Notes and Comments on Phaedo -- 33

13 September 2023

Notes and Comments on Phaedo – 33

Continuing with my series of posts on Phaedo, I am using the Harold North Fowler translation published by the Loeb Classical Library.

“’And great things are great and greater things greater by greatness, and smaller things smaller by smallness?’

“’Yes.’

“’And you would not accept the statement, if you were told that one man was greater or smaller than another by a head, but you would insist that you say only that every greater thing is greater than another by nothing else than greatness, and that it is greater by reason of greatness, and that which is smaller is smaller by nothing else than smallness and is smaller by reason of smallness.  For you would, I think, be afraid of meeting with the retort, if you said that a man was greater or smaller than another by a head, first that the greater is greater and the smaller is small by the same thing, and secondly, that the greater man is greater by a head, which is small, and that it is a monstrous thing that one is great by something that is small.  Would you not be afraid of this?’

“And Cebes laughed and said, ‘Yes, I should.’

“’Then,’ he continued, ‘you would be afraid to say that ten is more than eight by two and that this is the reason it is more.  You would say it is more by number and by reason of number; and a two-cubit measure is greater than a one-cubit measure not by half but by magnitude, would you not?  For you would have the same fear.’

“’Certainly,’ said he.

“’Well, then, if one is added to one or if one is divided, you would avoid saying that the addition or the division is the cause of two?  You would exclaim loudly that you know no other way by which anything can come into existence than by participating in the proper essence of each thing in which it participates, and therefore you accept no other cause of the existence of two than participation in duality, and things which are to be two must participate in duality, and whatever is to be one must participate in unity, and you would pay no attention to the divisions and additions and other such subtleties, leaving those for wise men to explain.  You would distrust your inexperience and would be afraid, as the saying goes, of your own shadow; so you would cling to that safe principle of ours and would reply as I have said.  And if anyone attacked the principle, you would pay him no attention and you would not reply to him until you had examined the consequences to see whether they agreed with one another or not; and when you had to give an explanation of the principle, you would give it in the same way by assuming some other principle which seemed to you the best of the higher ones, and so on until you reached one which was adequate.  You would not mix things up, as disputants do, in talking about the beginning and its consequences, if you wished to discover any of the realities; for perhaps not one of them thinks or cares in the least about these things.  They are so clever than they succeed in being well pleased with themselves even when they mix everything up; but if you are a philosopher, I think you will do as I have said.’

“’That is true,’ said Simmias and Cebes together.”

1.  Socrates moves the discussion forward from focusing on beauty to other abstractions and ideas that, in my opinion, are more difficult to understand than that of beauty.  I say this because we are used to thinking of individual objects, or occasions, as beautiful; in other words, beauty is not normally thought of as a relation.  We might say that X is more beautiful than Y, and that would be a relation; but when we say ‘X is beautiful’ the language resembles saying ‘X is green.’  This allows us to think of beauty as a quality modifying an object and I think this tendency smooths the way to thinking about beauty as such.

In contrast, ideas like greater and smaller are normally thought of as relations; that is to say, a relationship between at least two objects.  Even if we do not explicitly name the second object, for example if we say, “Jane is smaller,” I think we would assume that there is a comparison, or relationship, involved.  We might even ask, “Jane is smaller than whom?” or “Jane is smaller than what?” 

Socrates is extending the argument to other categories and applying what he taught about beauty to these other categories such as comparisons, and, later on, number.

2.  Socrates is presenting the view that when we say that ‘X is greater than Y’, we say this because X is participating in the form of ‘greater than’ and not because of material, sensory, observations or data.  This runs contrary to our usual way of thinking about this.  If I say that Jim is six inches taller than Ken, my immediate feeling is that this is because of measurements that have been taken; I don’t think of this ‘taller than’ in terms of noetic forms.  Socrates seeks to uncover certain conceptual dilemmas in approaching these relationships on a material basis.  For example, six inches is a small amount when compared to either Jim or Ken, and so Socrates says that this implies that Jim is taller by the smaller, which sounds very odd, even incoherent.

Many of us, however, are likely to respond that we are looking at the six inches as being added on to the height of Ken, and that there is nothing strange about doing that.  We are content that the difference in height can be accounted for in material terms.

3.  I think it is helpful to recall that Socrates is speaking here in terms of noetic causation; meaning how noetic realities, such as being, life, intellect, numbers, and so forth, are causes of material things.  In noetic realities distinctions that are inherent in materiality are present as unities.  When Socrates suggests that Cebes would never accept that person X was greater or smaller than person Y except by greatness and smallness, Socrates is speaking from a noetic understanding, not a material understanding.

What does that mean?  First, in noetic realities mutually exclusive, or contradictory, realities exist and function as unities; they are unified.  Greater and smaller are not distinct noetic realities, but they are distinct material realities.  That is why they always appear together, because they are a unity in the noetic realm and a remnant of their unity is present in material reality as their mutually dependent nature.

Second, noetic realities have no material content.  When looking at the three primary facets of noetic reality, being, mind/intellect, and life, their names describe eternal functions of the noetic realm, but not specific material manifestations.  Noetic being is not the being of a table, or a mountain, or a hawk; it is being as such.  Noetic mind is not filled with intellectual, or analytical, content; it is mind as such (awareness, consciousness).  And Noetic life is not the life of individualized beings; it is Life as such, the energy of Life, the Breath of Life. 

Because noetic realities have no material content it is possible for differentiated material reality to instantiate a noetic reality in ways that from a material perspective might seem mutually exclusive.  The process of differentiation is that creation of mutually exclusive material realities in the third hypostasis, but these realities are not mutually exclusive in the noetic sphere.

4.  It might be helpful to look at it from a less stark example of mutual exclusivity.  The noetic form of tree, or ‘treeness’, does not itself contain any trees.  It is because it does not contain any trees that it functions as the cause for all trees; oaks, pines, maples, elms, hawthorns, and so forth.  An oak is not a pine and the form of treeness is neither of these, yet the form of treeness is the causal basis for all trees.

5.  Part of the confusion, I suspect, is that material reality is often depicted in Platonic writing, as an ‘image’ of noetic reality; a deficient image, but nevertheless an image.  This implies that the forms resemble the relevant material manifestations in some manner.  While this analogy is a good teaching tool, I think it sometimes leads people to think that noetic realities have content that is like the material manifestations that the form is the cause of.  I think this leads to misunderstanding (I’m self-reporting here).

Even in material reality, material causes do not have to resemble what they are causing.  For example, sheet music does not make any sound and will silently lay there without objection.  But the sheet music can function as a cause of a sonic occasion such as a song or a symphony even though the sheet music has no sonic content.

6.  Plotinus writes about this aspect of the dialogue in Ennead VI.6, On Number:

“A thing exists more, not when it comes to be many or large, but when it belongs to itself: and it belongs to itself in tending to itself.  But the desire to be great in this way is the property of something which does not know what true greatness is and is hastening not where it should but to the exterior; but the direction towards itself was inward.  A sign of this is that when a thing comes to exist in magnitude, if it is by separation of parts, it exists as each and every one of its parts, and they each of them exist, but not the original thing itself; but if it is going to be itself, all its parts must tend to one: so that it is itself when it is one in some way, not large.  So through magnitude and as far as depends on magnitude it loses itself; but as far as it possesses a one, it possesses itself.”

(Plotinus, Ennead VI.6, On Number, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988, pages 11-13, ISBN: 9780674995154)

In this part of Phaedo Socrates is talking about magnitude, greater or smaller.  What Plotinus is pointing out is that when we comprehend things as essentially magnitudes they lose their unity.  But Socrates is speaking from the perspective of the noetic and in the noetic differentiated magnitude has not yet manifested.  Because differentiated magnitude has not yet manifested in the noetic Socrates insists that such differentiations as greater and smaller cannot be causes of these realities; rather they are results of the differentiation that takes place when noetic realities instantiate into the material domain.

(As an aside, I think Ennead VI.6, On Number as a whole is very helpful for understanding this part of Phaedo.)

7.  Socrates continues with a focus on numbers and their relationships.  Socrates uses the example of 1 being added to 1, or of 1 being divided; in both cases there are now two things where before there was one thing.  How does that happen?  It happens so naturally that we tend to not give an account of it, but the more we focus on this the more mysterious it becomes.  Socrates states that the cause of the appearance of twoness (I prefer twoness to the term ‘duality’) is due to participation in that noetic form, the form of twoness.  This is the explanation that Socrates provides, but it is not easy to accept this explanation without some contemplative experience of noetic realities.  By introducing this kind of explanation Socrates is both providing a philosophical perspective on how material realities emerge and transform, but Socrates is also pointing to the path to these noetic realities; he is opening the gate to the noetic realm.

8.  Socrates closes this part of the dialogue by suggesting that Simmias and Cebes not ‘mix up’ causal explanations, but instead remain dedicated to the understanding of the origin of things in the noetic realm.  Socrates emphasizes that ‘if you are a philosopher’ that is what you will do.  This is a significant pointer to the way an advanced practitioner of philosophy looks at the world in which we live.  After much practice the philosopher comprehends things, and, I suggest, perceives things as manifestations of, or instantiations of, or participants in, noetic forms, noetic realities.  An analogy might help; it is possible through practice to see all living things on earth as manifestations of the sun.  I mean to see that everything is a result of the energy and warmth that the sun pours out upon the earth.  In general, people do not do this.  Instead they tend to see things in isolation, or if they have some understanding of causation, they may perceive things in a causal chain, such as a family’s heritage, or a geologist might see mountains and valleys in terms of the movements of tectonic plates, or a chemist might see things in terms of their constituent chemicals.  But ultimately, all of these are dependent upon the sun and would not have manifested at all without participating in the sun’s energy.

In a similar way, noetic realities are the essential foundation for the existence of the things that we perceive.