Parmenides

The Parmenides. Objections to the Forms (all sly):
Not of hair, mud, fingernails, *chairs*? -- Everyone loves to make fun of chairs.
Then, the division of the forms so that things can partake of them,
"Spread over them all like a sail": each form has *parts*.
But if smallness has a part, won't smallness be *larger*?
And can something larger make anything small?
Next, the first argument from similarity:
Supposing several large objects and largeness itself
-- Since they are all large in the same way, isn't there some largeness beyond them, *ad infinitum*?
And if we make the mistake of saying that the forms are patterns, each thing made in the image of a form,
*If* a form is the image of something,
Don't we have a double reflection of the form in the image,
And hence need another form for both
(In this way constructing a hall of mirrors)?
Finally, the forms are unknowable, if we assume they are beyond:
Slavery itself is the master of the ideal slave, and we are lesser masters of a lesser race --
Leading to this conclusion, that knowledge is the ideal *magister* of all the things *over there*,
Whereas ours can only know of what is *here*. The twist?
That God, who must have perfect knowledge, cannot know of us.

Socrates objects twice: the forms are patterns of experience, and they exist in thought.
The second of these is the more important, which they try to refute thus:
"If forms are thoughts, then shouldn't all things think? (Presumably
They must think the form they would possess)."
Here we have the essential pattern, the *form* of the objections --
Wordplay signifying nothing.

Take the first, most *common* objection, that chairs cannot be formed:
A harmless misunderstanding. We need only say that the forms *structure* reality;
They make it possible, but they do not determine every part of it, every activity, at least not in themselves.
What are some of the candidates for form? Time, space, and motion --
A form need only encompass the broadest categories, without which experience would be *formless* chaos;
Everything else can be logically deduced *from* them,
And hence no need for an ideal chair.

Of course, we may be speaking of entirely different forms than Plato,
But we are interested in using these objections to explore the idea of *form*:
If Plato made mistakes, they will become apparent.
And here is an objection to a common practice -- understanding the philosophers --
What does it matter if you can argue that he meant Y rather than Z?
Not: to reconstruct the meaning of the work -- but to apply it to some problem like a light,
And see how far every permutation of its logic will take us.
We are reconstructing the foundations of life,
Looking over the shoddy remains of past efforts, tearing them apart
When we need an odd screw or a nail or a widget
That wasn't doing much good there, but can do much, and much more, here.

Resume. Supposing that the form of smallness were like a pill,
One of the cakes in Alice in Wonderland,
Which, if you partook of it, would make you smaller, larger, etc.
Of course, the metaphor breaks down --
We should not admit that the forms have quantity,
Because then we might imagine that large amounts do more, and smaller less,
Just as ten Advil cure a migraine, one a gentle ache.
It would be better to think of the forms in analogy with logical operators,
F(x), where x is the variable, and F() unchanging form;
If this were so, an endless number of specific things could be predicated to each form --
So much for that. This solves too, I think, the trouble with largeness.
If we were to say anything, it would be this:
The forms are of a different kind than the things which partake in them --
Logical and a priori -- and only if we treat them as material and a fortiori
Do we begin to run into a multitude of absurdities,
Such as those Parmenides later espouses in relation to the One, a barren wife.