OF THINGS PLATONIC

(This is a strictly reference entry, yet, being an integral part of my larger Plato series, I have made it postable.)

The good reader may realize that we have already talked “of things Platonic” in the last entry. Chomsky’s term “Plato’s problem” has no formal origin in Plato, but it refers to an actual problem considered by Plato, and thus labeled by Chomsky, talking “of things Platonic.”

Generally speaking, Plato is an incredibly rich source of ideas, which, as I have already mentioned several times before, led Alfred North Whitehead to pronounce that all subsequent Western philosophy, including modern philosophy, has been merely “a series of footnotes to Plato.” Not only that, but the great Greek has also been an incredibly powerful inspiration for all sorts of allusions and fits of name-calling.

Here are just three examples of what I have in mind, based on their appearance as bona fide linguistic items in my good old Webster’s Dictionary. The definitions from that selfsame dictionary are also provided.---

Platonic Love. Not amorous or sensual, but purely spiritual love.

Platonic Bodies. The five regular geometrical solids, namely, the tetrahedron, hexahedron (or cube), octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron.

Platonic Year. The great year: a period of time determined by the revolution of the equinoxes, or the space of time in which the stars and constellations return to their former places in respect to the equinoxes. This revolution, which is calculated by the precession of the equinoxes, is accomplished in about 26,000 of the earth’s years.

Here now all three of them are in an additional elaboration, courtesy of the Wikipedia:

Platonic love in this original sense of the term is examined in Plato’s dialogue the Symposium, which has as its topic the subject of love, or Eros, generally. It explains the possibilities of how the feeling of love began, and how it has evolved, both sexually and non-sexually. Of particular importance is the speech of Socrates, relating the ideas attributed to the prophetess Diotima, which present love as a means of ascent to contemplation of the divine. For Diotima, and for Plato generally, the most correct use of love of other human beings is to direct one’s mind to love of divinity. In short, with genuine platonic love, the beautiful or lovely other person inspires the mind and the soul and directs one’s attention to spiritual things. Socrates in Plato’s Symposium explained two types of love: Vulgar Eros, or earthly love, and Divine Eros, or divine love. Vulgar Eros is nothing but material attraction towards a beautiful body for physical pleasure and reproduction. Divine Eros begins the journey from physical attraction, i.e. attraction towards beautiful form or body, but transcends gradually to love for Supreme Beauty. This concept of Divine Eros is later transformed into the term Platonic love.

In Euclidean geometry, a Platonic solid is a regular, convex polyhedron. The faces are congruent, regular polygons, with the same number of faces meeting at each vertex. There are exactly five solids which meet those criteria; each is named according to its number of faces.

The Platonic solids feature prominently in the philosophy of Plato, for whom they are named. Plato wrote about them in the dialogue Timaeus c.360 B.C. in which he associated each of the four classical elements (earth, air, water, and fire) with a regular solid. Earth was associated with the cube, air with the octahedron, water with the icosahedron, and fire with the tetrahedron. There was intuitive justification for these associations: the heat of the fire feels sharp and stabbing (like a little tetrahedra). Air is made of the octahedron; its minuscule components are so smooth that one can barely feel it. Water, the icosahedron, flows out of one’s hand when picked up, as if it is made of tiny little balls. By contrast, a highly un-spherical solid, the hexahedron (cube) represents earth. These clumsy little solids cause dirt to crumble and break when picked up, in stark difference to the smooth flow of water. Moreover, the solidity of the Earth was believed to be due to the fact that the cube is the only regular solid that tesselates Euclidean space. The fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron, Plato obscurely remarks, the god used for arranging the constellations on the whole heaven.

The term Great Year has a variety of related meanings. It is defined by NASA as: “The period of one complete cycle of the equinoxes around the ecliptic, about 25,800 years… also known as Platonic Year.” One complete cycle of the equinoxes here means one complete cycle of axial precession, however, such precession was unknown to Plato, who defined the “perfect year” as the return of the celestial bodies (planets) and the diurnal rotation of the fixed stars (circle of the Same) to their original positions. Plato’s description of the perfect year is found in his dialogue Timaeus:

“And so people are all but ignorant of the fact that time really is the wanderings of these bodies, bewilderingly numerous as they are and astonishingly variegated. It is none the less possible, however, to discern that the perfect number of time brings to completion the perfect year at the exact moment when the relative speeds of all eight periods have been completed together and, as measured by the circle of the Same which moves uniformly, have achieved their consummation.”

This concludes my entry, for the time being. Should I later come up with more things Platonic, I will know where exactly to put them, and how: by expanding this entry until there are no more such “things” left.