thinkthinkfeel

[kimberkit]

So, a rambly, chatty post. I've been reading Sophie's World lately (it was popular years ago, and essentially it's a story of the history of some of the major philosophers). I'm just up to the section on Plato.

Now, when I first read Plato's Republic, at age 16, I thought that Plato must have been a completely totalitarian fascist. He wanted a world ruled by the intelligentsia -- because it was only the intelligent who could perceive ideal forms, and who could rule wisely. Er, to back up for a second, the idea is that everything has an ideal form -- that somewhere, in looking at a flower, there must be an ideal conception of a flower. In looking at hundreds of gingerbread cookies, there must be an ideal shape for a gingerbread cookie.

Coming back to Plato now, though, I'm not so sure he's completely off his rocker about ideal forms. Surely there must be an ideal, if different, shape for different humans; surely there exists a perfect shape for what things should be.

I guess the problem for me, back then and now, is that I wonder whether we can really find that ideal shape purely through intellect. How can it be that only philosophers think that there's an ideal? How can only philosophers have a monopoly on how the world should run? A carpenter, shaping things every day with his hands, surely knows that there is an ideal shape for whatever it is he's making. And the same with other trades. I think we find our ideals by searching with our hearts, and with practice and interaction with the world.

I'm sure I'm going to get corrected by someone-or-other on my facts. Fire away, people :)

Comments

[ultiville.livejournal.com]

See, the problem here is that Plato has this concept of *a single ideal* that seems to me to have been deeply harmful, especially contrasted with some of the earlier Greek ideas having much more to do with looking at the totality of a life, etc, etc. Here's the problem: if you're a Platonist in this sense, it seems to me that you can't care about meaningful diversity. There's an ideal which we all participate in/aspire to. We achieve it to a greater or lesser extent, but if we were all to succeed, we'd all be (fundamentally) the same. We might want to say some things aren't included (though Plato wouldn't, I suspect) but we couldn't say that any of them are *morally relevant* (if we're talking about the form of the good). In other words, if we're Platonists, the methods we use to come to our moral conclusions don't matter at all, just whatever it is we end up doing, and if I'm wiser than you, I can say not only, "I wouldn't behave like that" but also "neither should you".

Of course, any civilized society needs some cases where someone can say that, and all of us are perfectly justified in saying that to people from time to time. Also, the idea of trying to conform to a form gives the idea of striving, change, and progress that, I think, is very good. But if you're going for the idea that what you're striving for is a single pinnacle state rather than something more complex, then you, by implication if nothing else, are dedicated to the idea that success is an important kind of sameness, rather than the idea that just as there are many ways to fail to be morally successful, there may be many ways to succeed...

But of course, some of this is my reaction to Plato's legacy, which has been overwhealmingly reductionist in this sense.

[osirusbrisbane.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, this reminds me of Tolstoy's "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

The carpenter analogy reminds me of that quote "Carving a dolphin is easy. You just take a big block and carve away anything that doesn't look like a dolphin."

But I'll say this: I think ideal forms may well have to be grasped through intellect alone if you're looking for the ideal ideal forms and not merely the ideal possible forms. Finding the latter likely involves some dickering with the world to establish the borders of possibility, whereas it seems to me that the former should be unburdened by such constraints.