Naked Ladies
"Comrade I am going to have start at the beginning. Objective and Subjective are symbols. What we are looking for I think is an understanding of what those symbols represent in us people. What they have purported to mean over time. It seems to me that Plato's Ideal Forms came from somewhere, in response to something, I suspect they are an understanding of Objective."
"This is my understanding of Ideal Forms. The ideal form justice is perfect justice. The ideal form of a circle is a perfect circle. Plato had decided our mind knows what a perfect circle is, it knows what justice is is because ideal forms preexist us?"
"Socrates argued that ideal forms were not separate from objects, they didn't exist out there in a perfect place but existed within objects. Socrates suggested that when we see a beautiful thing, or a just thing we are participating in a fleeting view of an idea of beauty or an idea of justice, it's a temporal moment, fleeting, and soon it is gone. In our understanding of subjective I believe we need a dasein of some sort, an understanding of Being and what or who is doing the Being."
"OK!"
"Well?"
"Well What?"
"Did Plato's thoughts about Being follow Permenides' Philosophy of Being, which went like this : Whatever is, is. It must be. It cannot not be. Conversly whatever is not, is not. It cannot be. It must not be."
They love the antecedence of knowing stuff, don't they! Like a family tree. What we got here are three names of ancient Greek People, all of whom lived in different places, yet they either knew each other, or knew of each other. If you like, you can look upon them as the Founding Nosey Fathers of that collection of cultures that produced the iterations of chocolate on the outside, ice cream on the inside that ultimately became the Klondike Bar before surrendering to the inevitable and diving into the hellscape of choices called the Bread Aisle because there lay Real Being.
The names we "hold" sacred are these. Heraclitus. Parmenides. The third name is a duo called Plato and his teacher Socrates. If you have to know Socrates was ugly as sin to look at, he was nervous of his wife but nothing else, he loved the sound of his own voice and he was far too lazy and poor to write books. Plato on the other hand was a big, tall, broad chap who had trained as a wrestler and all that hearty bro stuff that goes along with naked wrestling.
Heraclitus was of the opinion that all things were Flux. Endlessly moving around, never stopping. You couldn't step into the same river twice. What is here today will be gone tomorrow, so gather ye rosebuds while ye may. The words to remember about Heraclitus are "Flux" "Movement" "Time like an ever flowing stream."
Wherever else your mind goes, never underestimate the Heraclitus Observation. The Flux, Movement, Time Conundrum has yet to be solved by a Western Mind unless it's a mind that prefers to wallow in the heuristic of straightforward answers, and ignore awkward questions like, What is an algorithm?
Our second nosey parker, Parmenides, looked at the Heraclitus Observation and concluded that if Heraclitus was correct, everything was in flux, never staying still, then we could know nothing with any degree of certainty, there would never be a a still place were things could just be. Heraclitus agreed with that, it was rather sad, but when all is Flux you don't get to go where you're going, instead you're always going somewhere, you're always becoming something, but never actually becoming anything. Heraclitus then made mention of the possibilities in logic as a means to answer the "question why" which after all was the main preoccupation of people who had not much else to do because they had land and slaves and trading interests.
And yes indeed, Heraclitus was an ancient Greek who lived in what is now called Turkey which was then part of the Persian Empire, he wasn't a big fan of people, he had no problem with taking what pleasure he could from an existence amongst them in miserable uncertainty with a good 80% chance of things getting much worse. He was the much respected Schopenhauer of the Sixth Century BC.
Parmenides, who lived out west, in what was called Greater Greece, his part of Greater Greece is now called Southern Italy, while understanding Heraclitus' greatness, he apprehended the need for what on these pages we have taken to calling Nouns. The word apprehended means "grasp" as in understand, and "grasp" as put someone in the back of a police cruiser. Change in a world Parmenides wanted apprehended was the illusion, he decided. The true reality - what he called the "true being" - must be one, eternal, indivisible, unchanging, and perfect whole. And this indivisible perfect noun gave meaning and purpose to the joyous becoming of verbs.
Go ahead, argue all you want. Tomorrow Baxter and I and our silicone comrade yack on about the third Founding Nosey Father, Socrates and his student Plato, with particular attention to a point about fleeting glimpses Socates made about Plato's Ideal Forms.
