Parmenides

Overview

Eighty pages in two utterly unlike halves. The first is dramatic, famous and readable. The second is a hundred and fifty pages of deduction in the Greek, compressed into fifty or so in English, with no drama at all and a respondent who mostly says yes.

The frame is elaborate. Cephalus reports a conversation he had with Antiphon, who memorised an account he heard from Pythodorus, who was present when it happened. Three removes, which Plato does deliberately: what follows is old, transmitted, and not to be taken as anything Socrates is saying now.

The scene is set around 450 BCE. Parmenides, about sixty-five, has come to Athens for the Great Panathenaea with his pupil Zeno, about forty. Socrates is very young, perhaps twenty, and eager. The chronology is almost certainly invented, and the effect of the invention is that the man who would become Plato’s Socrates meets the founder of Eleatic philosophy as a clever boy meets a master.

Plato wrote it late, after the Republic, when the theory of Forms was already his. There is no consensus on what he thought he was doing.

The argument

The opening: Zeno’s paradoxes. Zeno has been reading from a book arguing that if things are many, they must be both like and unlike, which is impossible. Socrates sees at once what Zeno is up to: the book defends Parmenides by attacking his opponents, showing that plurality leads to absurdities worse than monism.

Socrates then makes his proposal. There is nothing strange, he says, in a thing being both like and unlike, if it partakes of the Form of Likeness and the Form of Unlikeness. What would be a marvel is if the Forms themselves were mixed. Separate the Forms from their instances and Zeno’s puzzles dissolve.

This is the theory of Forms, stated confidently by a twenty-year-old. Parmenides then dismantles it.

The objections. Five of them, in ascending seriousness.

First, extent. Are there Forms of just and beautiful and good? Yes. Of human being, fire, water? Socrates is unsure. Of hair, mud, dirt? Socrates recoils, and then admits he sometimes worries that consistency demands them. Parmenides says he is still young and that philosophy will take hold of him and then he will not despise anything.

Second, participation. Does a thing that partakes of a Form get the whole Form or a part of it? If the whole, then the one Form is present entire in many separate places. If a part, the Form is divided, and then a thing is large by having a piece of Largeness, which is smaller than Largeness.

Third, the regress. We call a group of things large because we see one Form over them. But now put Largeness alongside the large things and consider what they have in common: a second Largeness appears, and then a third, without end. Aristotle called this the Third Man and used it against Plato for the rest of his career.

Fourth, the retreat to thoughts. Socrates suggests the Forms might be thoughts in minds. Parmenides replies that a thought is a thought of something, so the Form is still there as what the thought is about, and besides, if things partake of thoughts then everything thinks.

Fifth, and Parmenides calls it the greatest difficulty. If Forms are separate, existing themselves by themselves, then they are related to each other and not to us. Mastery itself is master of Slavery itself, not of any human slave. And so Knowledge itself is knowledge of Truth itself, while our knowledge is of our things. We cannot know the Forms. And a god, having perfect knowledge, knows the Forms and therefore cannot know or rule anything here.

Socrates has no answer. Parmenides then says something important: without Forms, there is nothing for thought to fix on and philosophy is destroyed. The objections are not a refutation. They are a demonstration that the theory as stated will not do.

The prescription. Socrates’ fault, Parmenides says, is that he tried to define the beautiful and the just before being trained. The training is to take any hypothesis and work out the consequences both of its truth and of its falsity, for the subject in relation to itself and to everything else. Zeno recognises the method as his own, carried much further.

Socrates asks for a demonstration. Parmenides, reluctantly, gives one, and the second part begins.

The eight deductions. The hypothesis is: the One is. Parmenides runs through the consequences in a fixed pattern.

If the One is one, in the strictest sense, then it has no parts, no shape, is in nothing, is neither at rest nor in motion, is not the same as or different from anything, is not in time, does not partake of being, and therefore is not and is not even one. The first deduction destroys its own subject.

Then he takes the hypothesis differently, as a One that is, which has both unity and being as parts, and everything comes back: number, limit and unlimitedness, shape, place, motion and rest, sameness and difference, likeness, equality, time, and coming to be.

Six more follow, on the others in relation to the One, and then the same schedule for the hypothesis that the One is not, which still generates results. The closing sentence says that whether one is or is not, it and the others both are and are not, appear and do not appear, in all ways.

Young Aristoteles, the respondent, agrees to everything. He is not the philosopher Aristotle. Plato names him as a man who later became one of the Thirty Tyrants, which may be a joke about what agreeing to everything leads to.

How to read it

Read the first part properly and read it twice. It is thirty pages, it is dramatic and clear, and the five objections are among the sharpest criticisms ever made of a philosophical theory, made by its own author.

Do not try to read the second part continuously on a first encounter. Read the first deduction, which is short and shocking, and the beginning of the second, and then get a guide.

Get the guide. Gill’s introduction to the Hackett translation, or Constance Meinwald’s work on the two kinds of predication, or Kenneth Sayre’s reading. Almost nobody reads the second part unassisted and gets anywhere, and there is no shame in that.

Know the three standard views, so you can hold the question open. One: it is a genuine aporia, Plato exhibiting real trouble in his own theory without solving it. Two: it is a logical exercise, deliberately equivocating so the reader learns to spot the ambiguity, which is the training Parmenides promised. Three, the Neoplatonic reading: the deductions describe levels of reality, the first One being the ineffable source above being, and this reading produced Plotinus, Proclus and a great deal of Christian mysticism.

Read the Sophist afterwards. That dialogue takes up not-being, the problem the Parmenides leaves standing, and the Eleatic visitor there commits what he calls parricide against Father Parmenides. The two belong together.

And be patient with yourself. This is the hardest thing Plato wrote, it was hard in antiquity, and the sensation of losing the thread partway through the second part is the ordinary experience of reading it.

Questions it raises

• Why would Plato publish the strongest objections to his own theory and answer none of them?
• The regress argument assumes the Form of Largeness is itself large. Must it be?
• The greatest difficulty separates divine knowledge from our world entirely. Can a theory of Forms survive without separation?
• Parmenides says abandoning Forms destroys the possibility of discourse. Is that true?
• Is the second part serious metaphysics, a training exercise, or a demonstration of how ambiguity generates contradiction?
• The Neoplatonists built a cosmos on the first deduction. Were they reading Plato or writing over him?