Page 19 - GALIET FORMS AND UNFORMS: Aristotle´s Refutation to Plato IV

for it belongs to itself, to its own nature, it is as whole and as complete as Parmenides’ circle: individisible (belonging to Truth rather than Doxai) and therefore what is good is not “identical in them all” as Aristotle posits in the Nichomachean Ethics, for the whiteness of snow and the whiteness of lead do belong to the same Form of Whiteness, not as a quality of multivocity but as a univocity of being.
Ethically, Aristotle’s relativism that “honor, wisdom and pleasure...in respect of their goodness ...are distinct and diverse” (1097a, 24-25), would meet with a Socratic refusal of immense proportions: for Socrates would never participate in Nietzsche’s moral relativism; hence, the tremendous appeal that Platonism offered the early Christian church fathers who manipulated and interpreted Plato’s work to serve their best interests, thus paradoxically confirming Thrasymachus’ experience that “justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger” (Rep I, 338c) and justifying claims for power, holocausts and massacres over two millennia. Because Aristotle does not persistently poke into the concept of Good with as sharp a fork as Plato does, his conclusion that “the good is not some common element answering to one idea” (1097a, 26) is strongly weak and not as coherent as those immortal Socratic dialogues that squeeze one’s soul. Likewise, when Aristotle posits that “it (the form) will not be the good for being eternal” (1096b, 38-39), Socrates does not qualify good as a quantum of eternity, instead he says that the good is good because it is just and what is just is good for its own sake and for its benefit.
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