Plato ranks changeless Forms over the world of nature as Appearance
Evidence
In Plato’s psychology the complexity and diversity of the human personality are marshalled into alignment with these two sharply contrasting, mutually exclusive and opposing orders. These discontinuous contrasted orders correspond on the one hand to the world of the Forms or of Reality, which is changeless, immaterial, incorruptible, a world of timeless abstract ideas, and on the other to the ‘world of changes’, of becoming, which Plato identifies as the world of Appearance. The world of Appearance is the world we can see, touch, hear and smell, the world of ‘coming into being and passing away’, the world of biological life. In a major sense of the term ‘nature’, it is the world of nature. The term ‘reality’ indicates the explanatory, epistemological, political and ontological priority of the higher sphere of the Forms (Ideas) or reason over the lower sphere of biological life, of nature. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 342
Categorization
- XREF: This maps Plato’s Forms/reality over nature as appearance directly onto Descartes’ mind over body split carried forward by Merchant in The Death of Nature — the historical bridge chapter ch1 established. — connects to: Modernity recodifies Plato’s form-change hierarchy as a hard-soft gendered division — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 446; The warrior-hero’s choice of honour over life structures Plato’s devaluation of nature — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 377; Descartes relocated the Platonic devaluation of nature from virtue into consciousness — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 423 (+5 more)
- DEFINE: Defines how the reality/appearance split is the basic scaffold for the wider reason/nature dualism.
Broader Connections
- Modernity recodifies Plato’s form-change hierarchy as a hard-soft gendered division
#expands(0.85) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 446 - Platonic self-harmony is achieved through internal colonization of nature by reason
#expands(0.85) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 348 - A single reason-over-nature dualism structures every domain of Plato’s philosophy
#expands(0.85) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 312 - The warrior-hero’s choice of honour over life structures Plato’s devaluation of nature
#expands(0.80) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 377 - Plato argues that real knowledge derives from concepts rather than sensory perception
#corroborates(0.80) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 674 - Descartes relocated the Platonic devaluation of nature from virtue into consciousness
#expands(0.75) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 423 - Contemporary beauty norms reproduce a Platonic dualism of body as lack to be mastered
#expands(0.75) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 306 - Plato through German idealism grounded reason in an objective hierarchy of beings.
#expands(0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1457