Do Plato's Forms Require the Existence of God

username

I've been tossing around this idea for a while and am interested in some of your thoughts. I think I am of the belief that in order for Plato's theory of the forms to be true then there must be a God or in other words that Plato's theory can't be true without the existence of a God. God's essence would therefore be the form of the Good that he talks about. I believe that this is the only way to escape the third man argument. If you have no problem with the infinite regress of defining what the form of the good is then you may have no problem escaping the third man argument (although I would still argue that it's a problem), but for the sake of discussion let's say that an infinite regress of the definition of what the form of the good is would be a problem. The existence of a God and God's essence being the form of the good would allow for an end of the infinite regress. Let me specify God in this case to be the greatest conceivable being. This is how I believe my argument would shape out to be:

1. God is the greatest conceivable mind/being.

2. If the form of the good exists, then there is one thing that explains the goodness of any particular thing.

3. Something can explain the goodness of a particular thing if and only if the thing explaining the goodness has an understanding of "the thing that it is explaining"'s inner workings.

4. If one thing understands the inner workings of another thing then it must be a mind.

a. The only other option would be something abstract but that would only have complete understanding of inner workings if the world was uniform and unchanging. Since the world and the elements that make it up are dynamic and malleable, then the thing that understands all things good about it must also be able to comprehend the malleable nature of the world.

i. The only thing that can accomplish this is a mind

ii. You couldn’t come to an understanding of the good through something like math because there are set rules for how things will act at any given point.

iii. Contrastly, people are very dynamic and two people can both meet a lot of the criteria for what the good is but maybe one is more social and one more secluded. Going about achieving the good will look different for those two people. Each person is very different and therefore understanding the good of humanity will require dynamic understanding.

5. If there is one mind that will be able to understand the inner workings of all things, then it must be the greatest conceivable mind/being.

a. Minds are unable to fully understand things that are greater than them.

6. If only the greatest conceivable being can understand the inner workings of all things, then only God will be able to understand the inner workings of all things.

7. If only God is able to understand the inner workings of all things then only God can explain the goodness of all things.

8. Therefore, if the form of the good exists, then only God can explain the goodness of all things.

This was my first attempt at regimenting this argument so let me know what you think.

tim wood

↪username

Others can pick at your presuppositions. I, though, have a question: what prevents the mind in question from being the collective wisdom of humanity? You may answer that the collective wisdom of humanity as a mind is neither perfect, nor the greatest conceivable. But why are either of these necessary?

In sum, what prevents the good and the understanding of the good from being what it manifestly is, a work in progress? Or even a dynamic process without a well-defined endpoint?

Zelebg

Speaking of "collective", it is interesting "the greatest conceivable being" does not forbid existence of more than one such thing. They could then form a symbiosis, some kind of collective entity like cells of our body organize themselves to form a collective known as 'human body'.

This meta-god then, made of many tiny little greatest conceivable beings, is the greatest conceivable meta-being. I think it's this guy who holds all the answers, and if not, he could probably google it on his meta-internet among the collective wisdom of these meta-gods. So at the end, internet wins.

Tim3003

No God; just genetic inheritance and evolutionary principles..
My ability to conceive a perfect circle although none can ever exist is a function of a mind with an imagination which can extrapolate experience into ideals and create new concepts from them.
Evolution has given me such a mind.

username

@Zelebg The idea of the greatest conceivable being does make it mandatory that there only be one such being. I think if you can picture many greatest things being equal then those things are not in fact the greatest but rather tied for the best and it would therefore be better if only one of those things achieved that level of greatness. Being tied for first is not as good as being first on your own. You could also conceive of one of those beings breaking the tie which would then make that one being better. And your answer of these tiny greatest conceivable beings (TGCB) forming a meta-being would support my claim because that meta being would be greater than the TGCB since it would be a being composed of greatest conceivable beings. And despite what the world tries to tell us, the internet is not greater than a mind as it was created by minds and therefore it can't be greater than the ones that conceived it. This gives further support for my claim that the only thing that will be able to understand the inner workings of all things will be a mind. If what I'm saying as a mind doesn't make sense to you, maybe you can check your meta-internet for a better answer.

@tim wood Thank you for your response. I appreciate the feedback. If you want to say that the good neither has to be perfect or part of the GCB, I think I agree with you 100%, but I believe the philosophy that you are ascribing to there is far more Aristotelian than Platonic. Plato seems to assert that the Form of the Good is very much so defined and set whereas Aristotle seems to be saying that the form of the good is in the same grouping as anything else on earth. Rather than being above all things and defining what it means for those things to be good, the good is something that is in the process of being defined just like all other things. I don't know if I articulated that very well, but the point I'm trying to make is that I believe I would add a secondary argument to make the first more clear: That if a God doesn't exist then we should ascribe to the Aristotelian alternative to the forms. Would this satisfy your objection?

tim wood

but I believe the philosophy that you are ascribing to there is far more Aristotelian than Platonic. — username

You, or anyone, can define whatever you want any way you want. And to start a discussion, the activity of defining is usually a good thing. Either folks will argue to establish some common ground of understanding, or they'll agree and start on such a common ground. But definitions, yours, mine, theirs, in-of-by themselves, being first words, cannot be the last word (except in those arguments when they are).

The question becomes, are you interested in what Aristotle thought, or Plato, or are you interested in what makes sense now? To be sure, in many ways many things they said then still do make at least some sense now, but that is absolutely not as simple as it sounds. The Greek word ψυχή, psyche, for example. Do you think it means soul? What it means in their usage is a research problem.

This question of forms v. qualities comes forward in the (attempted) reconciliation of Greek paganism with Christian belief, more accurately the attempt of the Patristic fathers to co-opt, swallow, and digest whole aspects of that paganism - part of that attempt being Scholastic Realism: the doctrine that universals are real, are the reality. The idea being that the most perfect universal is God, thereby, of course, existing and being real. Particulars like thee and me, being distant from the universal are, also thereby, not-so-real and of course entirely imperfect. This apple-cart overthrown by Nominalism, in consideration that a perfect God, as envisioned by Realism, cannot be omnipotent (because, being "good, i.e., perfect" he cannot be bad - cannot be omnipotent). But Nominalists, like most folks now, preferred their God "omnipotent," even if most folks now, in contradistinction to them then, don't think about just what that means and implies.

And just here is Ockham's razor: not so much to keep things simple, but rather to acknowledge while the concepts of some universals are necessary for mere humans to make sense of the world and keep track of it, there ought not be too may of them because they obscure the reality and truth of the radically individual things/beings that Nominalism holds us to be.

If you want a simple abstract idea to capture your notions of Good, you can have that as a reasonable product of reasoning thinking. If you want it to exist as some real thing, somewhere, you can have that, but in that you cross the line into nature and natural science. The Greeks could do that because their ideas of nature and natural science differed from ours. But today realism puts you on the lists as just another whackdoodle. In my opinion. But it's a free country, and in this year of our Lord 2019 we apparently need neither make any kind of sense, nor even be honest.

Zelebg

↪username

Being tied for first is not as good as being first on your own.

Being more is greater than being less. Two of those must be greater than just one. That they share the 1st place does not make any of them less great, just makes them equal.

username

@Zelebg even if being tied is just as good as being solo first, my other objections still stand.

username

@tim wood So are you trying to say that you think talk of the forms is not important or necessary at this point because of the progression of time and the fact that we live in a different time where we don’t need universals to keep track of the ideas anymore? My point is not about whether the forms exist or if we even need them. My claim is about whether or not it’s even possible for Plato’s theory of the forms to be true without a God. So if you don’t believe in the forms that’s totally fine. That’s independent of my point. I don’t even know if I side with Plato on this issue I just wanted to explore the connection it could have with God. Thanks for the dialogue.

Ciceronianus

Well, God's Form perhaps.

Terrapin Station

I'm stumped why you're talking about explaining and understanding in the context of the theory of forms and the third man argument.

username

@Terrapin Station Are you confused why I'm talking about the third man argument or how I explained it? Could you clarify what you are stumped on.

username

↪Ciceronianus the White

My claim is that God's form would be the form of the good that Plato describes, yes.

Terrapin Station

↪username

For example:

" Something can explain the goodness of a particular thing if and only if the thing explaining the goodness has an understanding of "the thing that it is explaining"'s inner workings."

What do explaining and having an understanding have to do with the theory of forms or the third man argument? The theory of forms and the third man argument are about ontology/metaphysics, not about explaining and understanding things.

Gnomon

I think I am of the belief that in order for Plato's theory of the forms to be true then there must be a God or in other words that Plato's theory can't be true without the existence of a God. God's essence would therefore be the form of the Good that he talks about. — username

I suspect that Plato also assumed a universal god-like Mind as the source of all Forms. But his notion of that Eternal Essence was more like an impersonal organizing force or necessity, such as the "Logos". So, I also interpret his argument for "The Good" to be referring to "The Ideal" or "The Perfect", instead of a divine being. Yet, the same reasoning could be used to prove the existence of absolute "Evil". Likewise, that we can imagine the "greatest conceivable mind/being", proves nothing about existence, but merely our ability to imagine, to generalize, and to idealize.

Nevertheless, I too have concluded that a theory of Absolute Universal MIND is necessary to explain the existence of relative actual minds. Instead of saying that the god-mind exists, which is true only relative to all other "beings", I insist that what-I-call "G*D" is absolute "BEING" : the power of existence. All other concepts or Forms follow from that. No room for "third man" or infinite regress arguments.

With basic existence established, all other proposed Beings or Forms or Things can be discussed. But most of our other concepts contain an inherent paradox. If the Greatest Good exists necessarily, then the Greatest Evil must also exist. So, I infer that all such arguments are circular. Yet, I find that assuming Cosmic MIND as an axiom allows me to reason about the role of Forms and Information in the world. And that is the basis of my Enformationism worldview. http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/

username

@Terrapin Station Ah I understand. The third man argument is not particularly relevant for this premise. The problem that the third man argument brings forth (as I'm sure you are aware) is that something else would be needed to define what was good about the form of the good and then another thing would be needed to define what was good about what was good about the form of the good and so on into eternity. The only way to escape this problem is to find a way to end the infinite series and my point in this argument is that the form of the good being the essence of God would solve this, since God is the GCB and therefore nothing can even be conceived to define the goodness of God. Something would need to be greater than God in order to define why he is good but since he is the GCB that is not possible.

I also want to acknowledge that my wordage for this premise was kind of trash. The point I was trying to get across is that in order for something to be the form of the good it must be able to define what the perfect version of each thing would be and what characteristics are ascribed to that thing being good. So if we grant that something is able to do this and define what best version of everything is, then that thing must have a complete understanding of all the elements that make that thing what it is. So the form of the good would need to understand every part of human psyche, behavior, physique, etc. (as those are some of the characteristics that are of importance when discussing the goodness of humans), while also having that same sort understanding for all things in existence. Otherwise how could this thing possibly be able to define the goodness of everything, or anything for that matter.

Terrapin Station

↪username

I don't agree with the theory of forms, but there's a simple reason that the third man argument doesn't work: the property of "good" is itself good, of course, but on the platonic view, the property can't be lumped together with things that aren't the property but that have the property. The property "has" the property in question due to identity (hence putting "has" in quotation marks). Trying to lump the property together with things that have the property is making a sort of type mistake (a la the theory of types).

Again, I don't actually agree with platonic analysis here, but the third man argument is a pretty simple type error with respect to the Plato's theory of forms.

username

@Terrapin Station Please correct me if I misinterpret or misunderstand the solution you pose to the third man argument but I take what you said to be a response very similar to Constance Meinwald's response to the TMA in that there are two predications of what it means for something to be Good.

A thing can be good because it partakes in the characteristics of the good and something can be good because it is the nature of goodness. An thing that might be used to support your claim would be the two these two statements: man is a Man and Socrates is a Man. Man with a capitol M in this example is essentially the Form of a Man. In this example, man would be part of the nature of Man and Socrates would be something that partakes in the characteristics of what it means to be part of Man. Therefore asserting that man and Socrates could be in the same group would be ludicrous because the element of Man that pertain to each of them is so different. This would appear to solve the TMA.

The problem I find with this response is that the the self predication that Plato asserts the forms have isn't a limited kind of predication like the one listed above. According to Plato F is F and the reasoning you seem to have asserted says that F is F's nature. This is far different than F is F. If we are to truly say that F is F then that must mean that we are saying that the Form of the Good is the same as itself in every way possible, therefore it must share the characteristics of the things that partake in the Form of the Good. This would allow for the lumping together that the third man argument shows would be a problem for the Forms.

armonie

しれない

Do Plato's Forms Require the Existence of God

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