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St Thomas Aquinas

The end of all our desires,

eternal life, is fittingly placed

last among those things to be

believed; and the Creed says:

life everlasting. Amen.

They wrote this to stand

against those who believe

that the soul perishes with

the body.

St Bridget ofSweden

There is no sinner in the

world, however much at

enmity with God, who cannot

recover God's grace by

recourse to Mary, and by

asking her assistance.

St Philip Neri

MONDAY, 12 NOVEMBER 2012

On Plato's forms

It is widely defendedthroughout the early Socraticwoks, the transition phaseand the mature period of

Plato1

the doctrine of theforms or ideas. The doctrinestates that apart from the

material world, there exists arealm which transcends thesenses and acts as theprinciple on which things are

participating2

. An example ofthings which participate in the forms can be given interms of things around us. This constitutes the groundof Platonic metaphysics. In fact, an entire school ofmetaphysics has been constructed around the theory ofthe forms known as Platonic realism. Ever since the

5thcentury BC, there have appeared more theories and

ontologies which have challenged Platonism. This on-going debate is known as the debate of universals andparticulars. By the name the theory of forms would fallunder the category of universals whereas tangiblebeings have often been seen as particulars. If weobserve, say for example, a dog, we shall see thatdespite being numerically identical only to itself andunique, it still has something in common with otherdogs. This is the obvious property of being a dog. Thedog in this case is the particular. The principle whichunites all of these together and brings them into beingis the very form of dog itself which is beyond the limit

of all dogs in which all participate. Therefore it can besaid that the form of dog is the universal. In thisessay we wish to demonstrate that the theory of formsdoes nothing more than to duplicate the material world

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and also to show the other objections which werepresented by Platos contemporaries as possiblesolutions to the problem of universals.

Plato gives the description of the form of beauty in a

manner which is best demonstrated in the Symposium3

:and neither comes to be nor perishes, neither waxes nor wanes;

next, it is not beautiful in part and in part ugly, nor is it such atsuch a time and other at another, nor in one respect beautiful andin another ugly, nor so affected by position as to seem beautiful to

some and ugly to others. the earth or sky or any other thing;

but existing ever in singularity of form independent by itself, while

all the multitude of beautiful things partake of it in such wise that,

though all of them are coming to be and perishing, it grows neither

greater nor less, and is affected by nothing.

Similarly, in the Hippias Major4

:Nothing is easier than to answer and tell him what the beautifulis, by which all other things are adorned and by the addition of

which they are made to appear beautiful.

It can be seen that this theory is an attempt to unify orto synthesise the properties of things which areobservable. It is to argue that they have a ground ofbeing in a transcendental realm of forms which are self-subsistent and of which all material entities have theirobjective ground of being. The philosopher andinterpreter of Plato, A.E. Taylor argues that thefundamental forms of Plato are shapes, integers and

mathematical objects5

. Plato more specifically suggestsa hierarchy of genera, species and being on which theontological reality of the forms is divided and exist.

They are further united and organised by an absoluteprinciple, called the demiurge ()

6

which isbest understood as a Supreme Being or God. Thishowever might just be the fatal flaw in the theory offorms. If God is the uniting principle of the forms, andHe is the one who created all of them, it begs thequestion as to whether or not they are necessary at all.It surely would seem possible that God could be theformal cause of all things without having to have formsas intermediaries or formal causes which transcendparticulars themselves. Indeed this is the solution wepropose in this work. To argue that the forms are what

unite particulars truly does nothing more than to createor duplicate the reality of particulars to a reality ofuniversals. What Plato did was not offering a proof forthe existence of the forms in any substantial sense. Itmight be argued that his eloquence in explaining theuniting principle of particulars transcends theparticulars themselves, yet they need not imply theexistence of an actual universal in ontology. Here weside with Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas who arguedthat Plato offered no substantial proof for the existenceof the forms. In other words, the existence ofparticulars does not prove the existence of subsistent

and transcendent universals7.

St Thomas states:




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According to Plato the Ideas are prior both to sensible things andto the objects of mathematics. But according to him the Ideas

themselves are numbers; and they are odd numbers rather than

even ones, because he attributed odd number to form and even

number to matter. Hence he also said that the dyad [or duality] is

matter. Therefore it follows that other numbers are prior to thedyad, which he held to be the matter of sensible things, and

identified with the great and small. Yet the Platonists asserted the

very opposite of this, that is to say, that the dyad is first in theclass of number.

This is one argument which shows not only theimprobability but the inherent contradiction thePlatonist faces when attempting to defend the realm offorms and ideas as concrete realities. It must be re-emphasised that the reason why Plato attempted toformulate an ontology around the forms wasspecifically to answer the problem of having particularswithout universals. Yet there is a further dilemmawhich the Platonist faces which is known as theproblem of the Third Man. The argument demonstratesthat the multiplicity of forms leads to an infinite regresswhich renders the theory problematic if not entirelyuseless. This is because in order to explain the forms,there must be a principle which unites the forms. Forthere to be such a principle, there would be anotherwhich unites the principle and so on ad infinitum. Inessence Plato attempted to explain the efficient causesof things by arguing that their ground of being was inthis transcendental realm. However as has beendemonstrated, the theory renders itself useless andproblematic, conflating the existence of material thingswith real abstract properties. We must therefore solvethe problem of universals without running intonominalist presuppositions in another manner.

Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas recognised thatparticular corporeal beings are divided into form andmatter. It is of particular interest to us to expand moreon the notion of the formal causes which can eloquentlyexplain the existence of beings in the world withoutpositing the abstract realm of forms. The formal causeof being is that which gives it its essence, in otherwords, its genera and species. The formal cause of ahuman being is man itself. This is derived through the

abstraction of the particular and individual human to agrasp of the essence which is common amongst allmen. Hence when we use the predicate is a man, wepresume that all beings who are men have a commonproperty which can be known through the intellect viaabstraction rather than participation in an actual form.

St Thomas Aquinas states8:For human nature exists in the intellect in abstraction from allthat individuates; and this is why it has a content which is the

same in relation to all individual men outside the soul; it is equally

the likeness of all of them, and leads to a knowledge of all insofar

as they are men. And it is from the fact that the nature has such arelation to all individuals that the intellect discovers and attributes

the notion of the species to it.




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We therefore conclude by reaffirming that the Platonictheory of Ideas does not much in terms of self-explanation. Rather it attempts to solve the problem weencounter when attempting to explain the vast numberof things of the same genera, species and properties. Itsuffices to say that Plato's argument for thetranscendental forms are not proofs in the concrete

sense but rather an appeal to what he deemed as thebest explanation. This essay has demonstrated that thisexplanation is not only not the best but also facesserious problems when attempting to explain theinfinite possibility of forms (third man argument) andalso the fact that forms themselves do not havecausation-like properties. It would require God to uniteparticulars and make them participate in the forms.This however would make the notion of the formsobsolete since if God exists, He could simply createindividual beings without having to unite them to anytranscendent entities.

---------------------------------------1FrederickCoplestonSJAhistoryofPhilosophy(NewmanPress1962),vol.1,partIII,p.139-140

2Republic,596a3Symposium,211-2124HippiasMajor,289d5A.E.Taylor Plato:Themanandhiswork,p.512-5146Timaeus,30a7StThomasAquinas CommentaryonAristotlesMetaphysics,Bk.I,LessonXIV

8Deenteetessentia,a.60

Posted by Hans Coessens at07:19Labels:Aquinas , Aristotle ,Forms ,God ,Ideas ,Plato ,Platonism ,Thomism

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