Philosophy Has Always Been (Sort of) Transcendental

The Argument From Ideality in Plato's Phaedo

The following is an introduction to a key kind of philosophical argument (the transcendental), it being one important sub-argument for the Platonic Forms.

Prolegomena to Any Future Claims I Make About My Critical-Transcendental Bonafides

Sometimes you hear the narrative that, prior to a certain point in the history of philosophy (usually Kant, but I’ve heard all sorts of things), philosophy was merely “dogmatic”. After that point, it became “critical”. This word “critical” unfortunately possesses a great deal of meanings which I do not understand.¹ But one term that frequently accompanies it is “transcendental”. While this term has, again, many technical uses depending on the context and tradition in which it is found, there is a common usage of it which refers to something, if not invented or first employed by Plato, then at least perfected by him.

People tend to gloss “transcendental argument” as, roughly, “an argumentative movement from certain givens to their conditions of possibility”. We take something in front of our faces, so to speak, something empirical or concrete or otherwise there (I mean right there), and we try to explain what the world or the subject or the mind (or whatever) must be like in order for that datum or starting-point to be or to appear as it does. What are the presuppositions and structuring principles behind what I’m seeing? What sort of thing am I such that I can see it? How is it that this thing is given to me, and in just the way it’s given?

Transcendental argument is thus supposed to avoid the unauthorized metaphysical presuppositions of the old dogmatic philosophy. Instead of an assertion about reality independent of what is given to us, transcendental argument is supposed to provide access to the conditions of possibility for what is given to us in our experience.² These conditions may be formal (as in Kant), or something very definitely not formal (as in Heidegger); it may be tied to something like a “transcendental subject/ego” or to some other entity, or if not entity then “site”, &c. The possibilities are endless.

I won’t be so bold as to say that nothing changed with the advent of self-identifying transcendental philosophy/phenomenology. Indeed, from what I can tell, a great deal was irrevocably lost, whatever might have been simultaneously gained (no comment). But I will say that these common truisms regarding the “transcendental” obfuscate more than they clarify.

For one thing, philosophy has always been transcendental, making use of transcendental arguments (even if it also was, of course, dogmatic, but what isn’t?). The paradigm Platonic argument for the Forms, what I call the “Argument From Ideality” in Plato’s Phaedo (roughly from 73a, where recollection is invoked, to the climactic statement around 74e, and finally the synthesis of ideality with recollection just after that), is nothing but a transcendental argument. Plato, and Platonism, were already transcendental. Not “critical philosophy” in the way it is meant these days, but transcendental. Maybe the people I’ve talked to about this simply glossed over the Phaedo. Maybe they decided it was merely dogmatic before getting to line 73. Maybe they failed to consider x, y, and z, which of course everyone would do well to take into account.

Yes, philosophy has always been transcendental. That’s kind of what “philosophy” means, if you look at how a philosophical explanation functions according to Plato, and Aristotle, and the whole tradition of Platonic successors. If this is a strawman, that’s fine, just know that I’ve seen the strawman built in front of my very eyes a statistically improbable number of times while in graduate school.

To show you what I mean, let’s take a little look at that section of the Phaedo and see just how it is that the Forms are established there.

(Note: The following commentary is presented to emphasize the transcendental nature of the argument there, and not to give my best-considered and most-convincing argument for the Forms. It is a sketch that will be of greatest interest to those less familiar with Plato, though maybe there is something in it for others too.)

Phaedo 73a-74e: The Argument From Ideality

What is recollection? It is when we see a thing, whatever it might be, and are thereby reminded of something else. That of which we are reminded may be either like or unlike that which sparked the memory. One sees a man, and is reminded of some other man. Or perhaps one feels something very hot and is reminded of something very cold. Something is called to mind that is actually absent, but nonetheless by recollection becomes present to the one remembering, though in another manner. Importantly, any instance of recollection requires that “we must at some previous time have learned what we now recollect” (73a). We cannot recollect what we did not already know, though the precise manner of this “knowing” may be obscure to us. Perhaps it is present only by degree, and some things may be only partially recollected, or we recollect something related to them, or some aspect or characteristic of them, but cannot put our finger on just what it is towards which we are groping.

Well, you know what happens to lovers: whenever they see a lyre, a garment, or anything else that their beloved is accustomed to use, they know the lyre, and the image [eidos] of the boy to whom it belong comes into their mind. (73d)

Like or unlike, similarity, mere association whether positive or negative, there nonetheless remains some intelligible content that connects the cause of the recollection and the thing which is recollected. This is the first point.

Now what sort of things do we recollect? The prior examples given by Socrates appear to be all of a single type: a sensible token causes one to recollect another sensible. Socrates even says at this point in the argument that the eidos is called up. Now eidos can be translated in many ways, but it is ambiguous here in that it refers to “image” (as Grube translates it in the block quote) as well as “form” (the translation of Emlyn-Jones and Preddy). It is precisely something that traverses the sensible and intelligible to some degree. I see the lyre, and I recall the beloved. Before my mind there is a mental image, certainly, but what it is that I recall is not exhausted by the (sensible) image in the imagination. This is not yet an argument for the existence of Forms, but it is already slipping in that direction.

The argument proceeds to consider the Forms through the clarification of the intelligibility of what is recollected, and this is arrived at by establishing the fact that, in at least some cases, the cause of the recollection is deficient with respect to what is recollected.

We say that there is something that is equal. I do not mean a stick equal to a stick or a stone to a stone, or anything of that kind, but something else beyond these, the Equal itself. (74a)

What it is to be equal is not to be confused with a thing that happens to be equal. So far, so good.

Whence have we acquired the knowledge of it? Is it not from the things we mentioned just now, from seeing sticks or stones or some other things that are equal we come to think of that other which is different from them? Or doesn’t it seem to you to be different? Look at it also this way: Do not equal stones and sticks sometimes, while remaining the same, appear to one to be equal and to another to be unequal? (74b)

My judgment wavers. I see now two equal sticks, now (perhaps from a different angle) two rather unequal sticks. Maybe to really discover whether they are actually equal or not, I need to measure them. Maybe I need some sophisticated means to measuring them to an extreme degree of precision. Well, are they equal or not? It doesn’t actually matter here. The key point is that the appearance of the sticks as either equal or unequal is possible, even if they are not at this exact moment changing appreciably in the exact respect of length. Whether they are “perfectly equal” or not, they do not appear as what they are, or at least they might not do so.

But what of the equals themselves? Have they ever appeared unequal to you, or Equality to be Inequality? (74c)

Equality as such does not appear to the intellect to be Inequality, despite the fact that those things which we say to be equal can in fact appear to the senses as being unequal. The “deficiency” of the equal sticks is in their partial or wavering appearance, their appearing as what they are not or failing to appear as they are. This is, however, impossible for intelligible content such as Equality or Inequality. These simply appear as they are, and they either appear or they do not.

When Heidegger writes that noein “is the perception of the simplest determinate ways of Being which entities as such may possess”, that it “perceives them just by looking at them”, and that this noein “is what is ‘true’ in the purest and most primordial sense” in that “it merely discovers” and “can never cover up”, he is not too far from Plato (though his interpretations of these same assertions are wildly different from the Platonic understanding).³

Plato/Socrates continues:

Whenever someone, on seeing something, realizes that that which he now sees wants to be like some other reality but falls short and cannot be like that other since it is inferior, do we agree that the one who thinks this must have prior knowledge of that to which he says it is like, but deficiently so? (74e)

Keeping in mind that recollection was said to function with the like and the unlike, we should think a little more about what is being established with this talk of hierarchical likeness/unlikeness. The sensible “wants to be like some other reality”, it “falls short”, it “cannot be like that other”, it is “inferior”, it is “like, but deficiently so”. We notice this pure content in the impure. They are not unrelated. It is not quite like the lyre and the lover example, for here it is not a contingent or external relation that establishes the recollection. Instead, it is a single content (likeness) with a difference of plenitude or perfection (unlikeness). Both are present in the moment of recollection, and the two are related in a definite way.

Do we ever see this Equality before our very eyes? Equality is not the sort of thing you see with the eyes, for in fact you see equal things, whether sticks or stones. In fact, Equality is an intelligible. We are brought to recollection of it by seeing things that are deficiently equal (sensibles), and to recollect it, we must have known or “seen” it beforehand. But this has never happened in our lives, of course, and so we are recollecting what we already possessed or knew or experienced prior to our birth. Hence recollection and ideality (this intelligible content of things like Equality) together produce the desired result, that intelligible content was in our souls from the beginning, so to speak.

Transcendentality & Ideality

The above summary was presented not expressly for the purpose of convincing the skeptic (which it will not), nor for reconstructing the most plausible and formally correct account of the logic of the passage (which it certainly did not), but so that the transcendental aspect of Platonism could be brought out as clearly as possible.

We are presented with a given: “those sticks look equal to me”. Or perhaps they look unequal. In either case, they appear a certain way, and I judge them to be a certain way, and all of this is irrespective of whether they are or are not actually equal. The given here is never, in this particular argument, determined to be really and truly one thing and not another. Sensibles are left as they are, as givens.

The move is from these givens, as they merely appear, to the conditions of possibility that make them able to appear that way to me. The givens, we might say, possess the intelligible content, and I can recognize that content because of the conditions, which turn out to be that same content but apparently existing in some other manner. They are different sorts of things. This is, remember, because pure noein cannot disclose something as other than what it is, and it either appears or it does not. Equality does not partially appear or hide something of itself, unlike the sticks.

If I did not apprehend Equality in some manner, I could not apprehend the equal sticks. The Equality existing in my soul is a precondition for the appearance of the equal sticks (again, whether they are equal or not).

It is, in a way, reminiscent of Descartes’ cosmological argument in the Meditations. There, he argues that we perceive, judge, and know the finitude and imperfection of things, and therefore we must know also the infinite and the perfect. It’s a similar move, but there Descartes also relies on some metaphysical assumptions about causality and existence (which, hey, nothing wrong with metaphysical assumptions, I’m just saying the Platonic argument here does not try to go as far, though it ultimately does by the end of the Phaedo). Even the “clear and distinct ideas” thing in Descartes is just an early modern gloss on what Plato says here about the mode in which intelligible content appears. I’m not a serious student of Descartes, of course.

Ideality for Plato is therefore transcendental, and the argument that establishes it is a transcendental argument, moving from givens to conditions of possibility without thereby determining the being of what was given qua given.

But Platonism does not stop there. The intelligible content can transform from being merely a transcendental condition to being a kind of pure presence, accessible “in itself” and not merely in the instances it enables. This will ultimately be identified with the real being of what was given, such that conditions and givens have a relationship that ends up being different from what they are said to possess by the newfangled critical philosophers. The Platonic move at that point, however, is not quite as big as it might seem at first glance, though it does lead through Parmenides.

How far one wants to take this is up to them, but it seems to me that maybe Plato was the first transcendental phenomenologist, and if so, definitely the best to ever do it.⁴

1. I’ve never read even one the Critiques all the way through.

2. The problem with this, in my experience, ends up being that you’re left with a bunch of transcendental conditions that each claim primacy over the others and there’s no good way to adjudicate. Maybe it even becomes a matter of hermeneutic excess. At least, this is what happens in a lot of transcendental phenomenology to which I’ve been unwittingly exposed.

3. Heidegger, Being and Time p. 57 (trans. Macquarrie and Robinson)

4. This is merely provocative.