A Celebration of Living Theology by Aldea Leonard Mihoc Justin A

Author:Aldea, Leonard,Mihoc, Justin A.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

The Genealogy of forms

In this connection, Bradshaw is entirely right to say that Rowan Williams has no warrant for supposing that neoplatonists were ever so naive as to ‘reify merely logical distinctions’, such that attributes are wrenched away from the subjects within which they should lie – whether finite or transcendent.70 Indeed, neoplatonism entirely rests upon (a largely correct) ‘henological’ reading of the Platonic forms whereby, as exemplars, they are not taken to be ‘very big things’ nor even to be ‘universals’ (as the neoplatonic commentaries on Plato make clear), since, for example, the universal abstraction ‘animal in general’ can paradoxically only ever be thought of as itself another instance of ‘animal’, just as P. J. Cohen in modern times showed that an ‘indiscernible’ general member of a set can still belong to a set.71

Thus in the Parmenides (132 b-c), Plato rightly suggests that the ‘third man’ argument deployed by Aristotle against ‘Platonic’ forms as ‘super-individuals’ must also apply against the ‘Aristotelian’ view that forms are abstract universals. But in point of fact, Aristotle himself denies in the Metaphysics that substance as essence or form is properly a universal.72 Rather, it can exist both as the form of a particular thing and in the mode of a universal in the mind that comprehends it. But in itself, form is indifferent to either universal or particular. Hence, Lloyd Gerson is right to say that at this point, Aristotle agrees with Platonism about one characteristic of form, even if the Stagirite wrongly (and very oddly) supposes that for Plato forms were super-individuals.73 Moreover, when he attacks forms as separable universals rather than as separable super-individuals, it is possible that he is not criticizing Platonic forms at all, but some other philosophical construal of their character.

Relevant here is the evidence from the Phaedrus (249 c) that Plato did not deny the ‘Aristotelian’ process of acquiring a ‘universal’ knowledge of form by process of mental abstraction: indeed, how could the Platonic question as to the nature of the existence of ‘the one in many’ ever arise, were we not capable of this process? However, as the neoplatonic commentaries on this passage suggest, ‘abstraction’ does not render ‘recollection’ redundant because precisely the Aristotelian refusal of the form as mere universal (which would tend to engender a nominalist reduction of universal to fiction) leaves the question of the origin of eidos and of the capacity for specifically intellectual ‘recognition’ of eidos as first derived from the senses, entirely unanswered.74 What mediates between ‘abstraction’ and ‘recollection’ (of knowledge once had by a pre-existent soul) for Proclus is a certain ‘trace’ of the forms abiding in the soul: this is not a kind of a priori understanding, but rather a power of the mind to synthesize and unite.75 Thus, we do not for Proclus know ‘in advance’, as for Kant, an innate conceptual repertoire, but rather, we only know what the mind can do after it has done it. This of course raises in a new form the

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