E-mail Archives : One beyond being March 4 & 5, 1995

This page is part of the "e-mail archives" section of a site, Plato and his dialogues, dedicated to developing a new interpretation of Plato's dialogues. The "e-mail archives" section includes HTML edited versions of posts that I submitted on various e-mail discussion lists about Plato and ancient philosophy.

To: sophia <sophia@liverpool.ac.uk>
Date : March 4, 1995, 22:13:44
Subject : Re: One beyond being

//--- forwarded letter -------------------------------------------------------

> Date: Tue, 28 Feb 95 20:57:37 +0000
> From: Carol.Poster@uni.edu
> To: "Members of the list" <sophia@liverpool.ac.uk>
> Subject: One beyond being

> Just wondering if placing the one beyond being is a way around the third man argument. Anyone have any thoughts on this? (I think it might be why the Parmenides was such an important text among neoplatonists).

> Carol Poster
> Poster@cobra.uni.edu

Plato didn't put the one beyond being, but only the good. The one was Plotin's favorite, not Plato's.I think the problem is not to look for something "beyond" being, but to stop giving "being" more weight than it has. For Plato, see the Sophist, "being" is the least meaningful of all predicates, as having the greatest extension; anything that can act or be acted upon, being only in my thoughts, has "being": the "temporary" definition is never reformulated, and holds good till the end. The real problem is not "being", but "participation". The question is not "what you are", but "what you are"; and you are what you become, what you participate in. If the good, and only him, is "beyond being", it's because the good is, contrary to being, the most meaningful of predicates, being the perfection of each being, its "telos", and thus, cannot be one among the being. No more than evil is a "being", but rather a lack of being, a lack of achievment of what a being is supposed to be, of its "good". In all that, the "one" is only another name for the "same", it is what makes each "being" someting, and something different from any other being; different, but not isolated; different, but capable of "participation"... And beware! participation is not only between "material" being and "forms", but between all sorts of beings, between forms and forms, among others. We have to find out the rules of participation, of "koinônia", and especially those which make us get along together as rational human "beings"...

There is no such thing as a "third man" once you understand what the form(s) of man is (are)! And you won't find the answer in the Parmenides, even with a mystical, or hermetic, interpretation... The purpose of the Parmenides is to pose the problem, to raise the questions, not to answer it. The only "answers" it gives are:

• you may not like "forms", but they are the only way to account for all the "phainomena"; and if you can't quite figure out what they are, at least, you know what they are not (part one, the shortest);
• if you get the wrong idea about "forms" and make them a "world" of their own without connections with ours, you can say almost anything, no matter which "hypothesis" you choose, and proove everything and its contrary with equal confidence (part two, the "tedious game").

The answers on the form(s) of man are to be found in the Timæus, read in the light of the Sophist and the Republic. As I said in an earlier post, the Timæus displays at least four of these forms, and none is subject to the third man argument. They are, from the most "material" to the most "formal" (they are introduced in the reverse order in the Timaeus):

• the "form" displayed by the "atoms" of matter man is made of, with their own laws; Plato would rather talk about "elements" and give them the "form" of triangles; but they are the form of matter, they have their own laws (the way triangle-atoms assemble and disassemble to constitute the four elements) and they "explain" one side of man, being its most elementary constituants;
• the "form" given the human body by the secondary gods to achieve its purpose, which is to host a rational "soul" handed them over by the demiourgos; today, we would call it the "biological" form of man; it too has its own laws, which contribute to health and sickness; as a "scheme", it is not one individual man or another, but "something" all men "participate" in, and there is no "third man" between men and this description of its biological constitution; note that all men don't "participate" in an equal degree to this form (some are healthier than others, and there are "monsters" from time to time);
• the "form" that the "soul" is with regard to the body; this one is a "form" in the sense that it is "immaterial", and, at this level, there are as many souls as there are men, in much the same way there are as many bodies; but, as is the case with bodies, all these souls have a common "form", devised by the demiourgos, and laws given them and properly explained by him when he handsover this "soul" to his assistants, who will build bodies (note that the secondary gods don't actually "build" bodies, but only the "form" of bodies, that it is man who begets man, that is, who actually "builds" an individual body... and soul). So, may be here, you might find something like a "third man": men have souls, which are "forms", and souls have a common "form", which make them all "forms" of men. But it is in no way an infinite regress, because, each time, we move in a different "order" of forms: the Timæus even takes time to expand the "regress" to show it won't go ad infinitum: the "form" of human soul is itself the "residue" of a higher "form", the "soul" of the world; but once there, you can try and explain the "composition" of souls from three "elementary" forms (which are to souls what the three "sides" of triangles are to the "form" of matter), namely sameness, otherness and being, but that's it, and, at this point, we are no longer talking of a fourth, or fifth man, but of something else.
• the "form" of justice, which is the ultimate form that man is supposed to achieve, and thus, which is his "good": and this one is the only one which is "outside time and space", and that's why it is presented (through the summary of the Republic, or at least another discussion much like the Republic, another way of hinting it is not bound in time and place, it is not the property of Glaucon or Timæus or anybody else) "before" the "myth" of Timæus, that is, before "time" begins (not only before the "created" time begins, but even before the "eternal" time of the demiourgos begins, with Timæus' speech (yet, it is already Timæus who makes the summary). And again, this "form" of man does not expose us to anything like the "third man" argument!

There is yet one more "form" of man that is present in the whole dialogue, and it is the word "man" itself... Yes, a word may be viewed as a form. It is "formal" with regard to what it represents, but it is "matter" to speech, and even matter has a "form". It is a "being", in the sense of the definition given in the Sophist, as it can be "acted upon" (by being pronounced, or written), a being in its own right, with its own laws: these laws are the laws that the Sophist tries to exhibit, the laws of speech that the rhetors have forgotten, with all the dire consequences we know. And the Parmenides is an example of what happens when, with the best intention in the world, that of raising men's souls towards the "immaterial", a Parmenides forget these laws, or doesn't care to look for them (and Parmenides was the inspiration behind Gorgias and his likes)...

But these are too many forms for an Aristotle! Yes, there may be several ways of understaning "being", ten "categories" if you'd like (Aristotle "rewriting" of the Sophist), but "man" is one and you must choose! He may not have "several" forms!... And what is this business about the "form of matter", when matter and form are precisely opposites?!... Aristotle will chose for us, and his "form" of man is somewhere between the second (biological "structure", remember his father was a physician, and he was a biologist) and third (the "soul", which become, in his language, and to please his master, an "entelechy", closer to an ADN string than to what Plato had in mind...). And here we are, twenty four centuries later, still struggling with the same difficulties, and incredulous when we unearth Plato's "answers", so biased we are by centuries of aristotelism, and, as he was, so materialistic in our thinking... Yet, Plato gave us the way, not the answers... And that is still valid today, even if most of the "science" in the Timæus is largely out of date and "primitive" (because there is "evolution" in biology and in "science" does not mean there is evolution in "metaphysics"... Sorry, Mr Aristotle!)