Table of contents
- Introduction
- Properties of forms
- Algorithm
- Examples
- Summary
- Sources
Introduction
If you've seen a couple of threads involving (mostly featless) multiversal characters you have probably run into the term 'Platonic' which is used to confer unimaginable power to those characters simply because of the fact they are somehow related to a Platonic concept. So the term is basically treated as a free pass to winning the argument on which multiversal character beats the other one.
Having said that, this thread is meant to explain how Plato's Forms actually work, clear off misunderstandings regarding Plato's ideas and hopefully ward off people from using the above mentioned argument in the future.
Properties of forms
Let's start this by first defining what a form is - Plato's Theory of Forms says that the physical world is only a shadow of the true reality of the World of Forms which is purely abstract and non-physical in every way. He claims that Forms are more "real" than any physical object and as such present some sort of a 'scheme' for them.
The most important properties of Forms is that they are:
- Non-spatiotemporal
- Causally inert
- Perfect
- Absolute
Okay, so let's clarify more on what I mean by these three properties since not many battleboarders get the full picture on what does it mean to posses such qualities.
Non-spatiotemporality
First, non-spatiotemporality - since Plato's Forms are entirely aspatiotemporal, it follows that they are also entirely non-physical (they do not exist in the physical world and are not composed out of physical objects) and non-mental (they are not minds or ideas in minds nor are they disembodied souls, or Gods, or anything else along these lines).
This also means that notions such as birth, creation, death, destruction are not applicable to these entities as these terms imply there existed a specific moment in time that can be attributed to them when such an event occurred. Also, you obviously can't assign them any physical location of existence, like saying "they exist on this planet" or saying "they are inside this realm", etc... nor can you talk about their other spatial properties, like their size for example.
Causal inertness
Secondly, causal inertness of Platonic Forms, meaning that they are not responsible in any way for objects having the natures they have, and they do not play any important role in our explanations of why objects have the natures they have.
The more important implication of this property for battleboarding is them being unchanging, that is, they cannot be involved in cause-and-effect relationships with other physical entities. In other words, if your character ever interacted with a clearly physical one then he doesn't satisfy this property. Same goes for being affected as well (or affecting someone / something). In practice, this means that a Platonic character can't
- kill someone
- destroy something
- move in physical space (attack, talk, blink, breathe, etc...)
- and in general - perform any action that would be required of him to win the battle
Perfection
Next, Platonic concepts have to be perfect (or in Plato's terms, good, which is why the Form of Good is the highest platonic concept). This means that concepts such as evil, weakness, darkness, etc... are not Platonic concepts but actually failures of attaining their respective 'perfect' counterparts.
Absoluteness
Even though this might not necessarily be a property and moreso the restriction (or lack thereof) on other properties, I feel like it is the most important to bring up as most battleboarders call Plato's concepts 'relative' or just misunderstand what it means to be absolute.
The difference between relative and absolute should be obvious so I won't be going over it, but I will bring up one important point I've seen people use to counter the absoluteness of Plato's Forms, that is the problem with the fact all forms 'emanate' from the Form of Good. Why is this a problem ? Well, it's because the Forms should be absolutely causally inert and unchanging, but them emanating from something implies they have been changed at some point and have a causal connection with it, right ? Well, not quite:
- Remember that the Forms have the property of non-spatiotemporality ? This means that the Form of Good didn't exist before other Forms, because you can't apply the notion of time to it in the first place.
- Second, changing the Form of Good won't produce any changes in the other Forms. Why? Because the Form of Good is immutable in the first place.
- Thirdly, Plato doesn't really use the term emanated, especially since both of those have very specific meanings in philosophy that don't refer to what Plato says. The correct term would be partaking***which doesn't imply any change, but rather, the relationship
***More detailed explanation:
The philosophical notion of participation was used by plato to explain the relation between the contingent, individual forms and the eternal, unchangeable Ideas. aristotle attributes the origin of this doctrine to the Pythagoreans, who taught that all things exist by imitation (μίμησις) of numbers; for him, Plato simply introduced the new term participation (μέθεξις) and said that all things exist by participation, changing only the name.
Some other properties worth to mention
For battleboarding purposes, one very important such property is that Plato was a hardcore finitist (and so the cosmology of his works and the scope of his concepts in that cosmology were also finite). Ironically enough, Plato was actually referring to the world of change (a.k.a. the physical world) as infinite, but since the world we experience (physical world) isn't the "actual reality" in his works, this infinite was merely referring to the potential infinite.
Also worth to mention, is that Plato himself pointed out that he isn’t capable of stating where the limits of the form and the non-forms are being placed which makes any statement regarding whether something is Platonic or not highly questionable and inherently ambiguous. After all, how can you state whether someone (or something) embodies a Platonic Form if the person who created the idea doesn't know what separates such a being from ones that don't embody them... (this last paragraph actually makes every debate talking whether some character is Platonic or not extremely unproductive since the notion itself is ill-defined)
Algorithm
After listing out and explaining in detail every property an actual Platonic Form should satisfy, I thought about making a (relatively) simple algorithm for determining if the character is actually Platonic:
- Does your character represent some sort of concept not associated with perfection (like evil, darkness, death, weakness, famine, etc...) ? If yes, jump to 8.
- Was your character ever affected by any physical entity and did he ever affect such entities himself ? If yes, jump to 8.
- Was your character ever created or destroyed ? If yes jump to 8.
- Did your character ever change his state of existence in any way ? If yes, jump to 8.
- Can your character be described using spatial or temporal notions (like size, age, location, etc...) ? If yes, jump to 8.
- Does your character have any of his properties* (like mass, volume, energy output, etc..) in infinite quantities ? If yes, jump to 8.
- Congratulations, your character does embody a Platonic Form
- Unfortunately, your character does not embody a Platonic Form
*Note: Step 6. is actually redundant, since if the character actually posses any physical attribute in any quantity he clearly isn't abstract and as such isn't Platonic.
Examples
Well, since I've already written an algorithm on how to easily determine if a character is Platonic, let's take a look at some examples, that is, characters I've seen being referred to as Platonic and see if they can get past the algorithm I created above:
- Darkseid, the "platonic concept of evil" - nope, fails at Step 1.
- Sphere of Gods entities (from DC) - nope, fails at step 2.
- Lucifer (from DC) - nope, fails at step 2.
- Monitors (from DC) - nope, fails at step 2.
- Rimuru - nope, fails at step 2.
- Any Umineko character - nope, fail at step 2.
- Any Nasuverse character - nope, fail at step 2. (or 3.)
- Any Er Gen character (Meng Hao, Bai Xiaochun, etc..) - nope, fails at step 2. (or 3.)
- Any World of Darkness character - nope, fail at step 4.
- Goddess of the Manifold - nope, fail at step 6. (though likely step 2.)
- Monad (from Xelee) - nope, fail at step 6. (though likely step 2.)
- Cthulu Mythos Archetypes - nope, fail at step 6. (though likely at step 3.)
All in all, it's safe to say that you will extremely likely never encounter a character that actually represents a Platonic Form, purely because of the fact it's extremely hard to implement all the necessary properties such a character should satisfy.
Summary
Well, after all of this, it's safe to say you have two choices when debating someone that wants to argue that a clearly non-Platonic character embodies a Platonic Form:
- Expose their lack of knowledge on Plato's works by pointing out inconsistencies in his arguments that don't match with what Plato actually said
- Let them state with certainty that their character embodies a Platonic Form, in which case, you win the debate by default as his character would lose by not being able to perform any action in the battle which is required (and as a bonus you can also use the fact his character must also be finite)
Sources
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abstract-objects/
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/cosmo/lectures/lec18.html
https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/participation
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