Is Plato's Ontology False?

An extract from the book J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being, which was published as an eBook on April 4, 2016. Available from Itunes, Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Inktera etc. Not currently available from Amazon. The extract is presented here without the footnotes:




Section Eleven

11.1. We now turn to examine what can be inferred of the nature of the ultimate reality (Being) as conceived by Plato, given the limitations of our intellectual tools.

11.2. Ultimately there must be a point of contact between the formal cause and the maker of the universe: this however, as is well known, is not an easy matter to disentangle in Plato. As he says at Tim 28c, "... to discover the Maker and Father of this Universe were a task indeed..." Elsewhere the ultimate root of reality is spoken of as the form of the Good. It is spoken of as fully knowable, capable of apprehension by the reason alone. The difficulty of knowing it appears to be a matter of intelligence, of discerning it as the universal among the particulars of the sensible world. It is the eternal and unchanging.

11.3. Yet it turns out that it cannot be fully known: reality is always beyond any description, any categorization we employ to define it. As we rise through the Forms it remains as far distant as ever, eluding any attempt to know it: when it turns out that the Real necessarily participates in the world of change, it is necessary to postulate that reality embraces both the changing and the changeless at the same time. It is thus a paradoxical matrix, for the Forms participate in Not-being as well as Being, and are all around us: the division between the realm of intelligibles and sensible form has broken down.

11.4. Is this a problem of epistemology only? Thus far the major distinction between the realms is that whereas we can conceive of a form of the Bad, such a notion is not given a formal reality by Plato since it is regarded as an absence of Good. Yet when it is shown that the intelligibles must be subject to change and to participate in Not-being, it cannot be argued that there is a clear distinction between the epistemological and ontological realms. Are we then to say that, after all, Plato confused epistemological and ontological categories? This however would be to presume that it is reasonable to make an absolute distinction between the epistemological and ontological worlds: to presume that they are not inextricably bound up with one another. Naturally if both the Forms and sensible objects possessed of souls and reason owe their "existence" to a single substrate of reality (whatever that might be), at some point they must be in contact with each other and to show formal resemblance. However, although in practice things said about the Real are drawn from the categories of our knowledge, we can only say that Plato projected one into the other if his final definition of the Real is apprehensible within the categories of knowledge. Since the Real is apparently beyond our capacity to know, though the argument is carried out with epistemological weapons, using subjective categories, Plato's ontology ought to be beyond a mere projection of the categories of knowledge.

11.5. The ultimate reality, whether it be termed the form of the Good or given another necessarily inadequate name does not reside in space - in fact the notion that things have a place is described as "a kind of bastard reasoning": we dimly dream and affirm that it is somehow necessary that all that exists should exist in some spot and occupying some place, and that which is neither on earth nor anywhere in the Heaven is nothing*[76].

11.6. In the Phaedrus *[77] Socrates speaks of the region above heaven,

never worthily sung by any earthly poet:

It is, however, as I shall tell; for I must dare to speak the truth... the colourless, formless*[78], and intangible truly existing essence, with which all true knowledge is concerned, holds this region and is visible only to the mind...*[79].

11.7. At Cratylus 424 we find that shape is not to be admitted. Frazer's remark that "it is impossible for us to accept the Platonic theory of causation, because it depends on Plato's fundamental error, the bestowal of objective existence on subjective abstractions"*[80] is thus virtually unfathomable. Whatever the nature of Plato's theory of causation might be, it is increasingly clear that his notion of reality bears no resemblance to that implicit in Frazer's critique. A reality which apparently admits of no qualities and quantities which might be apprehended through sense and known by intelligence, has no point of contact with a theory of knowledge except at the point where that theory breaks down: That is to say, it is a reality arrived at as the result of a theory of knowledge being extended to the point of the collapse of its integrity. It is not a reality established by an epistemology whose explanatory power is refined to the ultimate degree: the Platonic reality is known through the bankruptcy of the theory of knowledge*[81].

11.8. The implication of an ultimate reality beyond any human categorization except identity with itself*[82], which nevertheless cannot be spoken of as unchanging is that, for analytical and practical purposes, all the possible categories of knowing are contingent and relative; and likewise, all attempted descriptions of the nature of its Being. The nature of reality is forever beyond our capacity to know on the one hand, and on the other, it is itself beyond any possible self-definition, not because it does or does not change, but because it embraces the all of which both change and the unchanging are illusory substrates.

11.9. Reality, in short, if it is to be described at all, must be conceived of as an absolute collapse of all possible categories, both of knowing and of being. All space, all time, all possibility resides here, in no place, at no time, beyond all conception, all manifestation. It is simply whatever it is. If we knew it fully the knowledge would be meaningless to us. And what we can say we know of its nature isn't really knowledge*[83]

11.10. The idea of the Form of the Good therefore, is necessarily simply another device in Plato's armoury of likelihoods. Reality, as the ultimate categorical collapse (we have to give it some useful description), if it resembles anything at all within our experience, anything which supplies a concrete image to the conception, must closely resemble chaos - at the extreme of its nature it is forever beyond ordered interpretation.

Beyond Mathematics and Geometry

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

Everything has an inside and an outside. We live in a world in which we mostly react to what is on the outside of things, and readily apparent, rather than what is on the inside, and often invisible to us. What is on the outside is the phenomenon, what is on the inside is the noumenon.

The distinction between what is phenomenal, and what is noumenal, is a major idea in the philosophical outlook of Kant, who pointed out that what things actually are is not only generally unknown to us, but is in many cases actually unknowable.

The argument about this can be quite complex, since not only are there often many simple obstacles to understanding what a thing is, once the observer starts to think in terms of a contrast between a phenomenal representation of what that thing is, and the actual nature of the thing in itself (the noumenon), we become aware of just how little we may know or understand of the relationship between the two. The world is represented to us through the senses, and is interpreted in terms of the categories of understanding which we use to make sense of this information. But how that interpretation relates to what is represented to us in this way is mysterious. Speaking of representation is a good way of reminding ourselves that how something appears, and how it is in itself, is a matter of a conflation of the representation of a thing, and the conventions about what it is, or might be, which exist within the categories of our understanding.

So when we see a tree, we, as a matter of convention, treat the tree and its appearance as what the tree is, because in normal circumstances, there is not likely to be a conflict between our understanding of what is being represented to us by our understanding of the sense data available to us. The appearance fits with the categories of knowledge and understanding which we bring to bear on our experience.

Kant was not the first to observe that there was a distinction between appearance and reality, and between what is understood of a phenomenon by convention, and what the real nature of a thing is, This was a recurring thread in the development of Greek philosophy. Their understanding of the nature of their world was framed within the context of divine powers and agencies, so the idea that reality was hidden from the human understanding was highly developed among the Greeks and other ancient societies.

A question which is sometimes posed to children to illustrate the idea that the representation of something isn’t the same as what it is, is: ‘what is the colour of grass?’ The answer will usually be returned quickly, and be ‘green’.  But of course grass isn’t green. We see grass because the blades reflect particular wavelengths of light more strongly than others, and absorb some wavelengths. So we don’t see what colour grass actually is. In fact we are prompted to ask what we mean by an entity having a property of colour at all. Grass absorbs red transmitted light, and reflects green light, and those are the properties involved in our apprehension of the colour of the grass. We don’t know what the colour of grass in itself is, or even if it is an appropriate question, but we can describe the processes involved in how we apprehend it.

The categories of our understanding serve us from our earliest years, but in a simple form. The development of critical intelligence is the consequence of learning that what is presented to the mind and understanding is often more complex than it appears to be. What we need from our understanding at age six is hopelessly inadequate for us at age twenty. We learn (with the aid of education) to reprogramme the categories of our understanding so that we can process the information in a more sophisticated way than we did at six, and are no longer the prisoners of the illusion that the direct presentation of a thing is the thing itself.

This process of separating ourselves from an interpretation of the world in terms of simple apprehension is driven initially by the practical necessities of our existence. But this process does not need to stop there. Intelligence consists in being able to adjust the categories of our understanding so that we do not mistake one thing for another. It is a mental development which might have no end. This is essentially how Kant understood human intellectual development, which he framed (in his Prolegomena) in terms of a general theory of a priori concepts, not based on empirical sense data, or even a mathematical or geometric understanding of anything in the world. These a priori concepts can have a relationship with sense data and form in the phenomenal world, but they are not derived from these objects and constructs, and can be understood only as concepts entirely stripped of everything which would give them phenomenal or mathematical reality.

What is proposed in the Prolegomena is that real intelligence and understanding is what is shown to the mind by the mind alone, and that these concepts make sense only as purely mental constructs, manipulated and understood by the mind.

So Kant was talking about understanding what is beyond all representation, except in terms of mental abstractions, shorn of scalar and mathematical properties. They are entirely a priori abstractions. The focus of Kant’s metaphysics therefore is the noumenal reality behind all phenomenal appearance. This form of metaphysics he regarded as the basis of a scientific understanding of reality, and that all approaches to understanding the world through how it presents itself to us are faulty, and will not tell us what we may wish to know about what lies behind appearance.