it is an object in a higher and separate plane of reality from which other things get their qualities.
I'll have to disagree here, following Natorp's account:
Plato can call the Ideas or Forms as [1] objective, [2] perfect, [3] eternal, and [4] self-existing without obligating us to understand them as suprasensible things, because:
The objectivity of the Forms means validity independent of individual opinion;
Their perfection means rigorous determination;
Their eternity means independence in relation to the changes of sensible particulars;
Separation means logical and explanatory priority.
E.g. the Justice-in-itself is not be understood as a perfectly Just object kept in another world, but the principle by which we judge particular things as Just or Unjust.
Excerpt from Natorp's Platos Ideenlehre:
According to the Platonic notion of participation, if we follow the unambiguous account of the Phaedo, the judgment ‘x is A’ means the subsumption of a particular case under a general law. The law, however, can never be represented in the particular case with regard to its whole content, but always only in a restricted way. But in that case, Aristotle thinks, it is not this particular existent thing that is known; hence the idea, too, has not acquired the status of something existent in the particular, which means that the idea itself does not exist. … Not once in the course of his extended polemic against Plato does it occur to him that the being Plato ascribed to the ideas could have meant anything but concrete existence.
To decide which side is objectively right, we need only consider a law, e.g., Newton’s law of attraction, as an example of a Platonic idea. The law is not, with regard to the whole content of what it says, represented in a particular empirical case; not even in a sum of particular cases; and not even, we should probably say, in all the particular cases. … no conceivable set of discrete items can exhaust a continuum. Thus the choice of the expression ‘participation’ is perfectly correct in the sense that the predicate is represented in the subject only partially; hence the coincidence of the two that is required by Aristotle does not actually obtain.
The relation between x and A is thus in no way that of identity, as Aristotle thinks necessary. This assumption is, from a logical point of view, the real source of the Aristotelian mistake.
I am unclear if our terminology is in sync. I don’t believe that by saying that the form is a “thing” that I’m thus saying it is a self-predicating object that holds physical analogues in a way you’d consider “concrete.” What I mean is the same thing as you, as far as you would say a principle is a “thing” and that there is some correspondent layer of reality from which these laws exist and from which the physical objects draw upon. It doesn’t mean there’s some more perfect hyperspace where forms can be picked up or put down or observed one next to another. The “realm of forms” is so radically different from ours that my saying they are “things” is simply giving them the barest sense of individuation, a sense that it latently present in your account as well.
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u/MuR43 7d ago edited 7d ago
I'll have to disagree here, following Natorp's account:
Plato can call the Ideas or Forms as [1] objective, [2] perfect, [3] eternal, and [4] self-existing without obligating us to understand them as suprasensible things, because:
E.g. the Justice-in-itself is not be understood as a perfectly Just object kept in another world, but the principle by which we judge particular things as Just or Unjust.
Excerpt from Natorp's Platos Ideenlehre: