copy of a real chair in the realm of ideas, it seemed frankly silly. Now I understand where he was coming from, even if I don't accept his conclusion. I believe there is something fundamentally important about our ideas, especially mathematical ideas, and, to carry it further, about ideas that are intended to represent things in the material world. Plato seems to be probing that significance, and it makes him appear much more worthy of study than I had previous thought.
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