why do you think Plato refrains from saying anything like: "I maintain that these things are unknowable — Count Timothy von Icarus

On the one hand:

Plato did not wish to extinguish the fire of the desire to know. There is a difference between the claim that it is not possible to know, which is not something he knows, and the recognition that one does not know, between human and divine wisdom.

But on the other:
— Fooloso4

In the Apology he says:

... to be dead is one of two things: either the dead person is nothing and has no perception of anything, or [death] happens to be, as it is said, a change and a relocation or the soul from this place here to another place
(40c).

If the dead are nothing then there is no recollection of the Forms. If knowledge is not for the dead because the dead are nothing then knowledge is nowhere to be gained. — Fooloso4

It should also be noted that the story of transcendent knowledge in the Republic and the story of knowledge when dead are not the same. Which of these stories is true and how do you know that? I am with Socrates and know that I do not know. As I read him Plato is not giving us answers.

At any rate, I think you are confusing "myths and images" as a vehicle for/aid to attaining knowledge with all knowledge being of myths and images alone. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am not claiming that all knowledge is of myths and images. I am saying that in the absence of knowledge he gives us myths and images.

It seems to me that people who tend to think of the forms as existing in a magical "spirit realm" are generally hostile to Plato. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am not hostile to Plato. He is my favorite philosopher and I do not think the forms exist in a magical spirit realm.

More skeptical versions of Plato on the other hand seem more born of literalism, and in some cases a lack of imagination. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it is the other way around. Those who believe in transcendent knowledge of Forms read him literally. It is not lack of imagination. Imagination is essential but, as the divided line indicates, there is a difference between what we might image and what we know.

Socrates often distinguishes between the wisdom of the gods and human wisdom and his claim to ignorance can be understood as humility in the face of divine truths.. — Wayfarer

Right. He is not a God. His wisdom is human wisdom.Above the entryway to the temple of Apollo are inscribed the words "know thyself". One way in which this was understood is that man should know his place.

but note at 23 d he says 'Therefore I am still even now going about and searching and investigating at the god's behest — Wayfarer

Don't miss the irony. Rather than accept that what the Oracle says as true he sets out to refute it. In addition, he changes what the Oracle says from "no one is wiser than Socrates" to "... you declared that I was the wisest ."(21c)

I've noticed in the past you've suggested that various contributors have been influenced by Christian platonism; would it fair to suggest that your interpretation is influenced by an innate disposition towards naturalism? — Wayfarer

It would be fair to say that I do not know what Christian Platonists either claim to know or accept that Plato knows. I have in the past if these are things that you know and you admitted that you do not. I do not think I have an innate disposition toward naturalism. I am disposed, but not innately, to not attempting to understand Plato in terms of 'naturalism'. The term does not have a clear agreed upon meaning. As with some other philosophical terms when it is used one is saddled with claims that I may not accept.

I have in the past (asked) if these are things that you know and you admitted that you do not. — Fooloso4

On second thoughts - I do try to defend a form of platonic realism, which is that numbers, logical principles, and many other constituents of rational thought, are real independently of any individual act of thought even if not materially existent. I also show that platonic realism is generally deprecated in current philosophy, for the reasons given. So - is this something I know? I might believe it to be true but then how is that claim to be adjudicated?

But it's another thing to claim that the only form of wisdom is the knowledge that one does not have it, and which appears to be your claim. — Wayfarer

You overstate the case. There are different ways in which one might be said to be wise. Socrates acknowledges that the craftsman, doctor, and pilot are wise. He also says that he is wise regarding erotics.

Perl's use of myth echoes what I hear in Plotinus' language.

Plotinus would probably agree with:
— Perl, Thinking Being, Chap 2, Plato, Pp 38-39

Rather, the flight is a mythic representation of the psychic, cognitive attainment of an intellectual apprehension of the intelligible identities, ‘themselves by themselves,’ that inform and are displayed by, or appear in, sensible things.

My problem with this reading of Plato is that the "Theory of the Forms" becomes fixed as a doctrine. I commented upon this last year in a reply to you concerning FM Cornford's interpretation of the Theaetetus. The biggest problem with this fixed meaning of form and anamnesis is that it becomes a kind of form itself that exists separately from those who speak of it.

Perhaps the biggest challenge to Cornford's position comes from the Sophist through the voice of the Stranger:

Str: Now let us move on to the others, the friends of the forms, and you should interpret their doctrines for us too.

Theae: I shall.

Str: “Presumably you make a distinction between becoming and being and you refer to them as separate. Is this so?”

Theae: Yes.

Str: “And you say our communion with becoming is through the body, by means of sense perception, while it is by means of reasoning through the soul that we commune with actual being, which you say is always just the same as it is, while becoming is always changing.”

Theae: 248B “Yes. That is what we say.”

Str: “Now, best of all men, the communing which you ascribe to both, isn’t it what we mentioned a moment ago?”

Theae: What was that? Shall we say what this is?

Str: “An action or an effect arising from some power, from their coming together with one another.” You probably do not hear their response to this so clearly, Theaetetus, but perhaps I can hear it, as I am quite familiar with them.

Theae: What then? What account do they give?

Str: 248C They do not agree with what we said just now to the earth-born men about being.

Theae: What was that?

Str: We somehow proposed an adequate enough definition of things that are: whenever the power to be affected or to affect, even to the slightest extent, is present in something; that something is something that is.

Theae: Yes.

Str: Now to this they reply that; “the power to be affected and to affect is a feature of becoming,” but they say that neither power attaches to being.

Theae: Don’t they have a point?

Str: A point which makes us say that we still need to find out 248D more clearly from them whether they also concede that the soul knows, and that being is known.

Theae: They will surely assent to that.

Str: “What about this? Do you say that the knowing, or being known, is an action, an effect, or both? Or is one an action, and the other an effect? Or do neither of them have anything to do with action and effect?”

Theae: Obviously they would say “neither”, otherwise they would be contradicting what they said before.[1]

Str: I understand. Instead, they would say that; “if knowing is indeed some action, it follows that 248E whatever is known must, for its part, be affected. Indeed, based on this account, since being is known by the act of knowing, insofar as it is known, it is changed to that extent because it is affected, which we insist does not happen to the quiescent.”

Theae: Correct.

Str: But, by Zeus, what are we saying? Are we actually going to be persuaded so easily that change, life, soul and thought are absent from 249A what altogether is, that it neither lives nor thinks, but abides unchanging, solemn and pure, devoid of intelligence?

Theae: No, stranger, that would be an awful proposition were we to accept it. — Sophist, 248A, translated by Horan

That puts a hefty dent into the reasoning of the Timaeus and runs over Plotinus' interpretation of that book with a tractor.

Note to add: I don't mean to say by the above that the existence of forms is being denied. It is just to show that there is more than a single way to consider their activity as depicted by Cornford.

The biggest problem with this fixed meaning of form and anamnesis is that it becomes a kind of form itself that exists separately from those who speak of it. — Paine

I quite agree that the the 'fixing of doctrine' becomes a problem with many interpretations of Platonism - that is the source of dogma, I would have thought, which amounts to the formulaic representations of principles, as distinct from the living insight that they were supposed to convey. The ossification of insight into dogma has happened many times over history.

Thanks indeed for that quote from The Sophist, I can see how important that argument is in the overall scheme. Treating the form of a particular as 'a separate thing' is the crux of the problem. That is what the sections in Eric Perl address, in The Meaning of Separation, the Levels of Being, and the Ascent of the Soul.

We had a discussion about it a few months back and I'll refer to a very long post which summarises the relevant points from those chapters.

"I think naturalism is right, but I also think science forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality. It forces us to say ‘No’ in response to many questions to which most everyone hopes the answers are ‘Yes.’ These are the questions about purpose in nature, the meaning of life, the grounds of morality, the significance of consciousness, the character of thought, the freedom of the will, the limits of human self-understanding, and the trajectory of human history." ~ Alex Rosenberg.

This could be Wittgenstein saying: "We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched." Tractatus 6.52 — Paine

I don't agree at all, I think they're motivation is completely different. It is something which Rosenberg celebrates and Wittgenstein mourns. Alex Rosenberg is a militant atheist which Wittgenstein, despite his reticence, never was. Remember he used to carry around Tolstoy's edition of the Gospels during his war service. The 'mystical aphorisms' in section 6 of the Tractatus, about the transcendent nature of ethics, would never be found in anything Rosenberg writes.

In part what needs to be addressed is the relationship between your understanding of naturalism and thinking and culture. — Fooloso4

That is a very big question. I'll try and tackle it without turning it into a dissertation.

As I've said many times, I first came to philosophy through my autodidactic attempt to understand the meaning of spiritual enlightenment. That's what drew me to Buddhism, as they're explicit about it. But I also found references to enlightenment are in the Western cultural tradition (see SEP Divine Illumination). Examples appear prominently in Christian mysticism, but then, Aquinas has some connection with that, and he was also a conduit for the grand tradition of Greek philosophy which represents (in Plotinus) a school of the philosophia perennis*.

I will choose a passage from a Buddhist scholar to illustrate what I see as the problem of naturalism and culture that have arisen in the wake of the European Enlightenment (from a conference keynote speech, 1994.)

The early founders of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century — such as Galileo, Boyle, Descartes and Newton — were deeply religious men, for whom the belief in the wise and benign Creator was the premise behind their investigations into lawfulness of nature. However, while they remained loyal to the theistic premises of Christian faith, the drift of their thought severely attenuated the organic connection between the divine and the natural order, a connection so central to the premodern world view. They retained God only as the remote Creator and law-giver of Nature and sanctioned moral values as the expression of the Divine Will, the laws decreed for man by his Maker. In their thought a sharp dualism emerged between the transcendent sphere and the empirical world. The realm of "hard facts" ultimately consisted of units of senseless matter governed by mechanical laws, while ethics, values and ideals were removed from the realm of facts and assigned to the sphere of an interior subjectivity.

It was only a matter of time until, in the trail of the so-called Enlightenment, a wave of thinkers appeared who overturned the dualistic thesis central to this world view in favor of the straightforward materialism. This development was a following through of the reductionistic methodology to its final logical consequences. Once sense perception was hailed as the key to knowledge and quantification came to be regarded as the criterion of actuality, the logical next step was to suspend entirely the belief in a supernatural order and all it implied. Hence finally an uncompromising version of mechanistic materialism prevailed, whose axioms became the pillars of the new world view. Matter is now the only ultimate reality, and divine principle of any sort dismissed as sheer imagination. (@Paine - this is represented by Rosenberg.)

The triumph of materialism in the sphere of cosmology and metaphysics had the profoundest impact on human self-understanding. The message it conveyed was that the inward dimensions of our existence, with its vast profusion of spiritual and ethical concerns, is mere adventitious superstructure. The inward is reducible to the external, the invisible to the visible, the personal to the impersonal. Mind becomes a higher order function of the brain, the individual a node in a social order governed by statistical laws. All humankind's ideals and values are relegated to the status of illusions: they are projections of biological drives, sublimated wish-fulfillment. Even ethics, the philosophy of moral conduct, comes to be explained away as a flowery way of expressing personal preferences. Its claim to any objective foundation is untenable, and all ethical judgments become equally valid. The ascendancy of relativism is complete. — Bhikkhu Bodhi, A Buddhist Response to the Contemporary Dilemmas of Human Existence

Of course, many qualifications and caveats could be made, but I chose this passage because of it's straightforwardness.

However over many years, I've turned back towards the Christian Platonism which is actually our shared cultural background, and sought to understand enlightenment in those terms. I think Western culture has resources which Buddhism lacks, and besides, the 'crisis of the European sciences', as Husserl called it, was a European malady, and so the remedy needs to be sought in those terms.

And in any case, the times are well and truly a'changing. The kind of hardline materialism that this passage describes still exists, but science itself is dynamic and always changing, and the 'systems science' and new approaches in biology and physics are challenging that kind of dogmatic materialism. Nevertheless, naturalism is the assumed consensus of a secular age with a kind of unspoken convention about what kinds of ideas will or will not be admitted into consideration.

The concept of a vertical distinction between living and non-living things, and among living things themselves, conflicts with contemporary cultural and philosophical perspectives, particularly those grounded in natural science. Naturalism, with its emphasis on physical processes as the fundamental reality, will usually reject such metaphysical distinctions. It tends to flatten the Aristotelian hierarchy into a horizontal plane where differences among entities are seen in terms of varying arrangements of matter rather than different degrees or kinds of being. — Wayfarer

*Re the Philosophia Perennis - I am wary of the so-called 'traditionalists', René Guenon, Frithjoff Schuon, et al - I think it's something of a cult movement, notwithstanding some convergent interests.

I don't agree at all, I think they're motivation is completely different. It is something which Rosenberg celebrates and Wittgenstein mourns. Alex Rosenberg is a militant atheist which Wittgenstein, despite his reticence, never was. Remember he used to carry around Tolstoy's edition of the Gospels during his war service. The 'mystical aphorisms' in section 6 of the Tractatus, about the transcendent nature of ethics, would never be found in anything Rosenberg writes. — Wayfarer

I had not considered it as difference in motivation, only as a statement about what "science" does or does not provide.

I will have to think about your description of "Christian Platonists." I have to admit it is difficult for me to approach this with pure objectivity.

I appreciate that you considered the quote from Sophist as germane to the discussion.

I had not considered it as difference in motivation, only as a statement about what "science" does or does not provide. — Paine

(Wittgenstein's) work is opposed, as he once put it, to "the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand." Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it "scientism," the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face. — Ray Monk, Wittgenstein's Forgotten Lesson

Yes. He made that clear in Tractatus and that thought is consistent with the following works. But he did not oppose the practice of science, only the claim it replaced everything else.

- Thanks Paine, I will try to offer a response sometime in the next few days.

he did not oppose the practice of science, only the claim it replaced everything else. — Paine

My view also.

But he did not oppose the practice of science, only the claim it replaced everything else. — Paine

The claim that science could replace "everything else" is so patently absurd that I could never understand why anyone would believe it or bother to expend any energy opposing it.

(on second thoughts.....)

I don't believe I have ever said or even insinuated that science could replace everything else. If you think I have then you have somehow managed to misinterpret what I have said.

You’ll notice I deleted my remark before you replied. I thought better of it. But do peruse the article from which it came to see more context.

:up: I read it and agree with everything therein.

Yes, I thought it a good article. Ray Monk wrote a highly-regarded biography of Wittgenstein, which is on my 'I really must get around to reading' list.

You asked:

... would it fair to suggest that your interpretation is influenced by an innate disposition towards naturalism? — Wayfarer

I asked what you mean by naturalism. In response you said:

I will choose a passage from a Buddhist scholar to illustrate what I see as the problem of naturalism and culture that have arisen in the wake of the European Enlightenment — Wayfarer

If by naturalism you mean the problems that have arise in the wake of European Enlightenment, then my answer is no, my interpretation is not influenced by the problems of European Enlightenment. But it is not so simple. Look again at the passage cited by @Paine from the Sophist. On one side are the "friends of the forms" and on the other those born of "earth-born ancestors" who "maintain emphatically that they are all physical" and "would insist that whatever they are unable to squeeze with their hands is nothing at all". (247c)

To the extent that the claims of the earth-born line up with naturalism it is already present in Plato long before the European Enlightenment. There are, however, things such as justice, wisdom, excellence and the souls in which they arise that are not tangible or visible (248b). Things that cannot be squeezed with the hands. So it would seem that the friends of the forms win the battle. But not so fast.

“... if knowing is indeed some action, it follows that whatever is known must, for its part, be affected. Indeed, based on this account, since being is known by the act of knowing, insofar as it is known, it is changed to that extent because it is affected, which we insist does not happen to the quiescent.”

(248d-e)

As he asks the friends of the forms:

Are we actually going to be persuaded so easily that change, life, soul and thought are absent from what altogether is, that it neither lives nor thinks, but abides unchanging, solemn and pure, devoid of intelligence?

(248e-249a)

Rather than things being resolved by embracing the forms he says:

I think that we are just about to appreciate the perplexity involved in this inquiry.

(249d)

Motion and rest are opposites, but each are and both of them is. (250a) Both of them are not at rest or moving, so, he asks, is being then some third thing?

Now the most important kinds are those we have just mentioned: being itself, rest and motion.

Theae: Very much so.

Str: And we also say that two of them do not mix with one another.

Theae: They do not.

Str: And yet, being can mix with both, for presumably both are.

Theae: Of course.

Str: So there are these three.

Theae: Of course.

Although being, rest, and motion are three, to count rest, motion, and being as three would be a mistake. Being is a higher order than rest and motion. It is not a third thing to be counted alongside them.

The Stranger identifies five Kinds. In addition to motion, rest, and being, there is sameness and difference (Sophist 254c)

Contrary to Parmenides, the Stranger says that it is not possible to give an account of being without introducing non-being. Non-being is understood as otherness or difference.

There can be no comprehensive account of being without a comprehensive account of non-being. But what is other is without limit and cannot be comprehended. On the one hand this means that there can never be a comprehensive account of the whole, but on the other, it encourages an openness to what might be; beyond our limits of comprehension.

Rather than the One Aristotle points to Plato's indeterminate dyad

I find being told to read something in lieu of a response is patronizing and consider it a withdrawal from discourse. I share your complaint.

I think naturalism is right, but I also think science forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality. It forces us to say ‘No’ in response to many questions to which most everyone hopes the answers are ‘Yes.’ These are the questions about purpose in nature, the meaning of life, the grounds of morality, the significance of consciousness, the character of thought, the freedom of the will, the limits of human self-understanding, and the trajectory of human history.

That precisely outlines what science cannot provide and certainly cannot be described as "Platonist." But the statement is not "anti-philosophical" because it recognizes we have questions beyond what science tries to answer — Paine

My understanding is that human beings and other animals demonstrate purposiveness, but that science cannot show there to be any general or overarching purpose in nature. I don't see why a lack of overarching purpose and meaning should diminish the importance of general human and particular individual purpose and meaning.

The question as to how best to live, or to put it in Platonist terms the search for the Good, concerns us, or at least should concern us, all. I think it's not a question of what we specifically believe, but how we practice, when it comes to the "questions beyond what science tries to answer".

For example, in regard to the question of free will, I can be a full-blown determinist and still think it important for humans to be rationally self-governing.

I read that book many years ago but cannot recall much in the way of the impressions it left on me. I still have it on my shelves, so I may take a fresh look at it.

If by naturalism you mean the problems that have arise in the wake of European Enlightenment, then my answer is no, my interpretation is not influenced by the problems of European Enlightenment. — Fooloso4

I took it to be implied by your earlier declaration that 'modernity is our cave'.

To the extent that the claims of the earth-born line up with naturalism it is already present in Plato long before the European Enlightenment. — Fooloso4

Of course. Materialism is as ancient as philosophy itself. The Cārvāka of ancient India were materialists. Enlightenment materialism was represented by scholars such as Baron D'Holbach, who 'sees nothing but bodies in motion'. Like its opposite, it's a perennial theme in philosophy.

I've responded to your post in a thread about purpose

I took it to be implied by your earlier declaration that 'modernity is our cave'. — Wayfarer

Fair point. I think we can be in the situation of the prisoner who becomes unshackled but has not escaped the cave. We can be aware of the sources that shape our understanding of things and also be aware that there are earlier sources that differ from these. We can then address the problem of the extent to which we can lessen the influence of modernity on our understanding of those earlier sources.

... who 'sees nothing but bodies in motion'. — Wayfarer

The criticism of Forms in Plato's dialogues address the problem of their not being in motion - the problem of understanding the world in motion by positing something that is not in motion. I think Plato regarded flux as the natural starting point, and to the extent the cosmos is intelligible it must be understood in light of flux rather than by eliminating it.

the dialectical search for the truth — Janus

I think this is tricky because some regard dialectic as a method of establishing the truth rather than as a search for the truth. My impression is that Platonists regard the search as something that has reached a successful conclusion. Socratic philosophy, including both Plato and Aristotle, is about being wise in the face of ignorance, keeping our ignorance alive rather than eliminating it.

... Platonism as being less a matter of fixed doctrine than it is of searching for what is good and beautiful and true and flourishing engendering while acknowledging that there can be no definitive answers to those questions. — Janus

This is where I distinguish between Plato and Platonism. Plato is a Socratic, Platonists are not.

I think this is tricky because some regard dialectic as a method of establishing the truth rather than as a search for the truth. My impression is that Platonists regard the search as something that has reached a successful conclusion. Socratic philosophy, including both Plato and Aristotle, is about being wise in the face of ignorance, keeping our ignorance alive rather than eliminating it. — Fooloso4

Is it a different sense of truth? It could be said that finding wisdom is finding truth, even though nothing in the propositional mode of truth might be possible to say about the wisdom that is found. Perhaps dialectic is a process of error elimination that enables the gaining of wisdom even if the wisdom gained is only to realize that one does not know what one thought one knew.

This is where I distinguish between Plato and Platonism. Plato is a Socratic, Platonists are not. — Fooloso4

Right, Socrates seems far from being an ideologue or purveyor of doctrines.

Until I have read more into these issues, I will have nothing worthwhile to contribute (and maybe not even then). In the meantime, I'll continue to follow along with interest.

We can be aware of the sources that shape our understanding of things and also be aware that there are earlier sources that differ from these. We can then address the problem of the extent to which we can lessen the influence of modernity on our understanding of those earlier sources. — Fooloso4

In this regard, my attempts to cleanly separate history and interpretation runs into a spot of bother.

The idea that ancient texts were saying something other than established interpretations was through a recognition of their development through time. Trying to reverse the flow is a new river mapped with conjecture and new methods of comparison.

I was thinking the "established interpretations" include the series presented through centuries of accounts given upon these writings. Those views changed over time. It is only fairly recently, however, that talk about how different the past was from the present became a reason to question the meaning of a text.

On that basis, your view of what happened from then and now is more reliant upon recent scholarship than those who see no reason to question previous descriptions.

Of course he's no 'voice in the wilderness', he's a highly-respected scholar in his field. But don't you think that his declaration of the incompatibility of Platonism and naturalism might be considered 'dissident', or at least 'dissenting'? Banno often refers to surveys of academic philosophers who's views are overwhelmingly in favour of one or another form of naturalism. He's using his very well-earned seat at the table to question the mainstream.