New Essays on Plato and Aristotle (RLE: Plato)

Renford Bambrough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136236372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

What can the study of the history of ancient philosophy bring to the study of contemporary philosophical problems and questions? In New Essays on Plato and Aristotle eight distinguished philosophers address topics in Greek philosophy that are connected with current philosophical issues. All the essays are original and include Gilbert Ryle on Dialectic in the Academy and R. M. Hare on Plato's indictment of mathematicians.

DEGREES OF REALITY
IN PLATO
Gregory Vlastos

FROM the Greek “is”

we get directly the participle

the noun,

and the adverb,

From the English “is” all we can get directly is the participle, being, but no noun or adverb. We can't say “beingness” or “beingly”, and have to shift to “reality” and “really”. But when we do this we lose a verb from the same stem: we can't say, “Socrates reals a man” or “Socrates reals wise”, unless we want to start one of those over-strenuous linguistic games, like Hegelese or Heideggerese. If we want to talk English, we will have to break up the consanguineous Greek quartet into two etymologically unrelated groups, picking our verbs from the first, our noun and adverb (and also the exceptionally useful adjective, “real”) from the second. This is no great hardship. But it makes less than obvious what leaps to the eye in the Greek: that “real” and “reality” are simply the adjectival and nominal forms of “to be”, and that “is” in turn represents the verbal form of “real” and “reality”.

Plato does not speak of “grades” or “degrees” of reality. He says such things as these: The Form is “completely” real,¹ or “purely” real,² or “perfectly” real,³ or “really” real,⁴ it is “more real”¹ than its sensible instances, which are said to “fall between the purely real and the wholly unreal” (477a), because their state is such that “they both are and are not” (477a–478d). I want to ask three questions: First, what is the sense of “real” and “reality” in these statements? Second, why does Plato think the Forms are “more real” in this sense than are their sensible instances?² Third, what are the philosophical merits and demerits of this doctrine?

I

“True” is a fairly common meaning of “real” in spoken and written Greek. Thus Plato will say, “to speak (or, think) the real” for “to speak (or, think) the truth”.³ Moreover, in Greek, as in English, the predicate, “true”, applying primarily to propositions, may also apply, derivatively, to things described by propositions —to objects, persons, stuffs, states, processes, dispositions, and the like.⁴ In either language one can speak of “a true friend”, “true gold”, “true courage”, and so forth. In all such cases “real” can be substituted for “true” with little change of sense. We speak of “a real friend”, “real gold”, and the like. When we do this we think of things or persons as having those very properties in virtue of which they can be truly so described: e.g. of Jones as sympathetic, responsive, considerate, loyal, and whatever else we expect of a man whom we would call “a friend” when weighing our words, using them strictly and with a full view of the facts. Grammar itself would make this obvious if we had in English, as in Greek, a copula which is a verbal cognate of “real”. For we would then be saying that Jones is a “real” friend because he “reals” (= is) sympathetic, responsive, etc.; i.e. because he has those attributes in virtue of which sentences applying these predicates to him are true and would be found to be true if put to the test. This implicit reference to reliable truth is all that saves “real” from redundancy when used in this sense. There would be no point in saying that Jones is a “real” friend, as distinct from just saying that he is a friend, unless we were tacitly contrasting him with people who talk and act like friends, and for a time pass for friends, but then turn out to be fakes, i.e. unless we were expressing the conviction that Jones has “proved” a friend, or would “prove” one under trial.¹

What of “more real”? We would have no use for this expression if the logic of all predicates were like that of “diamond”, which divides all possible candidates for the description into just two classes, those which are (“real”) diamonds, and those which are not, with no intermediate category in between: the finest imitation diamond in the Fifth Avenue jewellery shop is no more of a real diamond than is the cheapest fake in Woolworth's. But in a wide variety of predicates we do want to recognise intermediate cases between the “real” and “not real” thing of that kind. A man may not be all one expects from a friend or from a scientist or a poet, yet measure up so much better to these descriptions than would any number of others that we would have no hesitation in saying that he is more of a real friend,² or scientist, or poet, than they. Or, to take a very different case: We see a painting, executed only partly by Rubens, the rest of the work done by pupils in his studio. Is this a “real” Rubens? It is, and it is not. It is more of one, certainly, than is an outright fake. But it is much less of one than would be a Rubens whose every brush-stroke came from the master's hand. The latter—the “real Rubens”—is what we would use as our authoritative source of knowledge of what “a Rubens” is.

When we try out this sense of “real” and “more real” in Plato we find uses that approach it closely. A fine example is his first use of “more real”:

¹ in Republic 515d. The passage is in the Allegory of the Cave. The man who had lived facing away from the light has just turned around to catch with dazzled eyes his first uncertain glimpse of the figures on the parapet that cast the shadows he had been taking for the “real” things his whole life long:

What do you suppose would be his answer if we were to tell him that he had seen nothing but trash heretofore, but that now, because he is² somewhat closer to reality and has turned towards more real things, he sees more correctly? And if we were to point to each of these passing objects [the figures] and make him answer the question, “What is it?”, don't you suppose he would be puzzled and count the things he had been seeing heretofore more true

than the ones pointed out to him now? (515d)

Suppose it were the statuette of a horse that he is looking at just now. In the most obvious sense of “real” this is no more of a “real horse” than are its silhouettes: no more than they is it a horse one needs to feed, can ride to town, and the like. But this sense of “real” has been screened out in the Allegory. Chained to his place, immobilised totally (he cannot even move his head), he has been drained of every mundane interest. The only thing left for him to be is homo cognoscens. The things he calls “horses” he scans with pure intellectual curiosity, intent on one thing only: to find out what he can, just by looking, in answer to the “What is it?”³ question. It is for just this purpose that he is now “somewhat closer to reality and has turned towards more real things”: looking at the figure of a horse before him “he sees more correctly” what a horse is.¹ The man who made it, let us suppose, was a fine craftsman, like one of those who cut the frieze of the P...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• DEGREES OF REALITY IN PLATO
• PLATO AND THE MATHEMATICIANS
• DIALECTIC IN THE ACADEMY
• ARISTOTLE ON THE SNARES OF ONTOLOGY
• ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION OF SUBSTANCE
• ARISTOTLE'S DISTINCTION BETWEEN ENERGEIA AND KINESIS
• THOUGHT AND ACTION IN ARISTOTLE
• ARISTOTLE ON JUSTICE: A PARADIGM OF PHILOSOPHY
• INDEX