Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Combining Platonic Forms

Some types of Platonism, particularly moral Platonism, are asinine worldviews that cannot be argued for apart from circular reasoning and other fallacies [1].  Still, I want to draw attention to the fact that, despite the idiocy of proposing that a group of "forms" exists abstractly beyond human consciousness and the material world [2], combining some of the forms would fashion something very familiar to Christians.  According to Platonism there are forms of particular things ("beauty" or "greenness") that reflect the things themselves; to see the forms after experiencing everyday human life would be like seeing what causes shadows after seeing only the shadows for so long.

If forms like the form of beauty, form of justice, and form of goodness (these are only three examples pertaining to values) were combined--and the result had its own conscious, personal mind--then the result would greatly resemble the deity of Christianity.  There are enormous differences between Platonism and Christian theism, of course: on Platonism there is nothing to reveal the nature of values, whereas in Christianity (or other types of personal theism) God reveals to humans the realm of values.  This means that on moral Platonism no one can ever know the actual content of the moral forms, left only with conflicting subjective perceptions and nothing to bring to light what goodness or justice actually are.  Another difference is that Platonism simply asserts that thing like justice and beauty just exist, but Christianity actually grounds values in the nature of the uncaused cause.

The Christian response to the forms is to recognize that Platonism takes parts of Yahweh's nature, divides them up, separates them, and removes them from the status of being metaphysically necessary.  An uncaused cause cannot not exist [3], so if the forms of values are not rooted in the nature of the uncaused cause there is nothing about them that is necessary.  There is also the fact that apart from the nature of a deity there can be no values at all, for otherwise there is no moral authority; there are merely forms that exist, but what makes the things these forms epitomize good or obligatory?

Platonism (general Platonism, not mathematical Platonism) keeps the uncaused cause and values separate.  Christianity, contrarily, recognizes that the latter could only exist as a part of the former's very nature.  It does not follow from the existence of an uncaused cause that values exist, but values cannot exist except as part of the uncaused cause's nature.  What Socrates/Plato viewed as separate is intimately unified in Christianity.

I mentioned "greenness" as an example of a form earlier, yet to say that God is green is hardly a statement relevant to Christian theology.  Not all of the Platonic forms are relevant to the results of combining the specific forms that I have described.  But even I, someone who hates the fallacies of general Platonism, must acknowledge that some aspects of moral Platonism are merely a distortion of Christian ideas, restructured into something unhelpful, baseless, and epistemologically unsound.


[1].  See here:
A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-circular-reasoning-of-platonism.html
B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-epistemic-problem-of-moral-platonism.html

[2].  The only things that exist abstractly by necessity are the laws of logic and concepts that logic imposes itself on (this is very similar to modern mathematical Platonism).  If someone identifies as a Platonist but simply means by this that logic and/or numerical concepts exist by necessity independent of consciousness and matter, he or she has a correct worldview on this point.  But this is not the same as moral Platonism or the broader Platonism of Plato.

[3].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-uncaused-cause.html

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