Yeah, “think for yourself, and if you disagree with me that means you’re doing it wrong” is a heck of a way to run a school of philosophy. It’s no wonder she hates Plato, he’s constantly challenging people in their settled beliefs.
> The "extreme realists" or Platonists, . . . hold that abstractions exist as real entities or archetypes in another dimension of reality and that the concretes we perceive are merely their imperfect reflections, but the concretes evoke the abstractions in our mind. (According to Plato, they do so by evoking the memory of the archetypes which we had known, before birth, in that other dimension.)
I think the concepts of forms and shapes rubbed her the wrong way.
Here's a quote from Piekoff that I think explains why much better than what Rand would have written.
> Momentous conclusions about man are implicit in this metaphysics (and were later made explicit by a long line of Platonists): since individual men are merely particular instances of the universal "man," they are not ultimately real. What is real about men is only the Form which they share in common and reflect. To common sense, there appear to be many separate, individual men, each independent of the others, each fully real in his own right. To Platonism, this is a deception; all the seemingly individual men are really the same one Form, in various reflections or manifestations. Thus, all men ultimately comprise one unity, and no earthly man is an autonomous entity—just as, if a man were reflected in a multifaceted mirror, the many reflections would not be autonomous entities.
Not sure if you are joking, but that’s not a clear summary of platonism.
Platonism does believe that forms exist separate from material instances; like, perfect spheres or triangles are “real,” even if there are no perfect spheres or triangle in the material world. That is a statement for the reality of the immaterial world, for platonists.
However, there are more than just these idealized forms in the immaterial world of forms. There aren’t just right triangles or perfect spheres, there are also forms that have complexity exceeding anything in the material world.
The world of forms might be thought of as the world of information, if that helps. However, it is subtlety different, since information is materially instantiated — and there appear to be hierarchies within the world of forms that somehow take precedence. Eg, the concept of 1 takes precedence over 363279.
The point is that there are forms of individual people, too, in platonism. Plato is vague about this in dialectic, but I believe Plotinus addresses it directly.
Right. I want to make it clear I wasn't saying "I support Ayn Rand's thought's on Platonism", what I wanted to convey was my interpretation of what Rand/Piekoff Wrote and why I think they read Plato and had the reaction they did.
I'm not a professional philosopher, but I think the nebulous nature of how Plato addresses forms and shapes is difficult for someone from a Randian Materialistic viewpoint to accept.
I think that even at it's weakest interpretation, the concept of forms and shapes at least provides an avenue for aspirational meditation as we can discuss what an "ideal" of a thing (food, medecine, political ideaology, etc) might be
Yes, I understood you. Plato has a lot of deliberate vagueness — it’s a dialectical communication, where the knowledge is communicated through the challenges of processing it
