Listen to this on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/Yndb2gl0aKs
This essay is dedicated to the late Tom Trelogan. I purchased this book for your class, and I finally have read it cover to cover.
Reading Plato is no walk in the park, but I dare say it is not as hard as I expected. If physical exercise, like a walk in the park, is a fine simile to keep, then I’d say that reading Plato feels quite a lot like going on a jog one nice morning when you’re feeling well motivated. That’s of course if this metaphor maintains that Plato’s dialogues are equivalent to both the jog itself and the environment the jog takes place in.
The exertion that you may feel when reading the material is difficult yet satisfying. So long as you stay on the path that’s quite clearly marked out, you can lapse into a rhythmic Zen of reasoning-then-claim, reasoning-then-claim, again and again, until you reach the end. But throughout, you’ll come across points of contention, like annoyances that wreck your running Zen. Places in the text where the modern-day experience is vastly different than what is depicted in the dialogues is like running by someone mowing their lawn, the grass bits and gasoline fumes sluffing up your lungs, and the grating noise of the engine disturbing your concentration. The sudden and grueling mathematical explorations that I don’t have the mind to fully comprehend on a one-read basis is like having the need to run uphill to get to where you’re going; you’d rather not need to but there’s no way around the extra effort. And the sudden, shocking moment in The Republic book V when Socrates defends the idea of eugenics is like breathing in a bug. You spit it out and it’s gone, but the lingering taste and feel of that moment sort of ruins the rest of your day.
In essence, reading Plato’s dialogues has ups and downs, but doing your best to maintain that Zen does make this read worth it. At least, that’s my opinion.
Which is what I want to focus on in this essay; not my opinion, but Plato’s classification of Opinion, and where it fits in with Ignorance and Knowledge. More than that, I want to question a part of his reasoning, at least as far as I am able, for I believe that his position is flawed.
To begin, we must wrap up his explication of opinion, which is honestly not that hard. Plato’s description of opinion follows suit with many contemporary ideas of nonbinary thought, and so something to that end is a picture to keep in mind moving forward. Just continue to consider that where black and white pigments are mixed, gray tends to show its face from the result.
Opinion, according to Plato, is a state of awareness between the extremes of Ignorance and Knowledge. Therefore, we have three terms to define. Ignorance is easy to define, being the utter lack of Knowledge. Of course, this could bring up the question ‘what is the thing that is lacking knowledge? Is it a person? Or something else?’ Something to ponder. The other point of the binary, Knowledge, is defined as a belief in something that is true; the trust that a true belief represents something exactly as it is in its Ideal state.
The Platonic Ideals are rather ubiquitous in the Dialogues, as he finds ways to insert them into nearly each one. Effectively, they are abstract forms of anything—seriously, anything, even other abstracts—in its most ideal state. A common example is a chair: every chair we see on earth is definable and recognizable as such, and that is because there exists within the heightened ether the chair. The single, most ideal chair that every other chair takes its blueprints from. It is a chair that cannot be improved upon, that cannot change and will never cease to be so long as there are chairs to be sat on. In an abstract sense, all other chairs act like—or participate in the form of—this one chair, so as to be able to be a chair themselves. Now, take this idea, and extrapolate it to anything else. Consider an ideal stove, an ideal pane of glass; take it another direction and consider an ideal joyfulness, an ideal sound, an ideal justice, and finally, or firstly, the ideal Truth, which would be Knowledge.
Knowledge is, therefore, the Ideal Truth, as apprehended by belief within a person. Ignorance is total lack of that apprehension. In between this binary is where Opinion lies. Opinion is an apprehension of something by way of belief. What that something is can be flexible, as are most things on a spectrum. The very first step above Ignorance, or the first type of Opinion, is an apprehension of Error by simple belief. It’s believing in something that is incorrect; something that is provably wrong, that is otherwise not a representation of Knowledge. Whether willful or no, the subject in question believes in Error, and it being an apprehension of a belief, it cannot be classified as Ignorance. (Note as well that the belief can still be measured as true, because so long as the belief is apprehendable, i.e., it can be genuinely considered a belief that at the very least one person upholds, then it is a true belief. It is the justification that would ideally be put into question.)
The next type of Opinion is belief in the truth without reason. Any time someone is right about something, but cannot put their finger on exactly why, they are participating in what Plato calls in the Meno Right Opinion. It is right because it apprehends the truth, but again, there is no reason given as to why. As soon as someone supports their right opinion through reasoning, or as Plato and his school called Dialectic, then their Right Opinion can truly become Knowledge. Of course, being limited by the humanity of our own bodies keeps us from ever beholding the Ideal Truth, something Socrates laments heavily in the Phaedo, but Plato’s opinion (and I chose that word carefully) is that the closest us as people can get to Knowledge is via this method: Using dialectical reasoning and true belief to describe, as fully as possible, the abstract, ethereal Truth that exists nowhere and everywhere about us.
But I have problems with this. My question is about the Ideal Forms themselves, and how Plato’s position on these in tandem with his take on Opinion as I just described seems to pull apart either his system of Knowledge, or his Theory of the Forms itself. It may be because I am currently reading a collection of Aristotle’s works as my next book, but I’ll say right now that I find the Theory of the Forms flimsy at best, and that if either this or the binary of Ignorance and Knowledge must go, I’d chiefly cut out the former.
The issue begins as this: it appears that Plato considers Knowledge to have a Form that can be participated in, but nowhere does he speak to Ignorance having its own Form. It’s as if it doesn’t exist. So, we have to decide whether an Ideal Ignorance exists or not. Because, the case could very well be made that if Ignorance is a lack of Knowledge, it must follow that Ignorance is ontologically dependent. That is, Ignorance would not exist were it not for a Knowledge that could be apprehended yet isn’t, like how a hole is only a hole owing to the fact that a thing has a part of it that doesn’t exist. I, however, disagree with that viewpoint. Ignorance must exist as a wholly separate entity from Knowledge. I say this because of the very fact that there is a continuum between the two elements at all.
Binaries exist because opposing elements exist; both of these elements exist separately from each other, while being linked intrinsically because of their natures working alongside one another. Consider a volume dial on a TV. It is on a continuum between no sound and full. For the purposes of the television, silence exists as a Form that the television can participate in, just as well as it can participate in the form of a full-volume, speaker wrecking noise which sits as the other end of the spectrum. The silence exists no less than the loudness. In the same way, Ignorance exists no less than Knowledge.
Thus, Ignorance should have its own Platonic Form that ignorant people can participate in. So here is the rub: What about the middle? Is there a perfect Platonic Opinion? And if so, what about the other areas on the scale? Can they be represented by a Form?
The Forms are devised to be so that if something exists (both in a concrete and abstract sense), there is a Form that exists as well. Plato’s examples often fall into mathematical terms, and so will this here: imagine a Form represented as a point, i.e. as a unit that has no mass or area. Its opposite is only opposite in quality, and so it too can be represented as a point. If these two points are connected as on a continuum, then they are connected by a line segment. And what is a line segment if not an innumerable amount of points all directly next to each other in series? So, the space in between the polar points are connected by further more and more points, all of which presumably corresponding to yet more and more Platonic Forms. Right?
Yes, except this very quickly and obviously has gotten out of hand. It forces one to imagine a world in which everything that has, does, or will exist already has a Form at the ready to be participated in, including things that are made entirely out of the same material (i.e., bread vs. Weetabix), and marginally-the-same-yet-just-differing-in-one-element ideologies and even states of someone’s mind that they have no real control over. As has already been shown, while Plato never brings up the opposite of Knowledge as its own thing, this reasoning supports that it should be its own, as well as all the infinite points in the middle. With this in mind, we are to imagine that all objects, everywhere, at all times have already been instated somewhere, even if they are never to be used or pondered upon. What is the point of that?
It’s a romantic viewpoint, I think; it’s just far too unwieldy for me to fully subscribe to. It doesn’t help me understand why people change over their lives. It doesn’t describe how new things can be made, and how progress can ever be achieved—something Plato wrestles with and posits a mediocre answer to in the Meno. It’s just rough and way too far-fetched to be very accurate. But it was a great stepping stone for Humanity.
Aristotle is coming next, and while I fear his writing is much less accessible to me than Plato’s, I will use some of my space to describe the way in which he dismantles the Platonic Forms. Thank you for reading!