2 The Platonic Cut: Ideal Forms and the Partition of Possibility

If the pre-Socratics shifted construal from divine genealogy to elemental principle, Plato enacted a sharper and more enduring cut: the abstraction of potential into the realm of transcendent universals. This Platonic division established a new horizon of thought in which possibility was no longer bound to the flux of becoming but secured in the permanence of ideal form.

Plato’s theory of Forms was not a mere doctrine of metaphysical dualism but a decisive reorganisation of construal. The sensible world, with its change and imperfection, was relegated to the status of appearance, while true being was assigned to the immutable domain of Ideas. In this framework, possibility was severed into two registers: the eternal potential of universals, and the deficient actualisations encountered in material existence.

The Platonic cut thus partitioned possibility itself. On one side, the Form as pure potentiality: the perfect circle, the ideal justice, the true good. On the other, the shadowed copies that participate without ever attaining the full measure of the ideal. Knowledge, accordingly, was redefined as recollection of the transcendent, a turning of the soul away from sensible particularity toward universal truth.

What this introduced was a new construal of potential: as that which is purified of time, change, and perspective. The Platonic Form guaranteed the stability of meaning by abstracting it from the contingencies of the world. In doing so, it established an enduring architecture of construal — one that has shaped Western philosophy ever since.

The cost, however, was the foreclosure of relational becoming. By binding possibility to transcendent universals, Plato set a precedent for construing actuality as derivative, flawed, and dependent. The richness of emergence was subordinated to the fixity of ideality.

Plato’s achievement, then, was to give philosophy its first ontology: a system of being grounded in abstract possibility. Yet his legacy is also the enduring tension between potential as living process and potential as transcendent form — a tension that has defined the trajectory of Western thought from antiquity to the present.