The Sophist of Plato

A Translation and Commentary

Monique Dixsaut, Kenneth Quandt

• Publisher: Academica Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781680533682
• eBook ISBN: 9781680533699
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting

In this mature dialogue Plato takes great pains to nail down what a sophist really is, since he finds the sophist a dangerous individual. But is the sophist so for us? The term has fallen into disuse as if obsolete. We might find in Plato’s attempt neither urgency nor even interest, unless...

... unless we ask ourselves how we have become inured to living in a world devoted to a cult of images, counterfeits, and appearances, starting even with ourselves? A world where money has become the criterion for all other values and misrepresenting merchandise is the pinnacle of commercial astuteness? 

Where we are no longer shocked by the commodification of culture, where expressing opinions has become synonymous with liberty, where all dialogue becomes debate and all debate a spectacle for its own sake? What is worst is that all this is leading us fundamentally to mistrust language and to deny it any possibility of being true. But in the Sophist it is no less than language and its truth that Plato sets out to save, by anchoring it in being; and thereby he becomes able to deal with the most redoubtable of difficulties. 

For these reasons the Sophist is without doubt the most radical and the most thrilling of all the Dialogues of Plato. 

Table of contents

• The Sophist of Plato
• The Sophist of Plato
• A Translation and Commentary
• by
• Monique Dixsaut
• Translated from the French by
• Kenneth Quandt
• Academica PressWashington
• Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
• Name: Dixsaut, Monique (author) | Quandt, Kenneth (translator)Title: The sophists of plato : a translation and commentary | Monique Dixsaut, Kenneth QuandtDescription: Washington : Academica Press, 2025. | Includes references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2025943380 | ISBN 9781680533682 (hardcover) ISBN 9781680533699 (e-book)
• Copyright 2025 Monique Dixsaut
• This is a translation of
• Platon. Le Sophiste
• published in Paris by Vrin
• September 2022
• * * *
• Also by Monique Dixsaut translatedinto English by Kenneth Quandt
• Plato-Nietzsche: Philosophy the Other Way (2017)a tr. of Platon-Nietzsche: L’Autre manière de philosopher (2015).
• Inventing the Philosopher: An Essay on the Dialogues of Plato (2023)a tr. of Le Naturel philosophe (2016).
• Que soient ici chaleureusement remerciés: Marc-Antoine Gavray, qui a mis en forme le texte grec et la traduction. Kenneth Quandt, pour ses précieuses remarques à la traduction du texte grec et au commentaire. Dimitri El Murr a relu l’ensemble du commentaire, et le dialogue que nous avons eu une après-midi entière à propos de ses objections et suggestions reste un souvenir inoubliable. Luca Torrente a vérifié avec beaucoup de soin les notes et en a tiré les éléments bibliographiques. Annie Larrivée, Claire et Laurent Dixsaut ont relu l’Introduction, qui en a grandement profité. Sans oublier ma dette envers Anne-Marie et Denis Arnaud d’avoir cru en cette collection bilingue, ainsi qu’à Elsa Constantini dont les couvertures sont de véritables œuvres d’art. Enfin, qu’il me soit permis de dire une fois de plus que sans le soutien de Jean, ce travail difficile n’aurait jamais pu voir le jour. — MD
• I should like to say how grateful I am for having met the Dixsauts some twenty years ago, and for the privilege of serving as MD’s translator into English during this time. Besides affording me many enjoyable sojourns to Paris and Madame’s indescribably fine lunches each day before she and Jean and I would settle into reviewing my drafts, our work together has afforded me the ho or of bringing to the anglophone public what for me is the most inspiring and inspired scholarship on Plato since that of Léon Robin and Paul Shorey. — KQ
• Contents
• Introduction 1
• The Urgency 1
• Textual Difficulties 2
• The Interlocutors 3
• Structure and Purpose of the Dialogue 5
• From the Sophist to the Politicus 8
• Translation 9
• Commentary 85
• The Prologue (216a–218b) 85
• Yesterday (216a1–c1) 85
• A Meeting Yesterday? 86
• Two Unusual Prologues 87
• Yesterday, the Maieutic Art 90
• Euclid of Megara Author of the Theaetetus? 91
• Yesterday, the Knowledge Sought For 93
• The Solution of Protagoras 94
• Yesterday Afternoon 95
• The Three Ways the Philosopher Appears (216c2–d2) 98
• Their Cause: Ignorance 98
• The Opinions of the Crowd 100
• The Question Posed by Socrates (216d3–217b9) 101
• The Road to Follow: the Alternative (217c1–218b5) 104
• The Alternative According to Protagoras 104
• The Alternative According to Parmenides 105
• Part One: The Figures of the Sophist (218b–237a) 109
• The Division of the Arts (218b6–219a3) 109
• Preliminaries (218b6–d8) 109
• Going from a Private Representationto a Common Search (218b6–c5) 110
• To Be Trained in Easiest Things (218c5–d7) 111
• An Easy Paradigm: Angling (218d8–219a3) 112
• The Didactic and Heuristic Function of the Paradigm 113
• The Ironic Function of the Paradigm 115
• Fish: An Ironic Analogy (Phaedo 109a–110a) 116
• Fish: An Ironic Genealogy (Timaeus 90a–92c) 117
• Fishing: Exhortation to Indifference (Laws VII, 822d–824a) 118
• Hunting 119
• Proper Sense and Metaphoric Sense: the Cynegeticus 119
• Hunting: Metaphorical Uses in the Dialogues 120
• The Sophist as Possessor of an Art (219a4–8) 122
• The Meaning of the Word Tekhnē 122
• Its Ambivalences 123
• A Problem of Auto-Definition 125
• The Method: To Divide All the Arts 126
• An Easy Paradigm: Angling (219a8–221c9) 127
• Two Species of Arts: Producing and Acquiring (219a8–c9) 127
• The Power of Producing (Poiētikē) 127
• The Acquisitive (Ktētic) Species 130
• Second and Third Steps 131
• Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Steps 132
• Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Steps 134
• Methodological Remarks 136
• Linguistic Remarks 137
• Definitions of the Sophistic Art (221c–232b) 139
• First Definition: Sophist and SocratesViewed as Ignorant (222a5–223b7) 140
• First Step: Animals Wild and “Tamed”? 140
• The Two Alternatives 142
• Second and Third Steps: Species of the Hēmerothēric?(222c3–222d6) 143
• Digression: the Science of the Matters of Love 145
• Fourth and Fifth Steps:The Species of Idiothēreutic (222d7–223a11) 146
• Definitional Recapitulation (223b1–6) 147
• Second and Third/Fourth Definition:The Sophistic Art as Viewed by Socrates (223b7–224e4) 150
• Second Definition (223b7–224d3) 150
• A Scandalous Analogy 151
• Recapitulation (224c9–d3) 153
• Third, or Third and Fourth Definitions? (224d4–e4) 154
• Recapitulation (224e1–4) 154
• Fifth Definition: Sophistic as Viewed by the Sophist (224e6–226a4) 155
• Eristic Ability: The Euthydemus 156
• Recapitulation (226a1–4) 158
• Sixth Definition: Sophist and Socratesas Viewed by the Stranger (226a7–231b2) 159
• Preliminaries 159
• A Diacritical Art (226a7-c9) 160
• Two Species of the Diacritical Art (226a7–d8) 160
• Purification: Its Species (226d9–227d1) 161
• Two Species of Psychic Evils (227d2–228e5) 163
• The Remedies (228e6–230a10) 164
• The Other Method (230b1–e5) 166
• Who Practices It? Sixth Definition (230e6–231b2) 169
• Recapitulation (231b3–8) 169
• A “Noble Sophistic”? 170
• Technical Language or Parody? 172
• Pause and General Recapitulation (231b9–232b2) 174
• From Definite Descriptions to the Sphere of the Symbolic 175
• From Omniscience to Discovering the Genus (232b2–237a1) 177
• Omniscience (232b2–234e7) 177
• Being Able to Speak on Anything? (232b2–233d2) 177
• A Paradigm, Nevertheless: The Painter (233d3–234c1) 179
• A Nouthetic Parenthesis (234c2–e7) 180
• The Discovery of the Genus (234e7–236c8) 182
• Magician and Imitator (234e7–235c8) 182
• Two Species of Mimetic Art (235c9–236c8) 184
• From Aporia to Aporia (236c9–237a1) 186
• Part Two: To Appear and to Seem Without Being (237a–264d) 188
• Parmenides’s Prohibition 188
• Speaking of Non-Being (237a2–239a12) 190
• To Say “What is Not”? (237a3–e7) 190
• To Say “the” Non-Being (238a1–c11) 191
• To “Say” the Non-Being (238d1–239a12) 193
• A Dialogue with the Sophist (239b1–242b5) 193
• First Counter-Hold: What Does “Image” Mean? (239b1–240c6) 193
• Good and Bad Images? 195
• Second Counter-Hold: False Opinion (240c7–241b3) 198
• Daring to Speak about Non-Being (241b4–c6) 201
• The Stranger’s Three Requests (241c7–242b5) 202
• The Legends about Being (242b6–245e5) 203
• Venerable Beliefs or Children’s Myths? 203
• The Number of Beings (242b6–244b5) 204
• The All is More than One (242b6–243d2) 204
• The Way to be Followed (243d3–e7) 206
• The All is Only One: From Mythos to Logos (244b6–d13) 207
• Refuting Parmenides (244d14–245e5) 210
• Parmenides and the Logos 210
• What Does this Word “Is” Mean? 213
• From Plato to Gorgias and Back 214
• The Way of Error 215
• The Sphere (244d14–245d11) 219
• The Signs of Being 220
• Being, One and Whole (245a1–d10) 223
• The One-Being and the True One (245a1–b10) 224
• Wholeness (245c1–d10) 224
• A Superficial Interpretation? 228
• What Exists? (245e–251a) 230
• A Gigantomachy (245e8–246e1) 230
• The Sons of the Earth (246e2–247d4) 232
• A Definition of Being? (247d5–251a4) 235
• A Provisional Definition? 236
• From Possessing to Being? 239
• What Do Their Friends Say about Ideas? (248a4–e6) 240
• The Stranger’s Reply to the Objections of Parmenides 242
• An Intelligible Motion? 245
• The Philosopher Becomes Indignant (248e7–249d5) 246
• The Beautiful Name of Phronēsis 247
• From One Aporia to Another (249d6–251a4) 250
• Communication Between Kinds (251a–259c) 252
• The “Late-Learners” and Logos (251a5–253b7) 253
• Who Are These “Late-Learners”? (251a5–c7) 253
• Their Hypotheses About Being (251c8–253b7) 255
• Introduction: The Choice to beMade and the Method (251c8–e7) 255
• The Negative Hypothesis (251e8–252d1) 257
• From the Positive Hypothesisto the Selective One (252d2–253b8) 258
• Two Paradigms 258
• The Vowel-Kinds 260
• The Dialectic of Kinds (253b9–254b7) 261
• Four Problems (253b9–c2) 261
• A Science of Kinds 262
• The Science of Free Men (253c3–9) 264
• The Dialectical Science (253c9–d4) 268
• From the Dialectical Science to the Dialectician (253d4–e3) 269
• What Does Idea Mean? 270
• One and Many: Their Species 274
• Four Kinds of Kind 275
• A Multiplicity of Separate Elements 276
• Multiple Essential Characters Mutually Oother 277
• Connecting wholes 278
• Many Separate Ideai? 280
• Conclusion: From the Dialectician to the Philosopher (253e4–254b7) 282
• The Greatest of the Kinds (254b8–257a12) 285
• Their Number (254b8–256d4) 286
• The Five Greatest Kinds (254b8–255e7) 286
• A Category Reading? 288
• Their Communication (255e8–256d7) 294
• From the Other to Non-Being (256d8–257a12) 297
• Negation: Its Meaning (257b1–c4) 298
• Warnings 299
• The Meaning of Negative Expressions 300
• Showing and Indicating 304
• A Logic of Ambiguity 305
• Conclusion: From Negating to Questioning 307
• Non-Being as Part of the Other (257c5–258c6) 308
• The Analogy with Science (257c7–d13) 309
• Partition or Fragmentation 310
• Placing into Contraposition and the Parity of Being (257d14–258b5) 311
• The Functions of the Other (258a11-b5) 314
• Non-Being as “One Idea” (258b 6-c5) 314
• Transition: Beyond Parmenides (258c6–259d8) 320
• Refuting What We Say Is the Being of the Non-Being (258c6–259d8) 321
• What Must This Potential Gainsayer Refute? (258e6–259b7) 321
• To Refute, but to Really Refute (259b8–d8) 323
• Placing Discourse Among the Kinds That Are (258d9–260b3) 325
• A Self-Destructive Speech 325
• The Existence of the False (260b3–264b10) 327
• Non-Being, the Condition for Falsity (260b3–e3) 327
• The Road to Follow (260b3–261c10) 327
• Its Steps 328
• The Nature of Speech (261d1–262e3) 329
• The Reason for the Inquiry (261d1–e6) 329
• The Origin of the Distinction: The Cratylus? 330
• The Smallest Logos (261e7–262e3) 331
• The Verbal Proposition 332
• True and False Speech (262e4–263d5) 333
• Theaetetus Sits and Theaetetus Flies 335
• The False in Thought, Opinion and Imagination (263d6–264d11) 340
• The False in Thought (263d6–264b10) 340
• False Opining 343
• Falsity in Imagining (264a4–b5) 346
• The Kinship of the Species of Falsity (264a8–d11) 349
• Conclusion: The Definition of the Sophist (264d10–268d) 352
• The Art of Producing (264d12–266d4) 352
• Production and Acquisition (265a4–b3) 352
• Divine Production and Human Production (265b4–e9) 353
• Producing Things, Producing Images (265d9–e6) 355
• Eikastic Art and Phantastic Art (266d8–e5) 358
• The Division of the Phantastic Species (267a1–b3) 360
• A Doxomimetic (267b4–e4) 362
• Two Species of Imitator (267e5–268a9) 364
• Demology and Antilogy (268a10–c4) 366
• Recapitulation (268c5–d5) 367
• The Styles of the Sophist 369
• The Urgency 372
• Appendices 374
• Appendix 1: Diagrams of the Definitional Recapitulations 374
• Appendix 2: The Sophisms of Prometheus 376
• Appendix 3: Gorgias, the Parricide Heir of Parmenides 377
• Appendix 4: “A Fairly Infinite Infinity of Non-Being” 380
• Appendix 5: The World of the Sophist (Parmenides 164b5–165e) 381
• Citations from Plato 383
• Citations from other Authors 388
• Bibliography 390
• The Sophist: Editions and Translations 390
• About the Sophist 390
• Studies 390
• Articles 391
• About Plato 392
• Commented Translations and Studies of Plato 392
• Articles on Plato 393
• Antiquity 395
• Reference Works 395
• Texts of Ancient Authors 395
• Books on Ancient Authors 395
• Articles on Ancient Authors 396
• About Greek Culture 397
• Modern Authors 397
• INTRODUCTION
• “We must begin, first, right away, by defining the sophist.”(218B)
• If one were a pedant, to begin “first, right away” would be a pleonasm; but if Plato says it, it means there is an emergency a d that the sophist is a dangerous character. And so he is for Plato, but is he so for us? “Sophist” sounds like a word only experts in Greek culture can understand, or at least a term that has fallen into disuse, designating something just as obsolete. So that the hunt for the sophist carried out throughout the dialogue, may now seem to us devoid not only of urgency but even of any interest, a mere “shell” to be cracked open to reach the ”kernel” within. Unless ...
• … unless we should ask ourselves, instead, what kind of world we would have to be living in not to be aware that the pretenses, the counterfeits, the simulacra of which the sophist is the master, far from having disappeared from our horizon, pervade it almost in its entirety. For once one has read, and understood if possible, the first definitions of the sophist given here, how can he claim never to have met one? In that case this apparently out-of-date and impotent name would be revealed to be the last rampart set up by the sophist to prevent the world from knowing him for what he is.
• And yet who – here and now – just now – can fail to realize immediately that he lives in a world devoted to the cult of appearances, first of all one’s own? A world where money has become the criterion for all other values and where deception is the pinnacle of commercial skill? A world where we are no longer surprised by the commodification of culture and “works of art,” a commodification that has in fact condemned culture and “fine arts” to extinction? A world, finally, where expressing opinions has become tantamount to freedom, where any dialogue must be called a debate, and any debate must be made into a spectacle that will attract the largest possible audience? And the worst thing is our reluctance to believe that the speeches of those who govern us are true, disinterested, and devoted to the common good; and that those who educate, while they must make their pupils capable of intelligently questioning what they hear or read, are at the same time being tasked with developing the best of them as economic instruments for society (a mission not all of them accomplish, nor always) – all of which only leaves us common sense with which to oppose the sophist, since we can no longer trust language but only the brutality of things, facts, and events.
• It is thus language, speech, that we must save. For there’s a paradox about the sophist: while he argues that speech only skates over the surface of things, he sees in it nevertheless his instrument for power over men. So we have to listen to what the sophist has to say since unfortunately he’s not wrong about everything, and we must examine what postulates he is relying on. And to try to refute them, patiently one by one, will lead to unexpected and formidable difficulties. This is why the Sophist is arguably the most difficult of all Plato’s dialogues, but also the starkest and most uncompromising.
• A number of particular problems arise because of this. This Introduction attempts to inventory them, starting from the most ex ernal ones and moving to the most profound.
• The first problem has to do with establishing of the Greek text, translating it, and mastering its diversity of styles. The Sophist we have is perhaps the most “corrected” text of Plato, “emended” by “philologists” throughout the centuries. Their devotion to this twenty-five hundred year old text, their determination to save it from destruction and oblivion, to transmit it, to make readable what was at the beginning a sequence of capital letters where word-breaks were not indicated and which included neither punctuation or quote marks – such efforts deserve nothing but thanks and admiration from us. In order to present the most eliable version of the text they have compared and classified into “families” a host of manuscripts copied and re-copied over the centuries, and collected also the various quotations from it found in later Greek or Latin works. The trouble is that when i comes to the Sophist, most of the “corrections” they have made to the readings of the manuscripts were not called for to resolve syntactical or grammatical puzzles that left the text meaningless. Instead they consist of criterion that are supposed to clarify its meaning, or even decisions that imply that Plato cannot mean what the manuscripts tell us he means. The decision that governs the present work is that the reading presented, if not by all the manuscripts at least by the best, shall rule. This decision is not based on the principle that this best attested reading is the true one (“true” is a term to be banished from the vocabulary of philology), but that it is the most interesting and the most meaningful.
• Another difficulty to be dealt with is what type of translation one is to provide the reader. The Sophist contains a large numer of barbaric terms coined by Plato with the adjectival suffix, “ic” (-ικός, -ική), for designating the techniques or the arts practiced by the sophist. These terms teem together in the “definitional recapitulations” and make them incomprehensible. But giving a comprehensible translation of them means exempting the reader from wondering why Plato proceeds this way in the Sophist – a procedure that hardly prevents him from indulging in some of his most beautiful flights of fancy as well. But the “neologisms” only occur in the definitions of the sophist, and the flights of fancy occur only when the philosopher unexpectedly pops up in the conversation. Since the sophist parodies the scientist and fabricates “scientific” terms in the textbooks he writes – otherwise, why would we think him a scientist? – Plato’s usage is here parodying the sophist. This is why it seemed better not to offer a smoother translation of these passages.
• In addition, the further our investigation proceeds, the more do certain words play on multiple meanings. Their equivocality is unique to Greek and it is untranslatable. To take just two examples: logos can mean discourse, reasoning, argument, definition, and meaning; in pragma, “thing,” one must understand praxis, action: all “things” are thus for a Greek the results of a production, works of a divine Nature or of the gods if they are natural, or of human production if they are made or fashioned.
• After the Prologue, the discussion is entrusted to a very unusual character. For although Socrates asks the question that is meant to lead to three dialogues – “Are the philosopher, the sophist, and the politician three distinct kinds, or two, or only one?” – he then lets speak a visitor (“stranger”) from Elea, Parmenides’ homeland, whom another visitor, the mathematician Theodorus, introduced to him as “a real philosopher.” And what does this Stranger go on to do? He kills his father, Parmenides, and silences Socrates. He has, however, heard the lessons of the former and has not forgotten them; while as to Socrates, the Stranger says nothing about him. But he will prove to have a remarkable memory of all the dialogues in which Socrates is the protagonist – all of them come in at one point or another, and although the dialogues are not named not one of them is missing, not even the one that another Stranger from Athens has yet to deliver. And yet who wrote these dialogues? Not Socrates, though he would be the co-author of the one that took place the day before, the Theaetetus, which the Stranger is supposed not to have heard, but from which he will quote whole sentences and summarize whole passages in the Sophist. As for the “method by interrogations” that Parmenides would have taught him, where else could it be found than in the mouth of the imaginary Parmenides Plato portrays in his Parmenides? This anonymous Stranger is thus both the son of a Socrates whom he made unforgettable, and the son of a reinvented Parmenides. Being their son, he has re-engendered both of them in his own way. Who can embody this double filiation, the one being claimed only when it comes to killing his “father” Parmenides, and the other being implicit but sufficiently revealed since it is the voice of his father Socrates that this son had never ceased to make heard until then? Who, that is, if not Pla o? By making an anonymous Stranger his spokesman, he maintains his own anonymity, which means that thinking has no author, that it is an inner dialogue of a soul with itself when it wants to understand something. He preserves it all the more since the St anger is very rarely named. In all the dialogues where Socrates leads the discussion there is to be found in fact “a virtual parity between the frequency of the vocatives” by which Socrates addresses his interlocutors and that of the vocatives addressed o himself (“O Socrates”) by his interlocutors. Whereas the Stranger says “Theaetetus,” “my friend,” “my boy” forty times in the Sophist, Theaetetus (who yesterday responded with “O Socrates” almost 90 times) here says “O Stranger” only half a dozen times. He is addressing an anonymous who is little more than a Stranger, though he does want us to know the date of his birth: he was born on a certain morning in the year 399 (BC), born as Plato-the-Stranger, when he finally managed to capture the sophist and offered him to Socrates, who “yesterday afternoon” had gone to the porch of the King Archon to encounter the indictment that accused himself of being a sophist.
• The Plato-Stranger is going to dialogue with the young and brilliant mathematician Theaetetus, a character likewise reinvented since he has long since been dead. He is not always as docile as the Stranger had prescribed that he be, since he does not hesitate to say that he does not understand, nor to show himself slightly doubtful by answering “Maybe” and “Just about,” one of his favorite answers being, in various forms, “How could it be otherwise?” – something in chess called a “forced” variation. But as the difficulties accumulate other interlocutors come onto the scene and Theaetetus must participate in the discussion all the more actively. If the Stranger believes he is able to manage this, it’s because he has been subjected the day before to a rather tough test by Socrates. So, when the sophist (who until then had been the “game” to be captured) starts to question the two of them, Theaetetus will be the one who will be in charge of answering him; he will also be the one who has to act as interpreter for all those who speak and have spoken about being, and then question them and pass on their answers to the Stranger. And then, to fill out this little ballet of the interlocutors, the Stranger decides to reverse the roles: it will become Theaetetus’s turn to question him. They come back to a “classical” distribution of the roles of questioner and answerer only after all the ramparts the sophist hid behind have collapsed. In other words, “the difficulty to read, to understand, to ‘follow,’ is staged and dramatized”.
• Now let us come to the structure of the dialogue: it is clearly delineated, but being something other than “scholastic” it is punctuated by dead ends and discoveries, retreats and leaps forward – like any other dialogue of Plato but even more so. This is due to the polymorphic, equivocal, “variegated” nature of its object, as the Stranger keeps reminding us. Structure and object are here inseparable.
• With the help of Theaetetus, the Stranger will first try to define what art we are to attribute to the sophist (for clever this fellow undoubtedly is), which will entail removing, one by one, his many masks. He has no less than six of them: the sophist knows how 1): to chase young boys naive and rich enough to pay a lot of money for the education they suppose he will give them; 2) through 4): to trade in “knowledge” and cultural goods, locally or internationally; 5): to force anyone to contradict himself on any subject; and 6): to do this so methodically that this definition seems to be equally applicable to Socrates. All these definitions are correct but there are too many of them. We must therefore change the question and no longer ask what the sophist is able to do, but ask what he must be in order to be able to do it. The Stranger, Theaetetus, and we along with them, then find ourselves in a situation which will be presented to us as a family affair and which – as all Greeks knew – is necessarily a tragedy. Plato knows a lot about tragedies; indeed he would even have burned the ones he had written when he met Socrates, without any inkling that his master would provide him with enough material to write others.
• The Stranger thus has a father, the great Parmenides, who opened the way of truth for him, the one that leads to what is – to eing if you will – and who forbade him to take the other way, the one that leads to what is not, to non-being, for the very good reason that what is not absolutely does not exist. His son now objects, “Parmenides didn’t tell me what ‘to be’ means. So let me tell him: to be is to be able to act on something, however small that thing may be and even if it is only once and very fleetingly that it acts on it; but it is also to be able to undergo, to undergo the action of another being, whether it be an earthquake, an Idea, or a dream. That is what it means to be, to be able to act and to undergo: it’s not so complicated!” And he says more to himself, “I don’t see why Parmenides forbids it, the way of non-being, since he affirms that it is impossible. It does ’t make sense to forbid the impossible.”
• And yet Parmenides has another son, the twin of the first one, who happily follows this way and who declares something that deserves to be heard: “Haven’t I always said that speech is a power, the greatest of all, since it makes everything it says exist, provided of course one knows how to do it? With your brilliant definition, you have just given me the right answer: every thing we say exists, since every thing we say possesses this superlatively, your power to act and to cause suffering. Moreover, since it seems that if I told you, for example, that Theaetetus flies in the air, I would be saying something that is not, something that is not true. But how on earth could I say it if it absolutely does not exist, as Parmenides says? And if it exists in the way you, Plato, have just said, what would allow you to say that it is not true? And there’s the problem. For when are we finally going to decide to put an end to truth? The important thing is to say things that are effective, useful, and of course profitable – worth money, glory, honors, and power.”
• The Stranger is at this moment in dire straits, for he has just realized that in order to prevent his brother from doing harm, he must kill the father of both of them, Parmenides. Metaphorically, of course, but still... Killing him means demonstrating that what is not does exist, and that if perchance you slander someone, you produce, by speaking, a false image of him: the sophist is right, this image exists, and moreover, it must necessarily resemble reality somewhat, otherwise we wouldn’t believe it. Let’s think, says the Stranger, about what happens when I say that Theaetetus flies in the air: I produce a Theaetetus that is perfectly similar to Theaetetus, but that acts differently from the Theaetetus with whom I’m now arguing. “But here’s the solution!” he says to himself: “The false is no more the opposite of the true than non-being is the opposite of being. True and false, what is and what is not, are simply different, other, and everything that is other must obviously be other than something else, than a thing to which it is opposed without however denying it totally. For they are, the things which are not, but other than those which are ‘really’.” The sophist has thus well understood that he must deny the power of truth and the existence of falsity. For non-being, the question is settled: it is not nothingness, it is everything other than what is. We must stop capitalizi g being and non-being. If being loses its capital letter, so does non-being, and Truth gets its capital letter back – if we esteem capital letters. The sophist then loses his last bulwark, his last refuge, and everything else will be easier.
• But how does one know what a thing really is? By the means the Stranger has just deployed. By going from question to answer and from answer to question. And it took him a long time – in fact, he spent his whole life doing it. And since he has just shown us by example, he won’t need to define the philosopher, who is just someone crazy enough to spend his life searching for and hu ting down his prey in this way: dialectically, by questioning and answering what in truth is.
• It is, however, rather difficult for the Stranger not to admire him a little, this enemy brother who understood before he did he power of images, and understood that to be the master of the world all one needs to is fill it with appearances, pretenses, counterfeits. Who also foresaw the day when images would be more powerful than the things that are, because the latter acquire heir power to exist only from being, whereas images hold theirs from a non-being of inexhaustible fecundity: there is an infinity of things that are different from something that is. His brother may even have foreseen that a day would come when there would be so many of them – spoken, written or painted images (let’s add, among others, photography, which deceives the eye even mo e effectively than painting), and even moving images – and that they will succeed in appearing more real than realities, which are not altogether attractive. On that day we will be done with being, and done with truth: we will prefer to appear, to make illusions and to have illusions.
• Nevertheless the sophist has finally been caught: he is a professional at producing spoken images, images that do not even resemble originals but the opinion that one has of them. And then what will happen? Then, it is very likely that many will cry out, “Speak to us again, O Sophist, make us dream of bewitching images, provide us with illusions, and we will hold you harmless from true realities” – paraphrasing Chateaubriand’s beautiful tirade about money: “With you one is beautiful, young, adored; one has consideration, honors, qualities, virtues. You will say to me that with money one has only the appearance of all that: what does it matter, if I believe true what is false? Deceive me well and I will let you off at that: is life anything else than a lie?” Maybe, but if they do abet the triumph of the sophist, Plato will be condemned never to save his father figure, his much beloved father Socrates, nor any of his reincarnations. Tragedy there was, there is, and there will be, besides the fact that Socrates already had to be silenced because he is so unbearable when he argues or defends himself that he inevitably arouses the desire to murder him. The citizens of Athens took care of it, and that made him immortal – as a myth, but that’s better than nothing. The sophist does it much more cleverly: he persuades men that what Socrates says (whoever Socrates is) is just babble that seduces gullible teenagers for a short time.
• Though Plato has succeeded in defining the sophist he is very far from having removed his power. But until we (what “we”?) come to the point of saying, “It’s time to decide what to do about the sophist,” there will be no room for “knowledge, thought and intelligence,” all of which one must be something of a philosopher to honor above all else. Since they have little chance – they, not their miserable imitations – to be granted the place they deserve in the city of men, it is necessary to persevere and to attack the politicians, hoping against all odds that they will someday stop being sophists and start philosophizing.
• TRANSLATION
• “While it is true that any obscure text can be made ‘clear and distinct’ if we modify it, the reader wishes to know what Plato himself said; the ideas of a brilliant philologist (usually German) may be interesting but he is not the author of the Sophist.” These few lines of Nestor Cordero have served as the principle and guide for the notes to the translation, below, and I wanted to show how much I am indebted to him. But this translation not only takes the risk of sticking to whatever may seem obscure in the text of the manuscripts, it also aims at rendering the neological “barbarisms” coined by Plato in the Sophist and the Politicus. Providing an elegant translation of them amounts to keeping their readers from wondering why it is when he defines the sophist and the statesman that Plato indulges in such gibberish. Yet, taking into account that a Greek ear had access to the va ious verbs or to the adjectives implicit in the terms in -ικός, footnotes have been supplied to give their meaning. Other notes indicate internal references or present some indispensable historical or cultural details.
• 216a THEODORUS – Following up our agreement of yesterday, Socrates, we come ourselves disposed in good order and we are bringi g along this person here, a visitor. By origin he hails from Elea, but while he is other than the companions of Parmenides and Zeno, this man is truly a philosopher.
• SOCRATES – Theodorus, are you quite sure it is a visitor you are bringing along and not a god unbeknownst, as Homer says? He tells us [b] that gods generally accompany men who display proper reserve, but according to him it is especially the god of strangers who ‘accompanies them, so as to survey the violence and orderliness of men.’ Perhaps it is one of these superior beings who is coming along with you, planning to look down from above upon us mediocre conversationalists and to measure and criticize us, as a sort of divine cross-examiner.
• THEODORUS – But my visitor isn’t of that sort: he is a good deal more moderate than those who spend their energies in eristic controversy. Moreover he seems not at all a god to me, though a divine sort of human, as I say all philosophers are. [c]
• SOCRATES – You’re right about that, my friend. And yet to make out this latter sort is hardly easier, I’d say, than to make ou the gods! For these men – the authentic ones, not those who merely claim to be – cut all sorts of profiles in the eyes of the ignorant, as they “roam from city to city” to watch from above the life of those below; and although to some they may appear wo thless, to others they deserve all merit; and sometimes they appear to be statesmen and sometimes sophists, while there are times when they give the impression of being utterly mad. And so I would like first of all to ask this Stranger, if he will, 217a what the people of his country think about this, and by what names they call him.
• THEODORUS – What names do you mean?
• SOCRATES – Sophist, statesman, philosopher.
• THEODORUS – And just what is your question mostly aiming at? What problem do you have in mind in asking this?
• SOCRATES – This. Did they think all these were one thing or two things; or perhaps since there are three names, do they distinguish three kinds and assign one kind to each, one for each name?
• THEODORUS – Surely, I think, no jealousy will keep him from giving an account of these matters. Or how are we to speak, Stranger?
• [b] STRANGER – Just that way, Theodorus. I won’t begrudge it, nor is it difficult for me to say that they take them to be three. But to distinguish clearly whatever each may be is neither a small nor an easy task.
• THEODORUS – And let me just say, Socrates, that you have chanced upon a problem very much like those we were just presenting him on our way here, to which he gave the same excuses he now has voiced to you – clearly a mere pretext, since he claims he had heard a satisfactory discussion of this question and had not forgotten it.
• [c] SOCRATES – Alright, then Stranger, grant us the favor of answering our first request, but first tell us this: Is it usually more agreeable to you to go through on your own the full length of an account of what you have agreed to treat, or rather to proceed by questions, the way Parmenides proceeded through his very beautiful speeches when I was young and he was then quite old?
• [d] STRANGER – It is easier to dialogue, if it is with someone who gives me no trouble and is easy to lead; and if not, to go hrough on one’s own.
• SOCRATES – Well, you can choose whoever you want from those present, for all of them will listen to you gently. And if you wan my advice I would suggest Theaetetus here, or one of the others if you prefer.
• STRANGER – Socrates, I’m a little ashamed, given this is my first time being with you all, not to conduct the discussion by exchanging short remarks back and forth, [e] word to word, but to deliver an extended discourse myself, even if it is addressed to some one person, as if I were giving a display lecture. Yet, in truth, the question is not as simple as one might anticipate f om the way it was formulated. In fact, it calls for a very long discussion. And yet not to grant the favor you and those accompanying me requested, especially given what you have said, would be less than hospitable 218a and indeed quite rude. So I accept Theaetetus as my interlocutor and do so without reservation, given both my own previous discussion with him and your suggestion just now.
• THEAETETUS – But, Stranger, in choosing me, will you also be doing a favor to those present, as Socrates hopes?
• STRANGER – Perhaps no more needs be said on that point, Theaetetus. It seems it’s already settled that it will be to you that he speech will be addressed. But if you find the length of the effort burdensome, don’t blame me for it, but blame these companions of yours!
• [b] THEAETETUS – Well, at the moment I don’t imagine I will beg off, and yet if something like that should come about we can also call upon my fellow, Socrates, here: he shares the same name as Socrates, but he’s my age and a fellow student, and is used to working right along with me most of the time.
• STRANGER – Fine: you mind that matter on your own as the argument proceeds. But now you must inquire in common with me, and si ce it appears to me that we are to begin first, right away, now, with the sophist, and immediately to seek [c] what he might be and to show it clearly in a definition. For as it stands all you and I hold in common about him is his name: the activity (ergon) you or I have in mind that the name designates might be different for each of us: in all matters we must come to an agreement about the thing itself through discussion, rather than merely agree on a name without further discussion. The kind we are now looking to search out is not so easy to grasp in its entirety, as if it were easy to say just what a “sophist” is. If one is to treat important subjects correctly, it is a longstanding opinion followed by everyone [d] that one must first proceed by prac icing on the smallest and easiest things before attacking those that are very important. And so, Theaetetus, here is what I suggest for us: before the laborious and difficult hunt which the search for the kind of the sophist will prove to be, let us prac ice the method we will there follow on an easier subject – unless you have a more suitable approach and another method to suggest.
• THEAETETUS – Me? No, I haven’t one.
• STRANGER – So do you indeed join in the suggestion that we set about tracking down something unimportant so as to establish a model for the greater thing?
• [e] THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – What indeed shall we propose to study that though easily known and small possesses no lesser a definition than any of the large things? How about an angler? Isn’t that a thing everyone is familiar with and that doesn’t warrant enormous concern?
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• 219a STRANGER – And nonetheless I hope that the means by which we reach him and find its definition will prove helpful for what we want to do.
• THEAETETUS – That would be fine.
• STRANGER – Come then, let’s start with it this way: shall we posit that he is the possessor of a certain art, or a man deprived of art but endowed with some other power?
• THEAETETUS – Certainly he is not deprived of art.
• STRANGER – But then, if we take the arts as a whole, don’t they fit into two species?
• THEAETETUS – How so?
• STRANGER – There’s farming and all the many arts that take care of a mortal body, and also of what is put together and fabrica ed – [b] of a “utensil” as we have called it – as well as the mimetic art: all these we could justly refer to with a single name.
• THEAETETUS – How and with what name?
• STRANGER – Any art that brings subsequently into its own way of being a being that previously did not exist can presumably be said to “produce” it, while the thing so brought into being is “produced.”
• THEAETETUS – Right.
• STRANGER – But the things we listed just now have all for doing it a power of their own?
• THEAETETUS – Yes, they have.
• STRANGER – Then let us say of them that they’re all embraced by the “poiētic” art.
• [c] THEAETETUS – Let’s.
• STRANGER – On the other hand, there is the whole species of studying, of getting knowledge of khrēmatistic activity, agōnistic and thēreutic, since none of them creates anything as a craftsman does but rather they overpower things that are or have already come to be, in some cases by means of words or deeds, while in other cases refusing to leave them to those who have already taken mastery over them. Would not then a certain art having been called “acquisitive” draw a line through each and all of those parts?
• THEAETETUS – Yes, that would be appropriate.
• [d] STRANGER – So if each and all the arts are either ktētic or poiētic, into which art shall we place the art of the angler?
• THEAETETUS – Clearly, into the ktētic.
• STRANGER – But of the ktētic aren’t there two kinds? The one is an exchange between the willing and the willing whether as gif s, wages, or purchases, whereas the rest as a whole, being a matter of manipulating whether by deeds or by words, would be called “kheirōtic”?
• THEAETETUS – So it would seem, given what we had said.
• STRANGER – And next? Mustn’t we cut the kheirōtic art in two?
• THEAETETUS – At what point would you cut it?
• [e] STRANGER – By positing that the part that is done in the light of day is agōnistic whereas the part of the art done as a whole by stealth, is thēreutic.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – But as to this thēreutic art, it would be unreasonable not to cut in two.
• THEAETETUS – Say how.
• STRANGER – By our distinguishing the hunt of the soulless kind from hunting the kind that has soul.
• THEAETETUS – Of course, if indeed both those kinds exist.
• 220a STRANGER – And of course they do. As to the hunt of the soulless things, we may leave it nameless, except to mention certain parts of kolumbētic and of other things equally minor; but as to the other kind, it should be called “zoōthēric.”
• THEAETETUS – So be it.
• STRANGER – But as to this zoōthēric art, would we not be justified to say it is two-fold, having on the one hand to do with the walking kind (itself divided into numerous kinds that have numerous names) – let us call the “pezothēric” art – and on the other hand “enhygrothēric,” having to do with hunting those that live in a humid medium?
• THEAETETUS – Quite.
• [b] STRANGER – But of this “neustic” kind we see that the one tribe is winged and the other lives in water.
• THEATETUS – Of course.
• STRANGER – And presumably the hunt of the winged tribe as a whole is called the ornithothēric art – or not?
• THEAETETUS – Yes, that is the term.
• STRANGER – But the hunt almost entirely concerned with the kind that live in water is called the “halieutic” art?
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – And next, in turn, could we divide this kind of hunt into two very great parts?
• THEAETETUS – What parts?
• STRANGER – As to whether the hunting occurs in a fixed place by means of confinements, or by striking.
• THEAETETUS – What do you mean, and how are you distinguishing them?
• [c] STRANGER – In the one case, it is suitable to call an “enclosure” everything that gains control by means of containing something within.
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – So take baskets, nets, snares, traps, and the like: should we call them anything else than “enclosures”?
• THEAETETUS – Nothing but.
• STRANGER – So this kind of hunting we shall say is “herkothēric” or something like that.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – But the kind that comes about by striking with hooks or tridents, being distinct from that kind because of this, we ought now to call [d] by a single term: a “plēktic” sort of hunting. Or could one improve on that?
• THEAETETUS – Let’s not worry about the name: that one does the trick.
• STRANGER – To continue, then, one part of this plēktic hunting takes place at night, and since it is done by the light of fire it comes to be called “puretic” by those whose profession it is.
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – But the part that works by day – since tridents, too, have hooks on their points – is as a whole ankistreutic.
• [e] THEAETETUS – That’s indeed how it is called.
• STRANGER – And to go on, the ankistreutic part of plēktic hunting includes on the one hand the kind that strikes from above downward, using tridents in particular for this, that is called, I think, something like “triodontia” (fishing with a trident).
• THEAETETUS – Some at least do call it that.
• STRANGER – And there remains still one more and only one more species of it .
• THEAETETUS – What species?
• STRANGER – The one striking in the opposite direction, done still with hook but hitting not any part of the body of fishes, as is the case with tridents, 221a but only on the head and the mouth of the prey so it is pulled upward instead, with lines and poles. What shall we say must be the name for that, Theaetetus?
• THEAETETUS – It seems to me we have now found the very thing we set before us to find!
• STRANGER – If so, then, as to the art of angling, you and I have now [b] reached agreement not only about the name but it is i s activity which we have now come to grasp quite adequately. Given art in its entirety, one half was ktētic and of the ktētic the kheirōtic, of the kheirōtic the thēreutic, of the thēreutic the zoōthēric, of the zoōthēric the enhygrothēric and of the enhygrothēric the lower section was as a whole halieutic, of the halieutic the plēctic, and of the plēctic the ankistreutic, of which one half was the part involving a strike upwards from below that draws the animal up [c] and models its name on its action: it is this we were searching for, and it is called “the aspalieutic art.”
• THEAETETUS – This has been more than adequately shown.
• STRANGER – Then come, using this as a paradigm, let us also try to find out what the sophist might be.
• THEAETETUS – Of course, let’s!
• STRANGER – Now the first step we took in our inquiry about the angler was whether must one should put him down as just a layma or as possessing some art.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• [d] STRANGER – And now likewise, Theaetetus, are we to posit this man as just a layman or as being wholly a true “sophist”?
• THEAETETUS – No way is he a layman; for I understand what you’re saying, that someone having a name like that must be completely such.
• STRANGER – So it does indeed seem we must set him down as possessing an art.
• THEAETETUS – But what would that art be?
• STRANGER – By the gods! Has it escaped us that those two fellows are akin?
• THEAETETUS – Which to which?
• STRANGER – The angler to the sophist.
• THEAETETUS – In what way?
• STRANGER – Both appear to me to be kinds of hunters.
• [e] THEAETETUS – But what kind of hunting does the second do? We’ve already told what prey the first pursues.
• STRANGER – Just now we divided the whole of hunting in two, didn’t we, placing on one side hunting what swims and on the other hunting what walks?
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – And we went through the one when we dealt with those of the swimming kind that live in water, but the other we left undivided, noting only that it was quite multiform.
• 222a THEAETETUS – Quite.
• STRANGER – Up to that point, the sophist and the angler proceed together from our starting point, the ktētic art.
• THEAETETUS – So at least it seems…
• STRANGER – But from the zoōtheric forward their paths diverge, since for the one it is to the sea, I imagine, and to rivers and marshes that he goes, in order to capture those who live there…
• THEAETETUS – Surely so.
• STRANGER – … whereas for the other it is toward land and rivers of a different kind: toward meadows as it were abundant in wealth and youth, in order to master the creatures to be found there.
• [b] THEAETETUS – What do you mean by that?
• STRANGER – That hunting those on foot consists of two very large parts.
• THEAETETUS – And what is each?
• STRANGER – The one is the capture of gentle animals and the other of the wild.
• THEAETETUS – So there is a hunt after gentle animals?
• STRANGER – Yes, at least if man is a gentle animal. Choose as you prefer, whether to say that no hēmerothēric animal is gentle, or that some may be but the human animal is wild; or whether to say that human animals are gentle but that you do not believe there is a hunting after them – whichever of these two theses pleases you, and distinguish them clearly for us.
• [c] THEAETETUS – Alright, Stranger: I hold we are gentle animals and I say there does exist a hunt after men.
• STRANGER – Well then, let us say that the hēmerothēric is twofold.
• THEAETETUS – Dividing it according to what?
• STRANGER – By taking up as a single art the lēstic, andrapodistic, tyrannic, and the entirety of the polemic art, and defining it as “hunting by force.”
• THEAETETUS – Finely put.
• STRANGER – Whereas taking up the dikanic and the dēmēgoric and the proshomilētic as being all, in turn, a single art [d] we would address as “pithanourgic.”
• THEAETETUS – Correct.
• STRANGER – And of this pithanourgic let us say there are two kinds.
• THEAETETUS – What kinds?
• STRANGER – The one is private and the other public.
• THEAETETUS – Yes, let each of these be a species.
• STRANGER – And again, of the idiothēreutic art, is not the one part mistharnētic and the other dōrophoric?
• THEAETETUS – I don’t understand.
• STRANGER – That’s because you have not paid attention, as it seems, to the hunting of lovers.
• THEAETETUS – To what?
• [e] STRANGER – To the fact they offer gifts to those hunted.
• THEAETETUS – That is quite true.
• STRANGER – Let this then be a species of the erotic art.
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – But in the case of the type that receives a wage, one part of it consists in promising favors and using pleasure alone as a lure, and in seeking nothing more than to extract a wage for one’s own sustenance – this we might say is 223a a kolakic or a hēduntic art.
• THEAETETUS – How else could we put it?
• STRANGER – Alternatively, to claim that in one’s dealings one is seeking nothing other than virtue, while in fact it is a matter of extracting a salary paid in cash, would we not be right to say that this kind deserves a different name?
• THEAETETUS – How could one disagree?
• STRANGER – But what name? Try to say.
• THEAETETUS – But that’s obvious! In my view it is the sophist we have now come upon. And in saying this I think he has been given the name that is appropriate.
• [b] STRANGER – So to recapitulate this last course of reasoning, Theaetetus, it appears that the oikeiotic art, part of the ktētic, of the thēreutic, of the zoōthēric thēria, pezothēria, khersaia, hēmerothēric, anthrōpothēria, pithanothēria, idiothēria, misthanitic, numismatopōlic, doxopaideutic, is the hunt of young men rich and reputable, which our reasoning at this moment requires of us to be called the “sophistic” art.
• THEAETETUS – I totally agree.
• [c] STRANGER – But let us look at it this way, too. For the thing we are investigating at present belongs to an art hardly simple but remarkably variegated. In truth, in all the things that have now been said it presents an appearance that is not what we have just affirmed, but in fact is of a different kind.
• THEAETETUS – How so?
• STRANGER – Wasn’t the species “ktētic art” double? The one part thēreutic, and the other allaktic?
• THEAETETUS – Yes, it was.
• STRANGER – And we are saying that there are two kinds of allaktic art, the one dōretic and the other agorastic?
• THEAETETUS – That’s what we say.
• STRANGER – And in turn we will say of the agorastic that it is cut in two.
• [d] THEAETETUS – How will we?
• STRANGER – By distinguishing the selling of one’s own products, the “autopōlic” art, from that of exchanging products made by others, the “metablētic” art.
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – And next, of the metablētic art, isn’t exchanging within the city called the “capēlic” art, consisting of about hal of it?
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – Whereas the exchanging from one city to another by purchase and sale is the “emporic” art?
• THEAETETUS – Of course.
• [e] STRANGER – And as to the emporic art, are we not aware that what is exchanged for money consists, in one part, in all the hings that can nourish or be of use to the body, and in the other part all that can nourish or be useful to the soul?
• THEAETETUS – Just what do you mean by that?
• STRANGER – The part about the soul perhaps we do not recognize, whereas surely the other part we do.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• 224a STRANGER – Well, let us say the following about literary and artistic culture in all its forms. Whenever one leaves his city to buy things in another city and convey and sell them in another – whether it be works of painting or of any art of illusion, not to mention many other things directed to the soul, whether traded as diversion or as edification – let us say that the person who manages such a transport and sale would no less correctly be called a “dealer” than the person who sells items of food or drink.
• THEAETETUS – Quite true.
• [b] STRANGER – And as to the person who sells scientific learning and goes from city to city to exchange this for money, will you give him the same name?
• THEAETETUS – Very much so.
• STRANGER – Now of this psychemporic art shouldn’t the one part properly be called “epideictic” and the other part, though no less ridiculous than the former, necessarily be called by a name akin to its action since it is again a kind of selling?
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – Of this “mathēmatopōlic” art, then, the part that deals in all the specialized arts must be called by one name, [c] and that dealing with general culture and excellence by another.
• THEAETETUS – Of course.
• STRANGER – Then “technopōlic” would fit as the name for the former, but as to the latter let’s have you say what to call it.
• THEAETETUS – But what else could one call it without striking a false note, than saying it is the very kind we’re now searching for, the sophistic kind?
• STRANGER – None other. So come, let’s now recapitulate and say that the selling that belongs to the ktētic art, the metablētic part of the agorastic, [d] of the emporic, psychemporic selling of speeches and teachings relating to general culture and virtue, is the aspect under which the sophistic art made its second appearance.
• THEAETETUS – Exactly.
• STRANGER – And thirdly, I think that if a person stays fixed in his city buying some learnings but selling others on his own aout the same kinds of things, and makes his living by putting these also on sale, you would name him nothing else than this last?
• THEAETETUS – Why indeed wouldn’t I?
• [e] STRANGER – So the part of the ktētic art that is metablētic, agorastic, whether kapēlic or autopōlic indifferently, as long as it be mathēmatopōlic of this sort of things, you clearly will always call sophistic.
• THEAETETUS – Necessarily: one must follow the reasoning.
• STRANGER – Good. Then let’s examine whether the kind we are now investigating also resembles something like the following.
• 225a THEAETETUS – Just what?
• STRANGER – Of the ktētic art the agonistic art was a part, according to us, no?
• THEAETETUS – It was.
• STRANGER – Would it be out of the question to divide this part in two?
• THEAETETUS – Dividing it into what?
• STRANGER – Into the hamillētic and the makhētic.
• THEAETETUS – Let us posit this.
• STRANGER – And of the makhētic art, the part that is a confrontation body against body would most appropriately be named something like “biastic.”
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – But as to the part where arguments confront arguments, what name shall we give it, Theaetetus, unless [b] it be amphisbētētic?
• THEAETETUS – None other.
• STRANGER – But there are two ways of carrying out controversies.
• THEAETETUS – What are they?
• STRANGER – In so far as they give rise to confrontations between public speeches of some length in disputing about justice and injustice, they are of the juristic kind.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – But if it is in private and the speaking breaks up into alternating questions and answers, we are used to calling i “antilogic,” aren’t we, and nothing else?
• THEAETETUS – Nothing else.
• STRANGER – But of the antilogical, as much of it as non-technically argues back and forth [c] about contracts and proceeds randomly, we must posit this as a species of its own, since our reasoning recognizes it as other, even though it has never gotten a label from our forebears and hardly deserves to get one from us, either.
• THEAETETUS – True: the species is in fact divided into subparts that are too small and too diverse.
• STRANGER – But as to the part that is artful and that debates what in itself is just and unjust and other general questions, don’t we commonly call that “eristic”?
• THEAETETUS – How could we not?
• [d] STRANGER – Now, is one part of eristic in fact unremunerated and the other lucrative?
• THEAETETUS – Exactly.
• STRANGER – Accordingly let us try to say what the one and the other should be called.
• THEAETETUS – We must, indeed.
• STRANGER – Alright, I believe that taking pleasure in such discussions to the point of neglecting one’s personal business and eing unconcerned whether the manner of speech is agreeable for those who listen to it, is what I would say [e] is properly called “chatter.”
• THEAETETUS – That’s just about the usual term for it.
• STRANGER – And as to the opposite of this, who is it that makes a profit from private discussions? It’s your turn to give his ame.
• THEAETETUS – Well again, who could say, without erring, anything other than that once again we have arrived at that astounding fellow we have been pursuing, now for the fourth time: the sophist?
• 226a STRANGER – As it appears, the khrēmatistic kind, which is a part of the eristic, itself a part of the antilogic, a species of the amphisbētētic, makhētic, agonistic, which are all parts of the ktētic art: here is again, as the argument has now signaled us, the sophist.
• THEAETETUS – Clearly so.
• STRANGER – So you see how true it is to say he is a variegated creature, “not something you can catch with just one hand...” as the proverb has it.
• THEAETETUS – ... so you must use two!
• [b] STRANGER – So we must indeed, that’s for sure; and we will do so as well as we can, by now tracking him down on the following path: don’t we have certain words for naming domestic chores?
• THEAETETUS – Yes, many. But which of them are you thinking about?
• STRANGER – These: we speak of filtering, sifting, winnowing, slicing and distinguishing – don’t we?
• THEAETETUS – Yes. And so?
• STRANGER – And in addition to these, carding, unraveling, wefting and countless other such things are among the arts we recognize?
• [c] THEAETETUS – What are these examples meant to illustrate? What question do you want to reach through all of them?
• STRANGER – It is the diairetic art that all of these mentioned are giving voice to.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – I deduce that since a single art is present in all of them, we should dignify that art with a single name.
• THEAETETUS – Calling it what?
• STRANGER – “Diakritic.”
• THEAETETUS – Let it be so.
• STRANGER – Now see whether in turn we are able to see two species in this.
• THEAETETUS – To do as you’re prescribing is a little too fast for me!
• [d] STRANGER – Still, of the diakritic arts we listed the one was a matter of setting apart the worse from the better whereas he other was setting apart similar from similar.
• THEAETETUS – Put this way, it is almost obvious.
• STRANGER – Now for one art I don’t have a name in common usage; but for the other, where the separating keeps the better and discards the worse, I do.
• THEAETETUS – Name it.
• STRANGER – This kind of separation is to my knowledge universally called “purification.”
• THEAETETUS – So it is called.
• [e] STRANGER – And wouldn’t everyone see that this purificatory realm, in turn, is two-fold?
• THEAETETUS – Yes, if at least one takes the time to think about it. But for the moment, I don’t see it!
• STRANGER – Surely the many kinds of purifications of the body should be brought together under a single name.
• THEAETETUS – Which purifications? Under what name?
• STRANGER – As for living bodies, their internal purification 227a consists in distinguishing correctly what belongs to the gym astic art and what to the medical art, and their external purification is empirically provided by the art of bathing, to give a trivial example; as for inanimate bodies, the gnapheutic art and the cosmetic art as a whole take care of those, and break dow into many little parts that have gotten names that seem ridiculous.
• THEAETETUS – Very ridiculous.
• STRANGER – Quite so, Theaetetus. And yet for the method we are following in our discussion, it matters little whether we are t eating spongistic or pharmacology, whether the one purification benefits us more or less. For if we endeavor [b] to grasp intelligently wherein these various arts are akin or not it is in order to gain intelligence of them, and with this in mind our method grants them all equal honor; and when they resemble each other, it doesn’t judge one of them more ridiculous than the other, nor grants greater dignity to the hunt carried out by a general than that by an exterminator of lice, though the former is ofte puffed up and vain. So in answer to your question about the name to be given to all the powers [c] that can purify a body whether animate or inanimate, it goes without saying that our method does not care a whit about which name might be prettier. It is enough that it can bind together all those that purify some other thing, as opposed to the purifications of the soul. For separating from all the others the purification regarding rational thought is what our present research is aiming at, if indeed we u derstand rightly what the method aims at.
• THEAETETUS – But I have come to understand, and I agree there are two kinds of purification, one that concerns the soul and is quite separate from the one that has to do with the body.
• STRANGER – Couldn’t be better; and next hear how I attempt to cut in two what we’ve just mentioned. [d]
• THEAETETUS – Whatever cuts you lead me to I’ll endeavor to cut with you.
• STRANGER – Shall we say that wickedness is a different thing in the soul from virtue?
• THEAETETUS – Of course.
• STRANGER – And we said that purification is keeping one of these and throwing out what’s worthless?
• THEAETETUS – So we did.
• STRANGER – So, regarding the soul, if we discover something that relieves it of whatever defect it has and call it a “purifica ion”, would we be singing in tune?
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – Now we must say there are two kinds of defect in connection with soul.
• THEAETETUS – What kinds?
• 228a STRANGER – The one analogous to disease in a body and the other like an ugliness that occurs in it.
• THEAETETUS – I didn’t understand that.
• STRANGER – Perhaps it’s because you don’t take disease and sedition to be the same thing.
• THEAETETUS – Again I do not know how I am to respond to this.
• STRANGER – Do you take sedition to be something other than a discord brought on by some breakdown of the existing accords between what is by nature akin?
• THEAETETUS – No, nothing other.
• STRANGER – And ugliness: is it something other than the utterly displeasing kind of disproportion?
• [b] THEAETETUS – None other.
• STRANGER – But within the soul, between opinions and desires, courage and pleasures, and reason and pains – between and among all these things, one against the other, do we not perceive sedition in those who are in a defective state?
• THEAETETUS – Yes indeed we perceive that!
• STRANGER – But all these things are necessarily and fundamentally related?
• THEAETETUS – Unquestionably.
• STRANGER – So in saying that sedition and sickness are a perversion of soul we will be speaking correctly?
• THEAETETUS – Most correctly.
• [c] STRANGER – Then what about all the things participating in motion that fix upon a certain goal and strive to attain it? If whenever they set off, they deviate and miss their goal, are we to say that these outcomes are due to a mutual proportion between themselves and their goal, or on the contrary that it is the fact of their being disproportionate that this happens to them?
• THEAETETUS – Clearly it is that they are disproportionate.
• STRANGER – But we surely know that the soul is unwilling to be ignorant of what it is ignorant of.
• THEAETETUS – Surely.
• STRANGER – And for a soul to be ignorant, when it sets off toward truth but ends up [d] wandering away from it by a lack of understanding, is this anything other than a kind of derangement?
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – So we must set it down that a soul that is mindless is ugly and lacks proportion.
• THEAETETUS – So it seems.
• STRANGER – So there appear to be two kinds of defect in it, the one called perversion by most though quite clearly it is a disease of soul.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – And as to the other, they call it “ignorance”, but that this is a defect in the soul alone, they refuse to agree.
• [e] THEAETETUS – Surely it must be granted – though as you were speaking I was unsure – that there are two kinds of wickedness in the soul, and that cowardice and intemperance and injustice must all be considered a disease in us, whereas suffering ignorance in its many and various forms must be considered an ugliness.
• STRANGER – Alright, then. In the case of the body at least are there not two techniques to remedy these two states?
• THEAETETUS – What are they?
• 229a STRANGER – For ugliness, gymnastics; for disease, medicine.
• THEAETETUS – Clearly.
• STRANGER – So, for lack of moderation and injustice and cowardice, too, isn’t the corrective justice the penalty that is most itting?
• THEAETETUS – So much is likely, according at least to human opinion.
• STRANGER – But what about ignorance in all its kinds taken together? Would it be more correct to mention some other art than the didaskalic?
• THEAETETUS – No, none other.
• [b] STRANGER – Then let us go on. Of this didaskalic art must we affirm that there is only one kind, or several, or that two kinds are the most important? Examine this.
• THEAETETUS – I am examining it.
• STRANGER – By my lights, this is the way we will discover the answer most quickly.
• THEAETETUS – What way?
• STRANGER – By seeing whether ignorance mightn’t admit a line of cleavage down the middle. For if it is twofold it clearly follows that the didascalic art has two parts also, one for each kind of ignorance.
• THEAETETUS – Alright, but do you find that this casts more light on what we are searching for at present?
• [c] STRANGER – I at least believe that I see a distinct species of ignorance so large and so intractable that it outweighs all the other parts.
• THEAETETUS – Which species?
• STRANGER – The one that consists in not knowing but believing that one does. This could well be to blame for all the slips we make in our thinking.
• THEAETETUS – Truly.
• STRANGER – And it is natural also, I think, that this part of ignorance is the only part to admit being called “unwillingness o learn.”
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – Then what should the part of didascalic that rids us of it be called?
• [d] THEAETETUS – I think, Stranger, that the other part of it is “technical training,” whereas this one, at least through us, is called “education.”
• STRANGER – And so it is called in all of Greece, Theaetetus. But it remains for us still to examine this about it also: is it indivisible or does it allow of a division worth giving names to?
• THEAETETUS – Surely there is a need to examine this.
• STRANGER – It seems to me that this cuts in two in the following way.
• THEAETETUS – How?
• [e] STRANGER – One of the paths followed by the art of teaching uses a discourse that seems to me more rugged while the other is smoother.
• THEAETETUS – What are we to say about each of them?
• STRANGER – The one is the venerable method our fathers tended to use on their sons 230a when they have committed some error, s ill used by many these days: to reprimand them roughly, or to exhort them more gently. In either case the best name would be “admonition.”
• THEAETETUS – That’s the one.
• STRANGER – On the other hand, it has become clear to some who have thought it through that any unwillingness to learn is involuntary, that he who thinks himself knowledgeable will never consent to be taught any of the things about which he thinks himself terribly clever, and that this admonitory kind of education achieves a poor result for its trouble.
• THEAETETUS – They are right to think that.
• [b] STRANGER – That is why they use another method for expelling this sort of opining.
• THEAETETUS – What method?
• STRANGER – They ask questions on the points someone believes he is saying something while he is saying nothing; and then, since these opinions are those of a man who constantly wanders from one to the other, they examine them, collect and confront them with one another, and thereby easily show that they are not only in contradiction at the same time, on the same subjects and in he same respects, but themselves to themselves. When those they examine see this, they become angry with themselves and become more gentle toward the others, [c] and it is thus that they are disabused of the grand and obstinate opinions they have of themselves – a most agreeable deliverance for the listener as well as the most sure and lasting profit for him who undergoes it. Those who carry out such a purification, my dear lad, are thinking what doctors think about the body, that a body is incapable of enefit from the food one might give it until all the inward obstacles are removed. Our sort of doctors think the same thing with regard to the soul: that the man whose soul it is will reap no benefit from the lessons one might give him [d] until, by submitting him to refutation, he brings him to be vexed with himself and strips away the opinions that impede him from learning – and that in this way he comes into the light of day completely pure and believing he knows only what he does know and nothing more.
• THEAETETUS – And surely that condition is the noblest and most temperate.
• STRANGER – For all these reasons, Theaetetus, we must say that refutation is the most important and the most powerful of the purifications, and that the man who has not undergone it, even if it be [e] the Great King of Persia, because he remains unpurified of the greatest defilements, is a man without culture and shows himself ugly where one should be the purest and the most beautiful if he wants truly to be happy.
• THEAETETUS – Absolutely.
• STRANGER – So, what shall we call those who practice this art? 231a I shrink from calling them sophists.
• THEAETETUS – But why?
• STRANGER – Out of fear that in doing so I give the sophists too great an honor.
• THEAETETUS – And yet, all that has just been said does resemble someone of that sort!
• STRANGER – As a dog resembles a wolf, and the most savage beast the most gentle! We above all must always be on our guard when it comes to resemblances, for resemblances are a very slippery thing. Let’s nevertheless say at least that resemblances are here involved, for by my lights it is no small contest that a quarrel between boundaries will stir up when it becomes a matter [b] of the one and the other guarding them properly.
• THEAETETUS – No, that is quite likely.
• STRANGER – Let it be therefore be of that diacritic art kathartic, and of kathartic let the part that deals with the soul be distinctly separated, and of this, the didaskalic part, and of the didaskalic the paideutic, and of the paideutic let refutation deal with an empty seeming of knowledge – as the reasoning has just now showed us – be called nothing other for us than a noble sophistic of noble lineage.
• THEAETETUS – Let us say that, indeed. But now I am at an impasse! He has appeared [c] to be so many things who in the world should one say and affirm the sophist really is, in truth?
• STRANGER – And you should be at a loss. But you may also realize that he is no less in an impasse as to wherever he will slip out of our current argumentation. The proverb is true: “To escape each and every capture is hardly easy.” Just so, we must we now, and especially now, track him down and capture him.
• THEAETETUS – You’re right.
• STRANGER – So first let’s stop and take a deep breath, and as we catch our breath review for ourselves [d] how many guises the sophist has appeared to us. I believe he was at first found a hired hunter of rich young men.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – Second, as a sort of importer-exporter of learnings having to do with the soul.
• THEAETETUS – Exactly.
• STRANGER – Third, didn’t he appear as a local merchant of these same knowledges?
• THEAETETUS – Yes, and fourth he appeared to us as selling learnings of his own making.
• STRANGER – Your memory is quite correct. As to the fifth let me try to [e] remember. In the field of agonistic he was an athle e of argumentation specializing in eristic.
• THEAETETUS – So he was.
• STRANGER – Though the sixth was a bit controversial, we did grant it to him to be a purifier of the opinions that obstruct lea ning.
• THEAETETUS – Absolutely.
• 232a STRANGER –Don’t you see that when someone gives the appearance of being a man of multiple knowledges and yet is called by the name of one single art, this appearance is not at all sound? and that an art can only affect us this way if we fail to catch sight of that aspect of it in which all these knowledges converge, so that one calls their possessor several names instead of only one?
• THEAETETUS – That could well be close to the way it naturally is.
• [b] STRANGER – If so, we must not be so lazy in our search as to let us undergo it: instead, let’s begin by reviewing some of our definitions of the sophist. For one among them appeared to me to reveal him most accurately.
• THEAETETUS – Which one?
• STRANGER – Well, I think we said he was an antilogist.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – And is isn’t this just what he teaches others to be?
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – So let’s examine on what topics they claim to be training antilogists. Let our investigation begin at the beginning and set about it in this way. Come, [c] is it on divine matters hidden from the majority of men, that they generate experts in contradiction?
• THEAETETUS – So much at least is said of them.
• STRANGER – And also about all things visible on earth and in the heavens and about everything related to them?
• THEAETETUS – How not?
• STRANGER – But more, in their private meetings, when one is dealing with the coming to be of things and the way things are, on a general level, haven’t we seen how very redoubtably clever they are at creating contradictions and at making others clever at doing the same?
• THEAETETUS – Quite clever.
• [d] STRANGER – And laws and all political matters, don’t they promise to make men able to dispute about these?
• THEAETETUS – Yes. Nobody would even give them the time of day if they didn’t promise that.
• STRANGER – In fact on all arts as a whole and on each in particular, just what one has to do to contradict those who practice hem has been widely published and written down for anyone who might wish to know.
• THEAETETUS – I think you are thinking of Protagoras’ writings on wrestling and the other arts. [e]
• STRANGER – Yes, and those by many others, my friend! Indeed it seems to me that this antilogical art amounts to providing a special power to stir up controversy on any subject at all.
• THEAETETUS – Indeed it seems to spare nothing.
• STRANGER – But what do you say, my lad? By the gods do you believe this is possible? It may be that you, being younger, have a sharper view about this whereas we older ones are duller.
• 233a THEAETETUS – About what? Where are you going with that? I don’t really grasp what you are asking me.
• STRANGER – Whether it is possible for a man to know everything.
• THEAETETUS – Happy would be our tribe of men, Stranger!
• STRANGER – So how could one who himself is ignorant say anything sound when contradicting one who knows?
• THEAETETUS – There is no way.
• STRANGER – So can you see what makes the sophistic power amazing?
• THEAETETUS – Amazing?
• [b] STRANGER – The way those who possess it can somehow or other make the young believe they are the wisest on all subjects. Ater all, it is clear that if they did not contradict effectively and did not appear to the young to do so, or that if they did appear so but were not thought to be experts because of their art of controversy, then it would be hard to imagine why, as you put it, one would be willing to pay a dime to learn from them.
• THEAETETUS – Hardly.
• STRANGER – And yet they are in fact willing.
• THEAETETUS – Surely yes.
• [c] STRANGER – Probably because these do seem to have knowledge of the subjects they dispute about, in their eyes.
• THEAETETUS – How could it be otherwise?
• STRANGER – And don’t they pull this off in all subjects?
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – So they appear to their students to be wise in all ways.
• THEAETETUS – So they do…
• STRANGER – But in fact they are not. To be so was manifestly impossible.
• THEAETETUS – How would it not be impossible?
• STRANGER – Thus it is a doxastic “knowing” of all things that the sophist has now been revealed to possess rather than the tru h.
• [d] THEAETETUS – Exactly. And it may be that what we have just now said is the truest thing we have said about them yet.
• STRANGER – So then let’s take up an example that will make things clearer about them.
• THEAETETUS – What example?
• STRANGER – This – and try to pay close attention to me in your answers.
• THEAETETUS – About what?
• STRANGER – Let’s say someone claims he does not know how to speak and contradict, but knows how to make and do everything, tha ks to a single universal art –
• [e] THEAETETUS – What do you mean, everything?
• STRANGER – Ah! It is the very principle of all that has been said that immediately escapes you, since you do not understand what I mean by “everything”!
• THEAETETUS – Surely I do not.
• STRANGER –Well, my “everything” includes you and me and beyond us other living creatures and all trees.
• THEAETETUS – What are you saying about this?
• STRANGER – What if somebody claimed he would produce me and you and all the other things that grow out of the ground –
• 234a THEAETETUS – What kind of producing? Surely you are not talking about some kind of farmer since you also said he was a producer of living creatures.
• STRANGER – Yes I did, and also of the sea and the earth and the heavens and the gods and every other thing. Moreover, once he has produced all that at great speed, he puts each of those products up for sale at a low price.
• THEAETETUS – Is this some kind of game you are talking about?
• STRANGER – Well, if someone tells us he knows everything and can teach everything to another for a small fee and in little time, mustn’t we think he’s playing some kind of game?
• THEAETETUS – Surely we must, I’d say.
• [b] STRANGER – Do you know of a more artful and charming species of game than the mimetic art?
• THEAETETUS – Not a one. And with that you bring together a whole huge kind under one head, a kind very numerous and perhaps the most variegated of all.
• STRANGER – And so we do know the man who claims to able to make everything with a single art, after all. By fashioning imitations that have the same name as the realities, by the art of drawing, he will be able to deceive unknowing young children by showing them his drawings at a distance, and make them think that he is perfectly capable of producing any of those realities he wa ts.
• [c] THEAETETUS – How wouldn’t he be able?
• STRANGER – But won’t we expect there is an alternative art when it comes to arguments? Isn’t it possible also to bewitch the young – still standing as they do at some distance from the facts of reality – with arguments that make their way into their ears, by showing spoken likenesses of everything, to make it seem the truth is being said and that the speaker himself is the wises of all men in all things?
• [d] THEAETETUS – Why would such an art not exist?
• STRANGER – But Theaetetus, is it not inevitable that, in process of time, as they advance in age, these young auditors coming into close contact with realities and being compelled by brutal experience to see and feel things as they are, will find themselves constrained to change their previous opinions so that what seemed great will appear small and what seemed easy difficult, a d that [e] all the appearances conveyed in speeches will be completely overturned by the facts they have experienced?
• THEAETETUS – So at least I would say, even at my age. For I think I myself am still among those who find themselves at some distance.
• STRANGER – That is why all of us around you will try, and even now are trying, to bring you as close as possible and spare you the concomitant sufferings. But to return to the sophist, tell me this: is it now clear 235a to you that he is a species of magician who, inasmuch as against such realities, he does no more than imitate them? or are we still unsure whether he could not t uly possess knowledge of all the subjects in which he seems able to contradict?
• THEAETETUS – How could one not doubt that? According to what we have said it is now quite clear that this type belongs in the ealm of child’s-play.
• STRANGER – It is therefore as a magician and an imitator we must take him.
• THEAETETUS – How not?
• STRANGER – So come along! Our business now is not to let this creature [b] evade us any longer, since at present he is fairly surrounded by the instruments the present discussion provide in such cases, so that he can no longer escape this.
• THEAETETUS – Escape what?
• STRANGER – The fact he is within the genus illusionists belong to.
• THEAETETUS – In this, I am of the same opinion as you.
• STRANGER – It has thus been proven that we must now divide as quickly as possible the art of image-making, and that if once having descended into that abyss we come upon the sophist hiding from us there, we must immediately grab him according to the royal edict, and deliver him up [c] as our prey. But if he lurks within any of the sub-parts of the mimetic art we shall keep on pu suing him by dividing again the part in which he has taken refuge, up until he has been captured. In any case, we may say, neither he nor any other kind will ever boast of having escaped the method of the hunters able to conduct his chase in this way, following each track separately and all of them.
• THEAETETUS – Well put. We must do as you say, the way you are saying.
• STRANGER – If we go on dividing as we did before, [d] I myself now glimpse two species of imitation. But as to the essential aspect we are now searching for, I don’t yet seem to be able to say into which of them we will find it.
• THEAETETUS – But start by telling and dividing for us what are the two species you mention.
• STRANGER – One of the arts I see is the eikastic. This is mostly whenever one generates an imitation in accordance with the proportions of the model – its length, width, and depth – and moreover gives [e] each part the appropriate colors.
• THEAETETUS – But don’t all imitators try to do something like that?
• STRANGER – Not those who fabricate or draw things really big. For if they reproduced the veritable proportions of their beautiul models you know that the parts higher up would appear to be too small 236a and the lower too big, since we are viewing the former from far away and the latter up close.
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – So don’t these artists say goodbye to the true, and in place of what the proportions are, fashion their images by giving them proportions that seem to be beautiful?
• THEAETETUS – Undoubtedly.
• STRANGER – So isn’t it fitting to call the other, since it is like its model, a “likeness”?
• THEAETETUS – Yes it is.
• [b] STRANGER – But as to the part of the mimetic art that deals with this, to give it the name we have just given it, “eikastic”?
• THEAETETUS – Let’s call it so.
• STRANGER – But how are we to name that which appears to resemble what is fair only because the spectator is not in a fair posi ion, whereas for a spectator who has the power to view it adequately it is not resemblant to that which it claims to resemble? Isn’t what appears to resemble but does not merely an “appearance”?
• THEAETETUS – Certainly.
• STRANGER – And isn’t this a very large part of painting and [c] of mimetic as a whole?
• THEAETETUS – Of course.
• STRANGER – And as to the art that does not create a semblance but an appearance, wouldn’t it be most correct for us to call it “phantastic”?
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – So I have spoken of two kinds of eidolopoiïc art, namely the eikastic art and the phantastic art.
• THEAETETUS – Correct.
• STRANGER – But what I was uncertain about – in which of these two arts to place the sophist – I still lack a clear conception. [d] Truly he is an amazing man, and very hard is he to see through, since even now with great and subtle success he has escaped into a kind that leaves one trying to find him at an impasse.
• THEAETETUS – So it seems.
• STRANGER – Do you say that because you yourself know it, or is it that you have been carried away by the course of the argumen , forcing you to agree quickly?
• THEAETETUS – What are you saying – and why?
• STRANGER – The reality, my blessed boy, is that we are involved in an extremely difficult [e] investigation. For to appear and seem but not to be, and to say things but not true things – all this is always fraught with impasses, of old as well as now. How is one really to succeed to argue that saying things that are false and having opinions that are false can really be the case, without being entangled in a contradiction in the very act of uttering it? That, Theaetetus, is an extremely 237a difficult question.
• THEAETETUS – And why?
• STRANGER – Such an argument dares to suppose that what is not, is: otherwise it is impossible for the false to come into being. Yet it was in our boyhood, my boy, that we heard him, the great Parmenides – and through to the end, whether in prose or verse, he never stopped admonishing us about this every time he spoke:
• For this will never be proved, that non-beings are; You who search, bar your thought from this way.
• [b] From him we have this testimony, but discourse itself will prove it more forcefully than anything, once it is put to the question with moderation. It is with this that we must start, unless you another idea.
• THEAETETUS –As far as I am concerned, proceed as you choose; and as to best way to examine this discourse, see for yourself the best road to take, and lead on.
• STRANGER – Alright, that’s what we must do. So tell me: Do we somehow dare to speak of “what absolutely isn’t”?
• THEAETETUS – Why shouldn’t we?
• STRANGER – Let us suppose that one of the listeners had to answer this question: “ where should this name “non-being” be applied?” and suppose that he does not comply merely to intervene in the debate or take a part in a game; but then, after giving it deep thought, [c] tell me what you think he would have to say? Aiming at what and applying to what sort of thing does it seem to us he would use this word? And what would he be pointing out to any who inquired?
• THEAETETUS – You have asked a difficult thing and even something quite impossible for someone like me to answer.
• STRANGER – And yet this much is clear, that it is not onto beings that one should transport any hint of “not-being.”
• THEAETETUS – How could it be?
• STRANGER – And if not onto a being, then to transport non-being onto something would be an improper sort of transporting.
• THEAETETUS – How could it be proper?
• [d] STRANGER – This also is clear to us, presumably: that each time we say “something” we say it of some being. For to utter i by itself, stripped of and utterly absent from any and every being, is impossible. Right?
• THEAETETUS – Impossible.
• STRANGER – And looking at it this way do you agree that it is necessary that he who is saying “something” is saying it of one hing?
• THEAETETUS – I do.
• STRANGER – For, you will aver, “something” is a vocal sign for one thing, whereas “some things” can mean “both,” or “several.”
• THEAETETUS – How could I not?
• [e] STRANGER – But by all necessity he who does not say something seems to be saying nothing at all.
• THEAETETUS – By all necessity.
• STRANGER – Mustn’t one also refuse to grant that he says something when a man says “not at all a thing”– and mustn’t one affirm, rather, that he does not even “say” when a man tries to utter a non-being?
• THEAETETUS – Discourse would then reach a final impasse.
• 238a STRANGER – It’s not as yet high time for such high talk, my dear boy: we still have the most important and primary impasse of all, one that in fact has to do with the very principle of it.
• THEAETETUS – What do you declare that to be? Say it without fear!
• STRANGER – On the one hand, to what is some other being could presumably be added...
• THEAETETUS – How not?
• STRANGER – But on the other hand, are we to assert that it is even possible for one of the things that are to be added to a no -being?
• THEAETETUS – How could it be?
• STRANGER – Shall we posit that number, as a whole, is among the things that are?
• [b] THEAETETUS – If there is anything to posit so, that’s it.
• STRANGER –Then we must not even attempt to bring the plurality of number, let alone the being of number, to what is not.
• THEAETETUS – It certainly wouldn’t be proper to attempt it, as the argument is telling us.
• STRANGER – How then could one utter through his mouth or even grasp in thought the whole of beings or of non-beings without using number?
• THEAETETUS – Tell me how.
• STRANGER – But whenever we speak of “things that are not,” aren’t we [c] trying to apply numerical plurality to them?
• THEAETETUS – Of course.
• STRANGER – But whenever we say “what is not,” are we not applying unity to it?
• THEAETETUS – Yes, very clearly.
• STRANGER – And yet we affirm it is neither proper nor correct to attach being to non-being?
• THEAETETUS – Very true.
• STRANGER – Then do you conclude that it is not possible either to pronounce or to say or to think soundly that which itself and in itself is not, but that it is unthinkable, unsayable, unpronounceable and unaccountable?
• THEAETETUS – Absolutely.
• [d] STRANGER – So did I speak falsely a moment ago when I said I would speak of the greatest difficulty about it?
• THEAETETUS – Really, do we have to talk of one still greater?
• STRANGER – Really, my most excellent young man, after what we have just said do you still not understand that the man who challenges it necessarily contradicts himself for trying to refute it?
• THEAETETUS – But how? Explain more clearly.
• STRANGER – You mustn’t seek more clarity from me: [e] it was I who hypothesized that non-being must participate neither in one nor in many, and you now see that I did and now do say it is one, when I say “the” non-being. Do you understand that?
• THEAETETUS – I do.
• STRANGER – Moreover just a little earlier I asserted it was in itself unpronounceable, unsayable and unaccountable. Do you follow?
• THEAETETUS – I follow. How could I not?
• STRANGER – So my trying to attach being to it went against all that had 239a been said.
• THEAETETUS – It appears so.
• STRANGER – And more, in attaching this to it, didn’t I speak of it as one?
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – What’s more in saying it is unpronounceable and unsayable and unspeakable, wasn’t I delivering speeches that make i a single thing?
• THEAETETUS – How could one deny that?
• STRANGER – And yet we are affirming that if one would speak correctly one must neither determine it as being one, nor multiple, nor even name “it” at all. For this name comes down to giving it a kind of unity.
• THEAETETUS – Exactly.
• [b] STRANGER – And so what could one possibly say about me, if not that as always and again one will now find me defeated in my attempt to examine non-being. So it is not, as I said, in my language that one must seek the way to speak correctly of non-being. Therefore let us seek it now in you.
• THEAETETUS – But what are you saying?
• STRANGER –Go ahead! Since you’re young and of truly good lineage, try to show us, by girding up all your strength, that you are quite capable of uttering something correct about non-being, without joining being or unity or numerical plurality to it.
• [c] THEAETETUS – Only a huge and strange eagerness would need possess me to make such an attempt if, after seeing what you you self have undergone, I should attempt it myself.
• STRANGER – Alright then, if you will agree let’s let you and me off the hook. Until we run into someone up to the task, let’s say the sophist has hidden himself most artfully within some impenetrable refuge.
• THEAETETUS – It really seems so.
• STRANGER – That’s why if we declare he is in possession of a “phantastic” [d] art he will easily twist our arguments back agai st us, latching onto our use of language. Just as soon as we call him a “fabricator of images,” he will ask us what we could possibly mean by that word, “image.” So, Theaetetus, we need to examine how to answer this young man’s question.
• THEAETETUS – Clearly, we shall respond by bringing up images on the surface of water and in mirrors, and also those that are painted or sculpted and all such things.
• [e] STRANGER – It is obvious, Theaetetus, that you have never actually seen a sophist.
• THEAETETUS – Why?
• STRANGER – Because he will come across to you as having his eyes closed, or even having no eyes at all.
• THEAETETUS – How do you mean?
• STRANGER – As soon as you answer him that way, whether you speak of something in mirrors or fabricated things, he will ridicule your arguments as if addressed to him as to a sighted man, and will pretend to know neither of mirrors nor 240a water nor of vision in general, but will confine himself to question you on the conclusions to be drawn merely from your words.
• THEAETETUS – That is?
• STRANGER – On what circulates through the many instances whose multiplicity you saw fit to enumerate while giving them a single name, since it is this word “image” that you uttered for all of them, as if it were only a matter of a single thing. And so keep speaking, defend yourself and cede nothing to this man.
• THEAETETUS – What indeed, Stranger, could we say of an image except that it is something other so fashioned to resemble that i is such as the true thing?
• STRANGER – With an “other thing that is such” do you mean a “true” thing, or to what are you applying [b] the word “such”?
• THEAETETUS – Surely not to a true thing, but to something resembling the true.
• STRANGER – Meaning by “true” what really is?
• THEAETETUS – Just so!
• STRANGER – And what of “is not true”? Is it the contrary of “true”?
• THEAETETUS – Of course.
• STRANGER – So are you saying that what resembles is not, since you say that it is not true? But it does exist.
• THEAETETUS – Exists how?
• STRANGER – Not truly, given what you are arguing.
• THEAETETUS – No, and yet it really is a likeness.
• STRANGER – And so what we say is really a likeness does not really exist.
• [c] THEAETETUS – Hmmm! Thus, a sort of weaving could very well weave together what is not with what is: how strange!
• STRANGER – How would it not be strange? You see at least that even now by dint of this interweaving the many-headed sophist has compelled us to agree against our will that what is not in some way is.
• THEAETETUS – I only see it too well.
• STRANGER – But what then? Will we be able to define his art in a manner that makes us agree with ourselves?
• THEAETETUS – What is it you fear in suggesting this?
• [d] STRANGER – When we say that he deceives us and that his art is somehow an art of deception, shall we then be declaring tha his art leads our soul to false opinions? Or what shall we say?
• THEAETETUS – Let’s say that: how else can we put it?
• STRANGER – And false opinion in turn will be opining things contrary to things that are? Or what?
• THEAETETUS – That’s it: contrary.
• STRANGER – So you are arguing that the content of a false opinion is things that are not?
• THEAETETUS – Necessarily.
• [e] STRANGER – But is it because it is opining, about things that are not, that they are not? Or because it believes that in some way things are that are not in any way?
• THEAETETUS – It must be that it’s by opining that things that are not are in some way, if anyone is to be able to say something false, even a little bit and only briefly.
• STRANGER – But next? Will opinion not be able to believe that things that absolutely are absolutely are not?
• THEAETETUS – Yes it will.
• STRANGER – And this, too, will be false?
• THEAETETUS – This, too.
• STRANGER – And speech, too, I imaging, will be taken as false in the same way, 241a when it says that things that are are not, and that things that are not are.
• THEAETETUS – Yes. For what other reason could a speech be taken as false?
• STRANGER – Maybe for no other reason. But this is exactly what the sophist will deny, namely that there is any way to make a man of good sense agree, when the things about which one has just agreed were exactly those that we previously agreed to declare unpronounceable, unsayable, unaccountable and unthinkable. Do we understand, Theaetetus, what the sophist is here saying?
• THEAETETUS – How could we fail to understand that he will say we are saying the opposite of what we have just said, when we da ed to argue that falsehood exists [b] in opinions and speeches? For then, over and over again, we are forced to attach what is to what is not, though we argued that this is the most impossible thing.
• STRANGER – Good remembering! But the time has come to deliberate about what we are to do with the sophist, for you see very well how many counter-holds and impasses he can easily bring against whenever in trying to find him, we place him within the realm of fabricators of false appearances and of magicians.
• THEAETETUS – Indeed, I see it.
• STRANGER – And yet we have gone through only a small part of them, given they are [c] so to speak infinite.
• THEAETETUS – It would be impossible as it seems to get hold of the sophist under these circumstances.
• STRANGER – What then? Could it be we are so weakened as to give up?
• THEAETETUS – If it was up to me, certainly not, even if we manage somehow, however little, to free ourselves from the grip of his character.
• STRANGER – You will forgive me, then, and you will be content, as you just said, if we manage somehow to free ourselves from the grip of such a powerful argument?
• THEAETETUS – How could I do otherwise?
• [d] STRANGER – And I have another request for you.
• THEAETETUS – What is it?
• STRANGER – That you not take me to be a parricide!
• THEAETETUS – In what way?
• STRANGER – It will be necessary, in order to defend ourselves, to put to torture the logos of our father Parmenides and to use violence to establish that non-being in some way is, and in turn that being in some way is not.
• THEAETETUS – That is clearly the front on which we must do battle in the discussion to come.
• STRANGER – How could this not be clear even to the blind, [e] as they say! For as long as this refutation is not achieved and we have not reached an agreement, it will hardly be possible to talk about false arguments and false opinions, nor about images, whether imitations or phantasms, nor for that matter about the arts that deal in these things, not a one of them, without being compelled to contradict and make fools of ourselves
• THEAETETUS – Quite true.
• 242a STRANGER – That is why the time has come to boldly attack our father’s discourse, or else simply leave it behind, in case some kind of scruple bars us from doing so.
• THEAETETUS – But nothing at all will bar us from this!
• STRANGER – So now I have a third small request ...
• THEAETETUS – Just name it!
• STRANGER –I believe I already said, in what I was saying just now, that I have always avoided – and so even more at present – o embark upon such a refutation.
• THEAETETUS – You did say that.
• STRANGER – Yes, and that makes me afraid that you will think we crazy for reversing myself with every step I take. [b] After all it was to please you that we shall strive to refute his argument, if indeed we do refute it.
• THEAETETUS – As far as I am concerned I will not judge you are striking a false note if you engage in this refutation and proo. So proceed confidently!
• STRANGER – So let’s do so. But how are we to begin such a perilous argument? Here, my young man, is the path by which we necessarily must begin.
• THEAETETUS – Which one?
• STRANGER – By first examining something that seems very clear at present, [c] something that has given us no opportunity to experience any disorder and that we may easily agree about with each other and shall judge the matter well and truly decided.
• THEAETETUS – Can you express that more clearly?
• STRANGER – It was easily, calmly, it seems, that Parmenides made his argument for us – himself, and anyone who has set about making a decision concerning beings as to their number and nature.
• THEAETETUS – How so?
• STRANGER – It seems to me each of them are telling us a story as if we were children. According to the one there are three bei gs that sometimes are [d] at war with each and at other times become friends, and he regales us with the spectacle of marriages, and childbirths, and the nourishing of their progeniture; according to another there are only two, wet and dry or hot and cold, which he depicts as living together and he has them marry each other. The Elean tribe that came from us, starting with Xenophanes and even earlier, tell us that “all things,” so-called, come down to one, and spin their tale from that. After which, some Muses from Ionia and Sicily figured [e] that it was safer to weave the two together and say that being is one and many at the same time, and owes its cohesion to hatred and friendship. “For it is in being discordant that it accords with itself,” those Muses say, more tense in their tone, whereas those among them that are more relaxed have shortened the eternal tension of this discordant accord by saying that there is an alternation, and that the All is sometimes unified and friendly through the action of 243a Aphrodite, and sometimes multiple and at war with itself through the action of a certain “Hatred.” It would be difficult to know which among them have spoken the truth and which false, and at this point it would be impertinent to attack figures so a cient and famous. But we can say this much without incurring reproach ...
• THEAETETUS – What?
• STRANGER – ... that in looking down upon us from the heights in their grandeur they have paid too little attention to the crowd of us below. For they have the least care whether we could follow them in what they say, or whether we would [b] simply be left in the dust while they are busy putting the finishing touches on their stories.
• THEAETETUS – What do you mean?
• STRANGER – When the one of them asserts that there is or there has been or there comes to be many or two or one, or when another of them speaks of a mixing of the hot and the cold and posits dissociations here and associations there, by god I must ask you, Theaetetus: do you understand what they are saying? I can say for myself that when I was younger, any time one would speak o non-being, which just now presented us with an impasse, I thought I understood it perfectly; but now …? Well, you see the impasse in which we find ourselves about that.
• [c] THEAETETUS – So I do.
• STRANGER – And it just may be that our soul is in this same state on the topic of being, and that we, who affirm we have no emarrassment about this and that we understand what one means whenever he says that word, though we do not about that other one, that we may just find ourselves in the same state about both of them.
• THEAETETUS – Perhaps.
• STRANGER – And as we proceed we must say the same thing about all the other terms we have just been speaking of.
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – Then we will investigate all those things later – and there are many of them – [d] if we choose to, but now we must investigate the most important one, their tutelary and founding hero.
• THEAETETUS – Which are you speaking of? Or is it obvious that you are saying we must first interpret being, and what those who mention it assume they are pointing to?
• STRANGER – With every step you take, you understand better, Theaetetus. I want to discuss the route we are to take in our research and about the way it must proceed, by inquiring of them, as if they were here in person, “Let’s see, all of you for whom all things are made of hot and cold or some other pair of contraries of that sort, exactly what you are talking about when you [e] apply to the pair, and say of each of its terms, that it is? How are we to understand your ‘is’? Is it as a third thing in addition to those two, so that we are to posit that for you the all, instead of being two, becomes three? But I imagine it is not in affirming that the one and the other term in your couple is, that you are saying they are in the same way. For then, whatever it is, both come very close to being one?”
• THEAETETUS – That is true.
• STRANGER – “But you are wanting to call both ‘beings’.”
• THEAETETUS – Perhaps.
• 244a STRANGER – “But friends,” we shall say, “even saying it that way, you would most clearly be saying two are one.”
• THEAETETUS – Your retort is quite to the point.
• STRANGER – “So whenever we find ourselves at an impasse, it is for you to make us see with sufficient clarity what you can mea whenever you utter this word, “be.” For it is obvious that you have been familiar with this for a long time, while for us we believed we knew them up until now, but we have now become stuck. Start, then, by instructing us on this point, so that it will ot seem that we understand what you are saying while the opposite is [b] actually taking place.” In saying this and requiring this from them and from all the others who say that the All is more than one, would we, my boy, be striking a false note?
• THEAETETUS – Not in the least.
• STRANGER – Then what about those who say that the all is one? Oughtn’t we investigate to the best of our ability what they might mean by “to be”?
• THEAETETUS – How can we avoid it?
• STRANGER – So let’s have them answer this question, “You claim, I believe, that there is only one?” – “We so claim,” they will say, won’t they?
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – “Well then: is it something you call being?”
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• [c] STRANGER – “Is it the same thing as one, in which case you are using two words for the same thing? Or how?”
• THEAETETUS – What answer will they have when we ask that?
• STRANGER – It is clear, Theaetetus that for one who posits this hypothesis it will not be the easiest thing in the world to answer what we just asked, nor any other question for that matter.
• THEAETETUS – Why?
• STRANGER – To agree there are two names when one has just posited there is nothing but one is quite ridiculous, I would say.
• THEAETETUS – How could it fail to be so?
• STRANGER – And it would be completely so, to go so far as to say [d] there is a name but that it has no meaning.
• THEAETETUS – In what regard?
• STRANGER – If one posits a name is different from the thing, he is somehow saying they are two.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – But if he asserts that the name is not different but is the same thing, he will be forced to say it is the name of othing; or else if he shall say it is the name of something, the name will turn out to be the name of a name, and of nothing else.
• THEAETETUS – That follows.
• STRANGER – And if “one” is only the one of what is one, its “itself” is only the itself of a name that is of the name “one”?
• THEAETETUS – Necessarily.
• STRANGER – What then? Will they say the whole is different from the one-that-is, or the same as it?
• [e] THEAETETUS – How will they say anything else? How can they?
• STRANGER – If, accordingly, it is whole, and as Parmenides says:
• fully similar to the mass of a well-rounded sphere, equally extended in every direction; for stronger or weaker it must not be, here rather than there,
• such a being has a middle and extremities, and since it has these, it has parts by all necessity, hasn’t it?
• THEAETETUS – Yes, in fact.
• 245a STRANGER – Now surely nothing prevents that a unity should come to be superimposed upon what is divided in this way and should affect all its parts, so much so that it is both one and whole.
• THEAETETUS – Why not?
• STRANGER – But isn’t it impossible for that which is affected in this way to be the one itself?
• THEAETETUS – Why?
• STRANGER – Because, properly defined, what is truly one must be partless.
• THEAETETUS – Yes it must.
• [b] STRANGER – Then this one, consisting as it is of many parts, is not consonant with this definition.
• THEAETETUS – I understand.
• STRANGER – And will what is whole, affected by this kind of unity, be one and whole; or shall we absolutely refuse to say that it is whole?
• THEAETETUS – You’ve presented a difficult choice.
• STRANGER – Nothing could be more true. For if that which is is only one because it is affected in this way, it clearly cannot appear to be the same as the one – and thus their sum will more than one.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – Moreover, if being is not whole on account of undergoing the effect of the one, but itself is the whole, it results that being falls short of itself.
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• [c] STRANGER – And according to this line of argument, being deprived of itself, being will not be being.
• THEAETETUS – Correct!
• STRANGER – And again their sum becomes more than one, since both being and the whole have each taken on their own nature, each one separate from the other.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – And yet if the whole is completely not being, [d] the same is the case for being, which, in addition to not being, can never come into being.
• THEAETETUS – But why?
• STRANGER – Because what becomes always becomes in its entirety, so that one must neither speak of a “way of being” nor of a “coming to be” as being if one does not count the one and the whole among the things that are.
• THEAETETUS – It does indeed seem so.
• STRANGER – What’s more, whatever is not a whole cannot have any quantity, since if it has a quantity it must have it entirely, whatever the quantity be.
• THEAETETUS – Undoubtedly.
• STRANGER – And at the same time surely countless other things show up, [e] boundless aporias, raised against anyone who argues that being is somehow two-fold or only one.
• THEAETETUS – The ones we have just seen arising give enough evidence for that! One follows upon the other, bearing off all tha has been said into ever greater and more difficult paths of error.
• STRANGER – Accordingly, as to those who are involved in such utterly polished argumentation about being and non-being, though we have not covered them thoroughly, let us say this is enough. Now we must contemplate those who argue differently, so that we might see from the whole lot of them 246a that being is no easier to talk about than non-being.
• THEAETETUS – Yes we must now move on to these, also.
• STRANGER – And yet it appears there is something like a Battle of the Giants among them because of their disagreement about way of being of what is.
• THEAETETUS – How so?
• STRANGER – Some of them drag everything down from heaven to earth, laying hold of everything with their hands as if oak and stone. For in clinging to all such things as these they contend that only those things exist that you can bump into and somehow grab, [b] defining body to be the only way of being, and if anyone affirms something exists that has no body they merely respond with utter and total disbelief and refuse to listen any further.
• THEAETETUS – You have described a redoubtable group! I, too, have met many of them before.
• STRANGER – That’s why those who disagree with them must be on guard: it is from some high vantage point one cannot see that they defend themselves, fighting with all their strength to establish that certain intelligible and incorporeal “ideas” are the true way that being exists. As for the “bodies” of these and their arguments about truth, [c] they smash them up into little bits in their argumentation, and substitute for what these call the “way of being” a kind of becoming that never ceases to flow. A never-ending battle about this question, Theaetetus, is constantly renewed between them.
• THEAETETUS – That is true.
• STRANGER – So let us ask each of the two groups, one after the other, to give their accounts on behalf of the way of being they posit.
• THEAETETUS – How shall we obtain it?
• STRANGER – From those who posit the way of being to be in their ideas it is easier: they are more gentle. But from those who have dragged everything [d] by main force toward body it will be more difficult – and perhaps in a way impossible. But here is how I think we must deal with them.
• THEAETETUS – How?
• STRANGER – The best way, if it is possible, is to render them nobler in deed. But if this is beyond our power we’ll do it in speech, by supposing they will agree to answer in a more lawful way than they are doing right now. For an agreement given by people who are nobler carries more weight, I think, than one given by those who are worse; as for us it is not the latter we care aout, but truth.
• [e] THEAETETUS – Most correct.
• STRANGER – Pray then that it is those who have become better who are answering you, and be the interpreter of what they have said.
• THEAETETUS – So I will.
• STRANGER – When it is a matter of a mortal creature, do they say it is something?
• THEAETETUS – Of course.
• STRANGER – But do they agree it is an ensouled body?
• THEAETETUS – Certainly.
• STRANGER – Positing, then, that the soul is one of the things that are?
• 247a THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – But do they say that one such soul is just and another unjust, and that one is sensible and the other insane?
• THEAETETUS – Of course.
• STRANGER – But don’t they say it is because of its possession or the presence of justice that each of them become such, and the presence of its contrary that each becomes the opposite?
• THEAETETUS – Yes, they agree to that also.
• STRANGER – But on top of that, all that is capable of being present to something or absent from it, will they state that it fully exists?
• THEAETETUS – So they will.
• [b] STRANGER – So from the moment that justice exists, and wise thinking and the rest of the virtues, as well as their opposites – and naturally the soul as well, in which all of that comes into being – do they say that any of these things can be seen or touched, or that one cannot see any of them?
• THEAETETUS – Virtually none of these is visible.
• STRANGER – But then what are they saying? That they possess a body?
• THEAETETUS – About all those things they do not give a uniform answer. They say that the soul does seem to them have a body, but as for wise thinking and each of the other things the question bears upon, shame [c] keeps them from daring to grant that they are not among the things that are and maintaining at all costs that they are bodies.
• STRANGER – It is clear to us, Theaetetus, that these men have become better, for no sense of shame would restrain at least those who were sown and sprang from the earth; they would stubbornly hold that whatever they can’t squeeze between their hands doesn’t exist at all.
• THEAETETUS – You are saying just about how they think.
• STRANGER – So let us continue to question them. For if they are willing to admit that if, among the things that are, there is ever so little incorporeal [d], it will be enough. For what they must now tell us is what they have in mind that might be common to things by nature incorporeal and those that are corporeal, and that might enable them to say that both are. They may well be embarrassed: if that is just about how they feel, see if they might accept this suggestion from us, namely that is can say that both exist. Perhaps they would be at a loss. Let’s say they are and that we make a certain suggestion to them, namely that what is is something like this:
• THEAETETUS – Like what? Tell me and perhaps we’ll know.
• STRANGER – I say that whatever possesses a power of any sort, [e] either to act upon another thing, of whatever nature, or to e acted on, even in the smallest way and by the meanest of things, even if it is only once – I say all such things truly exist. For I propose as a definition for defining beings, that they are nothing other than power.
• THEAETETUS – Well, since they have nothing better to say at the moment than this, they accept that definition.
• STRANGER – Right. This may later appear otherwise 248a to us and them, but as far as they are concerned, let this remain agreed between us for the time being.
• THEAETETUS – It is agreed.
• STRANGER – Then let us proceed to the other group, the Friends of the Ideas. And let’s have you again give their answers.
• THEAETETUS – So I will.
• STRANGER – You speak of becoming and of being, by dividing them as two separate beings, don’t you?
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – And by means of body we communicate with becoming through sensation, whereas through thinking, by means of soul, that we have access to a way of being that really is, the way of being you affirm always behaves similarly in the same light, whereas becoming is sometimes one way and sometimes another.
• [b] THEAETETUS – So we affirm.
• STRANGER – And as for this communicating, my best of all men, in what sense shall we say you mean it, in either case? Isn’t it as we have just put it?
• THEAETETUS – Meaning what?
• STRANGER – That it is an undergoing or an acting-upon, resulting from a certain power, and occurring during their encounter. But it may be, Theaetetus, that you could not understand clearly their answer to these questions, while I understand it probably because it is familiar to me.
• THEAETETUS – So then what is their argument?
• [c] STRANGER – They do not grant us what has just been said to the Sons of the Earth about the way of being.
• THEAETETUS – Which was?
• STRANGER – We posited, I think, that it sufficed to define beings as that to which each time is present a power to undergo to act on the minutest thing.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – Against that they will say this, that for becoming there is a share in undergoing and acting-upon, but with respect to being the power of both these kinds does not apply.
• THEAETETUS – And does their argument make sense?
• STRANGER – At least in the sense that we must say that we need to get from them [d] further information, as to whether they also will agree that the soul can know and whether being can be known.
• THEAETETUS – This much they will surely grant.
• STRANGER – But knowing and being known: do you say they are an action or an undergoing or both? Or is the one an undergoing and the other another? Or that neither of them in any way has a share in either acting or undergoing?
• THEAETETUS – Clearly neither in neither: otherwise they would be contradicting what they said before.
• STRANGER – I get it. But this much I do know: if knowing is in fact [e] doing something, the known must for its part be undergoing, and to the extent that being is known by the act of knowing, it is being moved on account of undergoing it, which according to us however cannot happen to a thing that is at rest.
• THEAETETUS – Correct.
• STRANGER – But, by Zeus, what of this? Shall we easily be persuaded that motion and life and soul and thought are not present 49a to what completely is, and that it does not live or think, but august and holy, bereft of intelligence, it stands fixed and motionless?
• THEAETETUS – That would be a terrible argument for us to accept, dear Stranger!
• STRANGER – Shall we say it has intelligence but not life?
• THEAETETUS – But how?
• STRANGER – What if we say that life and intelligence are in it but that it is not in the soul that it has them?
• THEAETETUS – But in what other way could it have them?
• STRANGER – So instead, that it has intelligence, life, and soul, but is altogether motionless and still, though having a soul?
• [b] THEAETETUS – All those arguments seem absurd to me.
• STRANGER – Thus we must grant that what is moved and the moving are things that do exist.
• THEAETETUS – Probably.
• STRANGER – In any case, Theaetetus, if they are motionless there will be no intelligence anywhere, about anything, in anything.
• THEAETETUS – Exactly right.
• STRANGER – But at the same time, if we allow on the contrary that all things are in motion and are being moved, our reasoning will exclude that as well.
• THEAETETUS – How is that?
• STRANGER – Do you think, in the case of what keeps the same relations and is in the same condition [c] in respect to the same hing, that such can be the case if there is no rest at all?
• THEAETETUS – No way.
• STRANGER – And without these conditions obtaining can you see intelligence existing or arising – intelligence about anything a all?
• THEAETETUS – Hardly.
• STRANGER – Correct. And so, if there is one who must be fought with all the resources of logos, it is he who, in any possible way on any possible subject, struggles in order to eliminate knowledge and thought and intelligence.
• THEAETETUS – With full force.
• STRANGER – For the philosopher, then – he who honors these things above all – there is, it seems, every necessity for their sake both to refuse to accept that the all is at rest, whether from those who assert that everything is one [d] or from those who say it is a plurality of Ideas, and no less, in turn, to remain completely deaf to those who set in motion in every way “that which is;” but, imitating the children’s wish, he must choose “both” and say of that which is and of the all that they both are motionless and in motion.
• THEAETETUS – Quite true.
• STRANGER – So then haven’t we done a decent job of circumscribing the problem of being with our definition?
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – O my god, Theaetetus! I do think we are about to solve the impasse we met with in our investigation about being!
• [e] THEAETETUS – But how? What are you saying this time?
• STRANGER – My young man, do you not realize that we are presently in the greatest of ignorance about its subject, and yet may just seem to be saying something sensible?
• THEAETETUS – So it seems to me, at least. But in what sense this has escaped our notice I do not understand.
• STRANGER – Investigate – and try to be a bit more perspicacious – whether, in view of the agreement we have just reached, we ought 250a to be asked exactly the same questions that we ourselves were asking those who argue the all is made of the hot and the cold.
• THEAETETUS – What were they? Remind me.
• STRANGER – Of course. And I will try to do it following the method of asking you in their place, as before, so that we might p oceed together, step by step.
• THEAETETUS – Quite correctly so.
• STRANGER – Alright then: Do you not say that movement and rest are perfect opposites of each other?
• THEAETETUS – How could one say otherwise?
• STRANGER – And yet you do maintain that in themselves they exist equally, each of them?
• [b] THEAETETUS – I do maintain it.
• STRANGER – When you grant that they exist, do you mean by this that both and each of them are in motion?
• THEAETETUS – Not at all.
• STRANGER – But then are you indicating that they are at rest, in arguing that they both exist?
• THEAETETUS – How could I?
• STRANGER – Then is it as some third term in addition to those two that you are setting “being” in the soul, as enveloping toge her both rest and motion; and is it in taking them together and fixing your attention on their communication with being that you have come to say that both are?
• [c] THEAETETUS – Indeed we may have divined that being is a third term, once we affirmed that movement and rest exist.
• STRANGER – Therefore being is not motion and rest taken together, but is something other than these two.
• THEAETETUS – It seems so.
• STRANGER – Then in its own nature being is neither at rest nor in motion.
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – Then toward what should one direct his thinking now, if he wants to establish something clear and solid about it fo himself?
• THEAETETUS – Toward what indeed?
• STRANGER – Toward something not at all easily accessible, I think. For if something is not [d] moving how could it not be at rest? Or if not at all fixed how in turn could it not be in motion? And yet being, for us, has now come into view as beyond both of these. Or is this possible?
• THEAETETUS – It couldn’t be more impossible!
• STRANGER – But here is something worth mentioning about these.
• THEAETETUS – What?
• STRANGER – That when we were asked what we are to refer to by the name “non being,” we got stuck in an impasse. Do you remembe ?
• THEAETETUS – How could I not remember?
• [e] STRANGER – But aren’t we now in a bit less of an impasse about being?
• THEAETETUS – For me, Stranger, I find myself in an even worse impasse, if that’s possible!
• STRANGER – Well let’s not worry about our impasses. Since being and non being were equally aporetic, we can now hope that if the one of them should one day reveal itself more clearly or more obscurely, then so 251a would the other; but if we are able to see neither of them, let us at least make a way for our reasoning, whatever it may be, that will be most appropriate for both o them at the same time.
• THEAETETUS – Fine.
• STRANGER – Let us explain how it is we are calling one thing, though one and the same, by many names when we speak of it.
• THEAETETUS – What thing? Give me an example
• STRANGER – We speak about “man” by giving him a lot of epithets: we impose upon him colors and shapes and sizes and vices and virtues, among all of which – and there are countless others – we do not limit ourselves to saying he is [b] man only but also good, and countless other things; and so it goes with the rest of things for the same reason: although we begin by positing each as a single thing we go on to speak of it as many with many names.
• THEAETETUS – What you say is true.
• STRANGER – In this way we have laid out a feast both for the young and for elders arriving late on the benches: for this gives the former a way to reply immediately that it is just as impossible for the many to be one as for the one to be many. And they take great pleasure, as you know, in disallowing us to say [c] “the man is good,” insisting rather that the good is good and ma is man. You have run into many persons, Theaetetus, as I imagine, who are zealous about doing this sort of thing, sometimes even older men, whose lack of intellectual formation leaves them to admire such things, and to think they’ve chanced upon somethi g surpassingly wise.
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – So in order to include in our discussion all who have ever in their conversation had anything whatever to say about the manner of being of what is, let what we’re about to say be stated before these, as well as the others we have dialogued with before, in the form of questions.
• THEAETETUS – Just what will these be?
• STRANGER – Are we to attach being neither to motion nor to rest, nor anything else to anything else, but posit them in our argumentation as being without mixture and incapable of mutual participation? Or instead shall we bring all of them together in saying they are all capable of mixing together mutually? Or third, Theaetetus, shall we say [e] that some of them are capable and others not?
• THEAETETUS – I have no answer to offer on their behalf about that. But perhaps you would answer as to the implications of each of these, one after the other?
• STRANGER – Alright. Let’s first posit, if you will, that they say that nothing has any power to participate with anything in a y respect. In that case would motion and rest participate not at all with being?
• 252a THEAETETUS – Not at all.
• STRANGER – But then will either of them exist, if they have no community with what is?
• THEAETETUS – It’s impossible.
• STRANGER – But with that agreement, as it seems, the thesis of those who set the All into motion and as well as those who set it at rest, and also those who reduce all existence to Ideas always in the same states and always unalterable, is reversed: for all them add “the fact of existing,” the one arguing that it is “essentially” moving, and the others that it is “essentially” a rest.
• THEAETETUS – Perfectly put.
• [b] STRANGER – And yet we must add also those who unify all things now and divide them then, whether reducing an infinity of elements to one or deriving an infinity out of a unity, or dividing it into a limited number of elements and putting these back together into a unity, whether they posit this is happening in turns or that both are happening at once: all this would be nonse se if there is no mixing together.
• THEAETETUS – Correct.
• STRANGER – Moreover, those who talk in the most ridiculous way of all are those who pursue a line of reasoning that disallows anything to communicate with another by dint of assigning it a name other than its own.
• [c] THEAETETUS – What do you mean?
• STRANGER – No matter what they are talking about they will be forced to employ the words “being” and “separate” and “from the others” and “in itself” – and countless others – and, powerless as they are to keep from doing so else being unable to string their sentences together, they will need no one to refute them since according to the proverb “they are sleeping with the enemy” – the one who will contradict them – and they will always be murmuring at every step, like that strange fellow Eurycles.
• [d] THEAETETUS – Your simile is accurate and true.
• STRANGER – But what is the consequence if we grant to all things the power to enter into communication with everything?
• THEAETETUS – Now that is a question even I can answer.
• STRANGER – How?
• THEAETETUS – That motion itself would be completely at rest, and that rest in turn would move, if they can come upon each othe .
• STRANGER – But isn’t that necessarily the most impossible thing – that motion should be at rest and rest in motion?
• THEAETETUS – Of course.
• STRANGER – So all that’s left is the third possibility.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• [e] STRANGER – Surely, one is required to adopt one: either everything mixes, or nothing mixes, or some things consent to mix while others don’t.
• THEAETETUS – How could it be otherwise?
• STRANGER – But we have discovered that the first two are impossible.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – Therefore anyone who wants to answer correctly will posit the third.
• THEAETETUS – Exactly.
• STRANGER – So if some things consent to do this and others do not, 253a what happens would be something like what happens to our letters. For some of them in fact do not fit together while others do.
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – And we can say of the vowels, differently from the others, that they move among all the others as connectors, indeed so well that without one of them it is impossible for the others to fit with the others.
• THEAETETUS – Yes, in fact.
• STRANGER – But does anybody and everybody know which are able to communicate with which, or does one need some art to carry that out adequately?
• THEAETETUS – One needs an art.
• STRANGER – Which art?
• THEAETETUS – The grammatical art.
• [b] STRANGER – And isn’t it the same in the case of high and low notes? Isn’t the man who has the art that knows which blend together and which do not a musical man, unlike the man who knows nothing about it?
• THEAETETUS – Just so.
• STRANGER – And will we find the same differences between skilled and unskilled if we turn to the other cases?
• THEAETETUS – Why deny it?
• STRANGER – Since we have reached agreement that the kinds, too, admit a mutual mixture in the same way, is it not necessary that the man who is going to make his way through arguments will surely need a certain art if he is to show correctly which kinds harmonize with which and which do not admit each other? [c] And quite naturally, too, whether there are any which, by proceeding through all, hold them together so as to enable them to blend, and if conversely there are others which work through wholes and cause their divisions?
• THEAETETUS – How could that not require an art – perhaps the greatest one!
• STRANGER – What shall we name this science, then, Theaetetus? By Zeus! Did we not stumble upon the science of free men? And al hough we are on a quest for the sophist, have we happened upon the philosopher first?
• THEAETETUS – How so?
• [d] STRANGER – Dividing according to kinds and not mistaking an Idea which is the same for another Idea, nor taking another Idea to be the same: shall we not say this belongs to the art of dialectic?
• THEAETETUS – But yes, we shall.
• STRANGER – And whoever who is at least able to do that, perceives adequately one essential aspect spread all through many, each of whose elements remain separate; or many mutually different essential characters enveloped from the outside by one; or again a single essential trait that, stretched through many wholes, is bound together; and finally many essential characters set apa t in every way, completely discriminated. [e] This – being able to know in which way each one of them can communicate and in which way not – is knowing how to distinguish kind by kind.
• THEAETETUS – Absolutely.
• STRANGER – Further, as to this dialectical ability, I think you will attribute it to nobody else than to him who philosophizes purely and correctly.
• THEAETETUS – How attribute it to any other?
• STRANGER – The philosopher, then, we will find in a place like this, now or later, if we are going to search for him. He, too, is difficult to see 254a in the plain light of day, but the difficulty in his case is different from that which makes the sophist hard to see.
• THEAETETUS – In what way?
• STRANGER – The one takes refuge in the darkness of non-being, imbibing it by dint of his practicing it: because of the darkness of this place he is hard to conceive distinctly – right?
• THEAETETUS – So it seems.
• STRANGER – But as to the philosopher, who is always pursuing the essential character of that which is in his reasoning, it is ecause of the brightness of the region in which he resides that he is not at all easy to see. In most cases the eyes of the soul are unable to [b] bear up when they look off toward the divine.
• THEAETETUS – And this explanation is no less likely than the other.
• STRANGER – He is therefore the man we shall soon examine more precisely, if we still want to; but as to the question of the sophist it is quite clear that we must not let him go before we have considered him sufficiently.
• THEAETETUS – Right.
• STRANGER – So, since we have reached agreement on the point that some kinds lend themselves to mutual communication and others do not, and that some, traversing them all, are [c] found to communicate with all – after this it remains for us to take our argument further by examining as follows not all the Ideas, lest we be overwhelmed by the multitude, but a selection of certain o es that are said to be the most important. First, let’s examine one by one what they are; and then how it is with their power to communicate with each other, so that, even if we find ourselves unable to grasp entirely clearly what is and what is not, we shall nevertheless not be brought down – to the extent that the turn of our present discussion [d] allows – to not knowing at all how to extricate ourselves safely out of this bad situation.
• THEAETETUS – Surely we must.
• STRANGER – The greatest of the kinds are surely the ones we have just passed in review: being, rest, and motion.
• THEAETETUS – By far.
• STRANGER – On top of which we say that these last two cannot mix with each other.
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – But being can mix with both, since the two of them are.
• THEAETETUS – Of course.
• STRANGER – So they are three.
• THEAETETUS – That’s right!
• STRANGER – So each of them is other than the two others, while each is itself the same as itself.
• [e] THEAETETUS – Surely.
• STRANGER – But what, in turn, can we now mean by this “same” and that “other”? Are they in themselves two kinds different from those three, though necessarily mixing with them, and that our investigation must be about five beings and not about three? Or is it that by this 255a “same” and that “other” we mean one of the three without realizing it?
• THEAETETUS – Perhaps.
• STRANGER – But motion and rest are surely not “the other” nor “the same.”
• THEAETETUS – Meaning what?
• STRANGER – Whatever else we attribute as held in common by both motion and rest cannot be either of the two.
• THEAETETUS – Why?
• STRANGER – Because then motion would be immobilized and rest start moving; for in the two cases, whichever of the two would come to be identified with “the other” will force the other to become the contrary of its own [b] nature, by virtue of participating in its contrary.
• THEAETETUS – Exactly.
• STRANGER – Yet, both of them participate in the same and in the other.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – So let us not say about motion that it is either the same or the other, any more than say that about rest.
• THEAETETUS – We must not, indeed.
• STRANGER – And being? Must it be thought of it as nothing more than the same?
• THEAETETUS – Perhaps.
• STRANGER – But if “being” and “same” mean nothing different, then in saying, once again, about motion and rest that both of them are, we will be back to saying that [c] the two of them are the same thing.
• THEAETETUS – But that is certainly impossible.
• STRANGER – And so it is impossible that “to be” and “to be the same” are just one.
• THEAETETUS – Could be.
• STRANGER – So shall we posit the same to be a fourth, beyond the three?
• THEAETETUS – Exactly.
• STRANGER. – And must we say that “the other” is a fifth among them? Or must we think that this and being are but two names for one kind?
• THEAETETUS – Could well be.
• STRANGER – But I think you do grant that among beings some are spoken of as “themselves according to themselves,” and some are always spoken of as relative to others.
• THEAETETUS – How can one not agree?
• [d] STRANGER – But that which is other is always the other of some other thing, isn’t it?
• THEAETETUS – True.
• STRANGER – But this would not be the case if “being” and “other” were not completely different. If the other participates in these two Ideas, as being does, there would come a time when one of the things that are other would be other without being other than another. But it was for us incontestable that it could happen to another, no matter what it is, to cease being what it is – that is, necessarily to be other than another thing.
• THEAETETUS – That is how it is.
• STRANGER – So the nature of the other must be taken to be a [e] fifth Idea among those we have selected.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – And we will say that it circulates through all of them: each of them, in fact, is other than the others not through its own nature but because of its participation in the essential character of other.
• THEAETETUS – Exactly.
• STRANGER – So let us say this about the five kinds, taking them up in their relations to one of them.
• THEAETETUS – How?
• STRANGER – Motion first: that it is utterly other than rest – or if not, what?
• THEAETETUS – No, it is.
• STRANGER – Thus, it is not rest.
• THEAETETUS – In no way.
• 256a STRANGER – And yet, it is, since it participates in being.
• THEAETETUS – It is.
• STRANGER – And then again: motion is other than sameness.
• THEAETETUS – That could well be.
• STRANGER – So that it is not the same.
• THEAETETUS – Certainly not.
• STRANGER – And yet it is same since everything participates in the same.
• THEAETETUS – It surely does.
• STRANGER – So motion is the same and not the same, we must agree, without taking offense. For when we say that it is the same and not the same we are not saying this twice in the same sense. Whenever we say that it is [b] the same it is because it participates in the same relative to itself, whereas when we deny it is the same, it is by reason of its communication with the other, which in separating it from the same makes it become not that but other, so that it is correct to say in this case that on the contrary it is not the same.
• THEAETETUS – Quite.
• STRANGER – Therefore if motion itself somehow participated in rest, would it not trouble us to describe it as being “at rest”?
• THEAETETUS – To do so would be completely correct, given that we were to agree that among the kinds, certain ones consent to be mixed with each other but others do not.
• [c] STRANGER – And before arriving at the point we have now reached, we had managed to demonstrate this by proving that it is consistent with their nature.
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – So let’s start again. Motion is other than the other, just as it was other than the same and than rest?
• THEAETETUS – Necessarily.
• STRANGER – So it is not other in one respect, and other according to our current argument.
• THEAETETUS – That is true.
• STRANGER – So what’s next? Shall we assert it is other than the other three but deny it is other than the fourth, [d] while we had agreed to number five of them, the kinds on which and among which our examination set out to bear?
• THEAETETUS – How can we deny it? It’s impossible to grant that they are fewer in number than what has just now become evident o us.
• STRANGER – Without trepidation, then, we’ll fight to maintain that motion is other than being?
• THEAETETUS – Without the slightest.
• STRANGER – It is clear therefore that motion really is not being, and is being since it participates in being.
• THEAETETUS – Clear as day.
• STRANGER – It is therefore unavoidable there should be non-being in motion and in all the kinds. For in distributing itself among all of them, the nature of the other [e] makes each of them other than being, so that it makes each not being; and about all without exception we will be justified to declare that they are non-beings and conversely that because they participate in bei g, they are and are beings.
• THEAETETUS – That is a risk to be taken.
• STRANGER – So in relation to each of these Ideas, there are many things that are and an unlimited quantity of what is not.
• THEAETETUS – Seems so.
• 257a STRANGER – Therefore even being itself must be said to be other than the others.
• THEAETETUS – Necessarily.
• STRANGER – And thus, according to us, as often as others are, so often being is not; for in not being the others it is unique in itself, and conversely it is not the others, which are infinite in number.
• THEAETETUS – Yes, that’s about it.
• STRANGER – And so these things must not bother us, if in fact the nature of the kinds does imply mutual communication. But if someone will not grant this, let him persuade us to reject the arguments we have gone through before attacking what follows from them.
• THEAETETUS – Perfectly just.
• [b] STRANGER – Let us look at this ...
• THEAETETUS – What?
• STRANGER – Whenever we say something is not, it seems, we do not mean it is something opposite to what is, but only something different.
• THEAETETUS – How so?
• STRANGER – Thus: Each time we say for example that something is “not large” do we appear to you to be pointing to the small any more than the equal?
• THEAETETUS – Surely not.
• STRANGER – So when one claims that negation signifies the contrary we will not grant it, and we will leave it at this: that it is one of the others that the [c] “non-” and or “not” indicate when placed before the words that follow, or rather before the things for which the names have been instituted and that are uttered after the negation.
• THEAETETUS – Absolutely.
• STRANGER – And let us reflect on this if you will.
• THEAETETUS – What?
• STRANGER – The nature of the other seems to me to break into small pieces, just like knowledge.
• THEAETETUS – How so?
• STRANGER – Science, too, is of course is one, but each part of it that detaches itself from it so as to determine a given thing possesses a denomination [d] that belongs to it alone: this is why so many things are said to be “arts” or “sciences.”
• THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – And likewise, do the parts of the nature of the other, which itself is one, undergo this also?
• THEAETETUS – They may well, but specify how.
• STRANGER – Does there exist a part of the other that is opposed to the beautiful?
• THEAETETUS – There does.
• STRANGER – Shall we say that this is nameless or shall we give it a name?
• THEAETETUS – It has a name: when we say something is “not beautiful” we mean nothing other than other than the nature of the beautiful.
• STRANGER – Come on, then, tell me this.
• [e] THEAETETUS – What?
• STRANGER – Whatever being it is that one distinguishes from a particular kind, which now comes to be confronted with some othe particular being from among the things that are, isn’t this the way that the not beautiful turns out to be?
• THEAETETUS – Yes, this way.
• STRANGER – A contraposition of a being with another being: this, it seems, is how the non-beautiful comes to be something.
• THEAETETUS – Exactly right.
• STRANGER – What then? According to this reasoning is the beautiful for us more belonging to the things that are and the non-beautiful belonging less?
• THEAETETUS – Not at all.
• 258a STRANGER – So the not-large and the large itself must be said to be, as much?
• THEAETETUS – As much.
• STRANGER – Therefore the non-just must also be given the same rank as the just, at least insofar as the one is not at all more than the other.
• THEAETETUS – Certainly.
• STRANGER – And we will talk this same way about the others, since the nature of the other has proved to number among the things that are; and if it is, one must necessarily posit that its parts are, in no way less than itself.
• THEAETETUS – How could we do otherwise?
• STRANGER – Thus, it seems, when a piece of the nature of the other [b] and the nature of being come into confrontation with each other, their confrontation is no less endowed with a way of being – if we may put it thus – than that of being itself, since it is not its contrary that it signifies but only this: its other.
• THEAETETUS – It’s quite clear.
• STRANGER – So what name shall we give it?
• THEAETETUS – It’s obvious: the Non-being we were looking for because of the sophist, here it is! It’s it!
• STRANGER – But if as you have said its way of being falls short of that of the others in no way, must we not be bold enough to say that the non-being possesses its own nature in a firmly assured way? And that exactly, as just now the large [c] was large and the beautiful was beautiful, as well as the not-large and the not-beautiful, so also the non-being was and is, in itself, non being, and thus an Idea to be counted among those that are? Or do we still hesitate, Theaetetus, to believe this about it?
• THEAETETUS – Not at all.
• STRANGER – Do you see then how much further our incredulity toward Parmenides has taken us, beyond what he had forbidden?
• THEAETETUS – In what way?
• [d] STRANGER – He asserts, I believe,
• For this will never be proved, that non-being is; You who search, remove your thought from this way.
• THEAETETUS – He does say this.
• STRANGER – Now we have not only demonstrated that the non-beings are, but we have also brought to light what the Idea of non-being is; for we have in fact demonstrated both the existence of and the nature of the Other and [e] that in being scattered throughout all beings, it related them with one another, and we have dared to say, about each of the little pieces of its nature that enter into juxtaposition with the being of each thing, that this is what non-being really is.
• THEAETETUS – Indeed, Stranger, we seem to have said things that could not be truer.
• STRANGER – So let no one say that after having declared that the non-being is the contrary of being, we now dare to say that the non-being is. For in our case it is some time since we said goodbye to some “contrary” of being, 259a whether it is or not, and whether it can be accounted for or it can absolutely not: let one either persuade us that we are wrong and refute it, or as long as he cannot let him say about it just what we do: that the kinds mingle mutually, that being and the other circulate across all of them and across each other, and that therefore in participating in being the other exists because of this participatio ; however it is not what it participates in but other, and, being other than what is, it is very clear that [b] in all necessity it is not-being; and being, in turn, by participating in the other will be other than the other kinds: being other than all o them, it is neither each of them nor all of them minus itself, whence it follows uncontestably that it is not, myriads and myriads of times, and that the others, each considered apart or all together, in many relations are and in many relations are not.
• THEAETETUS – True.
• STRANGER – Thus, one either refuses to believe in these juxtapositions, in which case he must examine and argue better than what has just been argued; [c] or believing he has put his finger on a difficult problem, he takes pleasure in tugging the arguments now this way and now that way, which comes down to wasting serious thought on things that hardly deserve it, as our arguments have just testified. For to do that is a discovery hardly refined or difficult, whereas what you see here is as difficult as it is fine ...
• THEAETETUS – What?
• STRANGER – ... what I have just now said: to be able, while perfectly conceding that such fine points might intervene in argumentations, to follow them up close and refute them one by one, so that while one affirms that viewed under a certain angle what is the same is other and other that is the same, he can see how, and in what relation, [d] that which is being said is affected by one of these terms. But to show, no matter how, that the same is other and the other same, or that the large is small and the similar dissimilar, and to take endless delight in opposing contraries to contraries in one’s arguments, that is not veritable refutation but clearly the mark of someone fresh out of school who only now is coming into contact with the things that exist.
• THEAETETUS – Perfectly put.
• STRANGER – In fact, my good man, working at separating everything from everything in this way [e] is above all an immoderate behavior, deficient in culture and philosophy.
• THEAETETUS – Why?
• STRANGER –To detach each thing from all the others constitutes the most radical way to annihilate all speech, for it is in the interlacing of the Ideas that speech comes into being for us.
• THEAETETUS – True.
• 260a STRANGER – Watch then how opportune it was to engage such men as these in battle, and force it upon them to allow one kind to mix with the another.
• THEAETETUS – Opportune to what end?
• STRANGER – Toward enabling our speech to be included among the things that are. Being deprived of this causes us what is most serious of all, to be deprived of philosophy. So we must now come to agree as to what speech is about: if it had been taken away from us to the extent of not being at all, we would no longer, I think, be capable of saying anything! [b] And yet it would have been taken away, lock stock and barrel, if we had agreed that nothing can mix with anything.
• THEAETETUS – You are right about that, but I do not understand why at this moment we must come to an agreement about speech.
• STRANGER – You will understand more easily if you follow me here:
• THEAETETUS – Where?
• STRANGER – Non-being for us came into view as a specific kind among the others, and as dispersed through all the things that a e.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – Well, after that we must examine if it mixes with opinion and speech.
• THEAETETUS – Why so?
• [c] STRANGER – If it does not mix with them, everything necessarily is true, but if it does mix then false opinion and false speech come to be. For to believe and to say things which are not is surely what the falseness consists in, when it enters opinion and speech.
• THEAETETUS – In that, indeed.
• STRANGER – The moment there is falsehood, there is deception, and if there is deception everything inevitably is full of images, appearances, and illusions.
• THEAETETUS – Of course.
• STRANGER – But we have said, I believe, that here is where [d] the sophist takes refuge, and has denied absolutely that there is ever falsehood, for according to him no one can either think or say “that which is not,” since that which is not participates in no way in being.
• THEAETETUS – That is what we said.
• STRANGER – Yes, but by now it has clearly appeared to participate in what is, so that on this point he would perhaps no longer fight; perhaps he would say that among the Ideas some participate in non-being and others do not, and that speech and opinion are among those that do not participate; so much so that he would fight to maintain that it is the eidolopoiic and phantastic ar , [e] which we hold to be his domain, that absolutely does not exist, on the grounds that opinion and speech have no relation with what is not; yet if such a communication does not take place, there cannot be any falsity at all. This is why one must star with a basic exploration of what speech is, what opinion and imagination are, so that once this comes to light we may observe how they communicate 261a with non-being; and once we have, to demonstrate that the false exists, and thereupon to confine the sophist within it, if indeed he is liable to such a treatment, or else to let him go and look for him in another kind.
• THEAETETUS – It seems to me, Stranger, that what we were saying at the outset about the sophist – that he is a kind difficult o capture – is true; he really appears to be full of defenses, and that whenever he sets up one of them in front of himself, it’s necessary to fight at pitched battle before one can reach him. For once have we finished with the one, by which he opposed us by denying non-being, he just now takes on another, [b] so that we have to demonstrate that falsity exists in opinion and in speech, after which in all likelihood he will take on still another, and another after that – and it seems we will never see the end of it.
• STRANGER – Whoever, Theaetetus, can advance even if only to a slight extent must always keep moving forward. For if you lack spirit in this sort of situation what would you do in others when you had not taken one step forward or had even been pushed backward? As the proverb says, [c] “There is little chance of seeing such a warrior capture a city.” Since, my good man, we have now succeeded to do what you have said, we have stormed the most redoubtable rampart: from here on matters will be easier and lesser.
• THEAETETUS – You are right.
• STRANGER – So first, let’s take up speech and opinion, as we planned, in order to establish more clearly if non-being can somehow attach to them or if both are absolutely true and neither are ever false.
• THEAETETUS – Very well.
• [d] STRANGER – Come then, let’s make a similar examination as we did when we were talking about the Ideas and about the letters, talking this time about words. For it is in that direction and that way that we might get a glimpse of what we are searching for.
• THEAETETUS – So what is to be understood by your “about words”?
• STRANGER – That we must know if all harmonize with each other, or if some allow it but others don’t.
• THEAETETUS – Well that much is clear: some allow it but others don’t.
• STRANGER – Perhaps this is what you mean: that if they point to something when being spoken in sequence, they [e] fit together; whereas if they don’t indicate anything by being spoken in sequence they don’t fit together?
• THEAETETUS – What are you saying with that?
• STRANGER – Just what I thought you had understood when you agreed to proceed. We have at our disposal two ways to indicate with our voice a given manner of being.
• THEAETETUS – How is that?
• 262a STRANGER – The one way is called “nouns” and the other “verbs.”
• THEAETETUS – Explain each of them.
• STRANGER – The way of indicating actions we call a “verb.”
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – As to the vocal sign that is applied to those who do the acting, it is a noun.
• THEAETETUS – Exactly.
• STRANGER – Now. Nouns rattled off in sequence all by themselves never constitute a speech (logos), any more than verbs do whe not connected to nouns.
• THEAETETUS – That’s the part I did not understand.
• [b] STRANGER – Clearly you had a different idea in mind when you gave me your agreement to proceed. For I meant exactly this, hat pronouncing them in a series does not constitute a speech.
• THEAETETUS – How so?
• STRANGER – Like “walks” “runs” “sleeps” and any other verbs signifying actions: even if one utters them in a row it doesn’t make a speech for all that.
• THEAETETUS – Surely not.
• STRANGER – And no more when one says “lion” “deer” “horse” and all other nouns naming the agents of these actions, the mere sequence again does not [c] constitute a statement, since no more in this case than in the previous, the sounds uttered do not show an action, nor the absence of an action, nor the way of being of what is or of what is not, as long as one has not mixed verbs with nouns. It is when these are fit together, and due to this primary interlacing, the most primary and shortest one of all, that a speech comes to be.
• THEAETETUS – What do you mean by this last?
• STRANGER – When one says “man learns,” is that to you a primary and shortest speech?
• [d] THEAETETUS – It is.
• STRANGER – For it immediately shows something about things that are, or are coming to be, or have been or will be, and it does ’t merely name but accomplishes something by interlacing verbs with nouns. Hence we call it stating and not just naming, and in particular we give the name “statement” to this binding together.
• THEAETETUS – A proper title.
• STRANGER – Thus, just as certain things fit together and others do not, so also certain vocal signs [e] do not fit together, although those of them that do fit together make up a statement.
• THEAETETUS – Absolutely.
• STRANGER – And another small thing.
• THEAETETUS – What?
• STRANGER – A speech, whenever there is one, does necessarily speak of something: it is impossible that it should not do so.
• THEAETETUS – Of course.
• STRANGER – But isn’t it also necessary that it be of one sort or another?
• THEAETETUS – How could that not be necessary?
• STRANGER – So let us now focus our attention on ourselves.
• THEAETETUS – Yes we ought to!
• STRANGER – I will address a statement to you that associates a thing with an action by means of a noun and a verb; your job is to tell me what the statement is speaking about.
• 263a THEAETETUS – I will do so as well as I can.
• STRANGER – “Theaetetus sits.” Is it a long speech?
• THEAETETUS – No it is quite modest!
• STRANGER – So, you must explain to me of whom it is speaking, and about whom it is saying something.
• THEAETETUS – Obviously it is of me and about me.
• STRANGER – Try this one:
• THEAETETUS – Which?
• STRANGER – “Theaetetus – with whom I am at present conversing – flies.”
• THEAETETUS – As to this one, too, one can only say is that it speaks of me and about me.
• STRANGER – And we say that every statement is necessarily of one sort or another?
• [b] THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – Of what sort must we say the one and the other of these speeches is?
• THEAETETUS – The one is false, I think, and the other is true.
• STRANGER – The one that is true says about you things that are as they are.
• THEAETETUS – Certainly.
• STRANGER – And the one that is false says things that are really other.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – So it says that things which are are not ...
• THEAETETUS – Possibly ...
• STRANGER – ... and thus things that in reality are other about you. For about each thing, I think we have said, there are many things that are, and many that are not.
• THEAETETUS – Quite right.
• [c] STRANGER – Thus the latter speech I made about you, given our definition of what can be a speech, is first of all perforce among the briefest.
• THEAETETUS – Just now we agreed on that point.
• STRANGER – And second it must be about something.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – And if it is not about you, it is surely not about anybody else.
• THEAETETUS – Surely.
• STRANGER – But if it spoke about nobody it would not be a speech at all. For we have clearly shown that it was impossible that a speech be a speech if it speaks about nothing.
• THEAETETUS – Right.
• [d] STRANGER – Now: When things are said about you that are other as if they were the same, and that are not as if they were, such an assemblage of nouns and verbs is what appears to be really and veritably a false statement.
• THEAETETUS – That is quite true.
• STRANGER – What then are we to say? As to thought, and opinion, and imagination, is it not already clear to us that they all occur in our souls, whether true and false?
• THEAETETUS – How?
• STRANGER – You will get my meaning more easily if first you hear what they are, and [e] in what respect each differs from one another.
• THEAETETUS – Tell me, then.
• STRANGER – So, thought and speech are the same thing, except that it is an interior and silent dialogue of the soul with itsel that we name “thought.”
• THEAETETUS – Exactly.
• STRANGER – Still, the stream that comes forth from it through the mouth with sound is called “speaking”?
• THEAETETUS – True.
• STRANGER – But among statements, in turn, we know there are also ...
• THEAETETUS – What?
• STRANGER – Assertion and negation.
• THEAETETUS – We know that.
• 264a STRANGER – Whenever, then, this happens in the soul, as thought and silently, do you have another name to address it than “opinion”?
• THEAETETUS – How could I?
• STRANGER – And when it is not by itself but through sensation it is present to someone, is it possible to see in it something other than a psychic image?
• THEAETETUS – Nothing.
• STRANGER – Since speech can be true or false, and it has become clear to us that thinking is a dialogue of the soul with itsel, [b] and that opinion is a completion of thinking, and that what we are designating when we say “I imagine” is a mixture of sensation and opinion, it is inevitable that, given their kinship with speech, some of these activities are false, or at least sometimes false.
• THEAETETUS – How could it be otherwise?
• STRANGER – So do you recognize that we have discovered false opinion and false speech much more quickly than we were anticipating, when a minute ago we feared that in undertaking this search we were embarking on a task we had no hope of completing?
• THEAETETUS – I do realize that.
• STRANGER – Alright then, let’s not be discouraged about what’s left for us to do. Since [c] all this has become clear, let’s recall our division by species.
• THEAETETUS – Just which ones?
• STRANGER – We divided eidōlopoiic into two, into eikastic and phantastic.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – And we said we were at a loss to decide into which of the two to place the sophist.
• THEAETETUS – Ah, yes.
• STRANGER – And when we were stuck in that impasse, an even greater dizziness obscured our view, when the argument appeared tha called into question whether likeness, image, and illusory appearance – anything of that sort –[d] could exist, since there is never, anywhere in any way, any falsity.
• THEAETETUS – What you say is true.
• STRANGER – But since the existence of false speech and false opinion have come to light, it is now possible that imitations of things that are do exist, and that the disposition to produce them gives birth to an apatētic art.
• THEAETETUS – That is possible.
• STRANGER – And we agreed, before, that the sophist belongs to one or the other of them?
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – So let’s try one more time to divide in two the [e] kind that is before us, and to proceed always toward the right part, keeping in this way to the kind with which the sophist communicates, until having stripped away all that he has in common with some others and leaving him only his own 265a nature, we will reveal it first to ourselves and thereafter to those who by heir nature have the greatest affinity with this method of proceeding.
• THEAETETUS – A correct way to go.
• STRANGER – Did we not begin then by dividing the arts into poētic and ktētic?
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – Then, when we were dividing the ktētic art, didn’t the sophist show up for us in the thēreutic, agōnistic, emporic art and in others of this sort?
• THEAETETUS – Exactly.
• STRANGER – But since he is now encompassed within the mimētic art it is clear that it is the poiētic art that we must first divide in two, [b] for imitation is in fact something like a production – a production of images and not of the things themselves – isn’t it?
• THEAETETUS – Absolutely.
• STRANGER – Of poiētic first, let there be two parts.
• THEAETETUS – Which two?
• STRANGER – One divine, one human.
• THEAETETUS. – This I have not yet understood.
• STRANGER – If we remember what we said to start with, we call poiētic any power which causes things that did not exist before o come to be.
• THEAETETUS – We do remember.
• [c] STRANGER – All mortal animals, and also whatever grows upon the earth out of roots, no less than all those inanimate bodies that are formed underground, whether fusible or not – shall we say of them they were not before and later come into being otherwise than by the action of some divine artisan? Or, to adopt the belief and language of the majority of men ...
• THEAETETUS – Meaning...
• STRANGER – ... that it is Nature that engenders them by a spontaneous causality deprived of thought, or else with the assistance of a divine reason and a knowledge that emanates from a god?
• [d] THEAETETUS – As for me, perhaps because of my age, I go back and forth from the one opinion to the other. But at this mome t, looking at you, and assuming you believe that it is a god that produces all that, I join your way of thinking.
• STRANGER – And rightly so, Theaetetus. If we thought you were among those who will later change their minds, I would try to pe suade you by means of an incontrovertible argument. But I do know your nature and I know that [e] without need for arguments it is carried by itself toward the view you presently feel you are being drawn; so I’ll refrain from it since that would be a was e of time. However, I will set it down as a principle that the so-called works of Nature are produced by a divine art, and that those put together by men taking these as their materials are made by a human art. According to this reasoning there are two kinds of production, one human and one divine.
• THEAETETUS – Correct.
• STRANGER – Now, since they are, cut again each of them in two.
• THEAETETUS – How?
• 266a STRANGER – The whole of the poiētic art you have just cut widthwise; this time do it lengthwise.
• THEAETETUS – Consider it done.
• STRANGER – So now what we have is four parts, two of them related to us and human, and two relative to the gods and divine.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – And now by returning to those that were divided the other way, we’ll say that one part of each of those two sections is autopoiētic, whereas the remaining two parts must be called, as precisely as possible, eidōlopoïic; so it is in this way that poiētic art is again divided into two.
• [b] THEAETETUS – Tell me again how.
• STRANGER – We ourselves, I imagine, and all the other creatures, and the elements that constitute the natural things – fire, water, and their kin – we surely know that each and all are things generated and perfected as such by god – or how?
• THEAETETUS – Like that.
• STRANGER – And each of them is accompanied by images that are not the things themselves but are also the work of some divine contrivance.
• THEAETETUS – What images?
• STRANGER – The images that appear to us in sleep and those that are said to appear “spontaneously” in daytime: the shadow projected by fire when [c] it is dark, or that double appearance sometimes produced on bright and slick surfaces by the meeting together, in one and the same beam of light, of the light proper to the object and a foreign light, producing a sensation of the object that is the reverse of what we are used to.
• THEAETETUS – Thus these two works of divine production are on the one hand the thing itself and on the other the image that accompanies it.
• STRANGER – And how is it with the art that belongs to us? Shall we not say that the oikodomic art produces the house itself, while the graphic art produces another that is a kind of human dream for the use of those who are awake?
• [d] THEAETETUS – Quite so.
• STRANGER – And in the same way, in all the other cases, the works of human production are double: on the one hand it is autourgic art – that is, it makes the thing itself – and on the other hand it is the eidōlopoïic art – it is producing images.
• THEAETETUS – I understand better this time, and set down two species of the poiētic art, each of which is double: on one hand he divine and human making, and on the other production of things and production of images.
• STRANGER – Yet let us remember that the eidōlourgic art was to include two kinds, the eikastic art and the phantastic, as soon as falsity was revealed to be really [e] false and by nature to be one of the things that are.
• THEAETETUS – Yes, that is indeed what we said.
• STRANGER – These species having come into view for us, shall we not posit them as being incontestably two?
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• 267a STRANGER – Let us then divide the phantastic art in two.
• THEAETETUS – What way?
• STRANGER – On one side it is brought about through the use of tools, and on the other the producer of the simulacrum uses himself as the tool.
• THEAETETUS – What do you mean by that?
• STRANGER – When someone, I imagine, uses his own body to reproduce the way you look, or his own voice to counterfeit yours, is it above all this part of the phantastic art that is called “imitation”?
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – Let us separate that out and call it “mimētic;” as to the rest of this art let’s indulge ourselves and go a bit sof , leaving it to [b] someone else to gather it all together and give it a suitable name.
• THEAETETUS – Let’s separate and indulge.
• STRANGER – Especially because this first species, Theaetetus, deserves to be considered two-fold. But examine now the reasons why.
• THEAETETUS – Tell me.
• STRANGER – Some imitators do it knowing what they are imitating, but others without knowing: what principle for division could be more radical than the division between ignorance and knowledge?
• THEAETETUS – None.
• STRANGER – Now, was the imitation mentioned just now done by people who know, since it would be because knowing you and your lineaments that one would be able to imitate you?
• [c] THEAETETUS – How can it be otherwise?
• STRANGER – But what about the figure of justice and of virtue taken as a whole? Don’t many, without knowing them but having fo med somehow an opinion of them, try hardily to make it appear they ardently desire that what it seems to them to be is really present in them, by imitating it as much as they can in what they do and say?
• THEAETETUS – There are many, surely.
• STRANGER – And do they fail to seem just while not being so at all? Or is it exactly the opposite?
• THEAETETUS – Quite the opposite.
• [d] STRANGER – So one must say, I think, that this imitator is different from the other one, just as the man who is ignorant surely differs from the man who knows.
• THEAETETUS – Yes.
• STRANGER – Where then are we to find the appropriate names for each of these two? Clearly this is difficult, for even if among our predecessors there already were a conception of the reason for dividing into genus and species they did not reflect upon it, so that they have not even undertaken to make divisions, and our resources for naming are accordingly very limited. And yet (though speaking thus may seem bold enough) let us, for the sake of distinguishing the [e] two of them, give them names. To the imitation that is based on an opinion give the name “doxomimētic” and to the one based on knowledge, “informed imitation.”
• THEAETETUS – So be it.
• STRANGER – And so it is the first we must work with, for while the sophist is surely to be found among the imitators, he is ce tainly not among those who know.
• THEAETETUS – Surely not.
• STRANGER – So let us examine the doxomimētic as if inquiring about a piece of iron to see whether it is solid or perhaps has some air pocket in it.
• THEAETETUS – Let’s.
• STRANGER – Well it does have, and not just one. The one doxomime 268a is simply naïve, thinking he knows what he only has an opinion about; but as to other, his arguments continually rolling him this way and another, he strongly suspects and fears that he does not know the things about which he presents himself to others knowing.
• THEAETETUS – Surely there each of the two you have described constitute a corresponding kind.
• STRANGER – So shall we put one of them down as a simple imitator while the other is an ironic one?
• THEAETETUS – That is about right.
• STRANGER – And of this latter kind shall we say there is only one kind, or two?
• THEAETETUS – You look and see.
• [b] STRANGER – So I will: there appear to me to be two. The one comes into view as capable of ironizing before an assembly and of developing long speeches before crowds, while for the other, he operates in private and by means of short speeches forces his interlocutor to contradict himself.
• THEAETETUS – That is just right.
• STRANGER – But now, how shall we represent the man of speeches that are too long? as an expert statesman or as a demagogue?
• THEAETETUS – As a demagogue.
• STRANGER – What shall we call the other one? An expert, or a sophist?
• THEAETETUS – To call him an “expert” is impossible since we have posited [c] that he does not know; but since it is an expert he imitates, it is clear that he must derive his name from him – and I have already come to recognize that it is about him that we must say, in all truth, that he is genuinely and wholly a sophist.
• STRANGER – Then shall we bind him up by weaving together all the threads of his name, as we have before, by going back from the end to the beginning?
• THEAETETUS – Quite.
• STRANGER – He who is expert in a mimetic art belonging to the enantiological art, an ironical part of the doxastic art, itself a part of the phantastical kind, [d] distinguished in the eidōlopoiic kind, the portion not divine but human of production which expends in speeches its thaumatopoiic art – whoever will state that this is “the race and the blood” of the genuine sophist will speak, it seems, the purest truth.
• THEAETETUS – Absolutely.
• COMMENTARY
• Yesterday, the great mathematician Theodorus of Cyrene introduced to Socrates one of his students, Theaetetus, a young man he had recommended for his exceptional nature, and Socrates spoke with him at great length. Today it is a stranger he is bringing, and Theodorus considers it useful to specify that though coming from Elea this stranger is different, “other,” from those in the orbit of Parmenides and Zeno. Plato has the habit now and then to insert at the opening a word and sometimes a sentence that bear their plain sense but will later be seen to have pointed to the essential problem of the dialogue. For example, the “beautiul and wise” Hippias will launch a dialogue on beauty (Hippias Major), the “for whom would I be coming?” which opens the one on friendship (Lysis), and it is a Socrates going “outside the walls” that will be examining the deliria of the Phaedrus; “war and battle” opens the highly contentious Gorgias, and “I went down” opens the Republic on the lamentable nature of political regimes. “Other” (heteron), in turn, figures among the first words of the Sophist, as does “Yourself”, the first word of the Phaedo (the dialogue “On the Soul”); these two words answer each other: to be the same as oneself does not exclude but in truth implies the courage to be different.
• However, contrary to what one might have anticipated, it is not with Socrates that this Stranger will converse. In the Sophist Socrates will make himself heard only to announce his silence and leave to Theaetetus the task of assuring, between “yesterday” and “tomorrow,” a new and surprising continuity in the Platonic corpus.
• From a dramatic point of view, we others, the audience, are on Monday in the company of Euclid and Terpsion, in Megara, 369, when Theaetetus, aged fifty, is about to die and Socrates has been dead thirty years. But Tuesday morning we are – again from the dramatic point of view – in Athens, 399, in the company of light-hearted individuals among whom are Socrates, Theodorus, the S ranger, and Theaetetus as a promising young boy.
• Gilbert Ryle, Plato’s Progress, 30
• The first words of the Sophist are spoken by the mathematician Theodorus:
• Following up our agreement of yesterday, Socrates, we come ourselves disposed in good order and we are bringing along this person here, a visitor. By origin he hails from Elea, but while he is other than the companions of Parmenides and Zeno, this man is truly a philosopher. (216a1-4)
• Clearly these words respond to the injunction formulated by Socrates at the end of the Theaetetus: “But early tomorrow morning, Theodorus, let’s get back together.” Once noticed, the unusual character of the link here set up by Plato between two of his dialogues might seem to need no further elaboration. And yet in his strange novel, Plato’s Progress, Gilbert Ryle puts a questio : The “yesterday” of the Sophist is thought to be the one on which Socrates had conversed with Theaetetus and set up a meeting for the next morning; but if one believes the Prologue, no less than thirty years separate the discussion transcribed by Euclid of Megara under the title Theaetetus from its “tomorrow,” the Sophist. By reducing these years to a single overnight, Plato resuscitates Socrates and returns Theaetetus to his adolescent years.
• Though an agreement is indeed not present in the Theaetetus as it has come down to us, let us admit that it would go without saying that the Sophist opens by recalling an implicit agreement bearing on an engagement tacitly concluded thirty years earlier. Certain words in its initial phrasing nevertheless deserve some attention, especially since they find an echo in another prologue, that of the Timaeus – the only other dialogue that took place on a “yesterday.” In both their prologues Socrates decides to cede his role to a Stranger, from Elea in the one, and from Locrus in the other, and he announces that the dialogue to follow is the first of a trilogy – a trilogy left incomplete in both cases. The Timaeus is to take up a Republic that is as really fictional as fictionally real, and if it mentions an appointment fixed the day before, it is an appointment partially missed. But i is not only such details that make the two prologues comparable: they are also unique among the prologues of the corpus for their bizarreness.
• When Proclus reflected on the “meaning of the prologues (prooimia) of Plato,” that of the Timaeus particularly drew his atten ion, since according to him it was amenable to two modes of interpretation: an ethical mode, devoted to setting out “appropriate behaviors” (kathēkonta), and a philosophical mode. It is along these lines that Porphyry, according to him, had commented on the opening lines of the Timaeus:
• SOCRATES: One, two three: but the fourth, Timaeus, of our partners and hosts of yesterday: where is he? – TIMAEUS: Some illness must have come upon him, Socrates, for he would not willingly miss this gathering. – SOCRATES: Will it then be your task of the others present to play the role of the one who is absent? (Tim.17a1–7)
• Socrates begins by counting those present: Timaeus, Critias and Hermocrates: everyone agrees on this. And everyone wonders why Socrates asks “Where is the fourth?” since including himself there are already four present, just as there were four yesterday. On taking himself out of this enumeration he attributes to himself the role of a hypothetical and anonymous absentee who must e replaced by those who are present, starting with Timaeus. Finding a way to absent himself although he is present is just what Socrates also does in the prologue of the Sophist. But his silence will not make itself heard in the same way, since it cannot be explained in the same way.
• The absentee in the Timaeus is suffering an “illness,” the only decent reason for not showing up at a gathering that he was pa t of and promised to return to. The general rules of hospitality are the ethical analogy to the laws governing the payment of a debt, and not to comply with them is for a Greek both impious and ignoble. Theodorus really wants to emphasize that he and his companions are acting as one should; being a visitor himself, and a guest, he must show his thanks for the hospitality being offered him. In order to describe the state of mind or soul he and his companions find themselves in as they arrive to hear a new conversation, he uses the adverb kosmiōs. When about his final intervention in the prologue of the Timaeus Socrates declares, “After you all have examined the question among yourselves, you are in agreement to render to me the hospitality of the speeches, and I stand at the ready, disposed toward you as I should be (kekosmēmenos) and more ready than anyone to receive them all.” The adverb in the Sophist (kosmiōs) and the perfect passive participle in the Timaeus have the same root, kosmos, “arrangement,” putting elements in harmonious order. The similarity of the contexts leads one to think that they both describe the disposition of the agent: to be moderate, and thus to have a soul in good order, capable of controlling its enthusiasm, its ardor (thumos): its aggressiveness. Thus the adverb kosmiōs could refer back tο the Theaetetus and beyond that to the Republic and the Charmides, as well as forward toward the conclusion of the Politicus.
• So how should it be translated? With “as it should be,” as belonging to men “well raised”? In order to show up at a meeting wi h Socrates one must not only be “well brought up”: one must arrive voluntarily, truly as himself, and ready to become other. A meeting with Socrates is not a normal old get-together and one may not ignore the risk one takes in coming:
• NICIAS – You seem not to know that he who comes near Socrates and in doing so makes himself available to converse with him is orced, no matter what the initial topic of discussion, to allow himself to be turned all around by the argumentation (logos), to the point that it will finally be of himself that he must give an account – the way he presently lives and the way he has lived in the past – and that Socrates will not let him leave before all that has been quite thoroughly examined. (La.187e6–188a3)⤀
• To “give an account” of an action or of a belief consists in exposing its motives, and thus to ask oneself what he has committed himself to in granting these beliefs their power to move him. “We come, ‘ourselves’ (autoi),” Theodorus declares: an additional word which many omit, doubting its force because “autos is a word so common in Greek, so insignificant in itself that it could as well serve as the first word of any dialogue.” In any case it the first word of the Phaedo, and one of the first in the Sophist. As insignificant as it may be, the pronominal adjective autos, intensive when employed without the article, has two possible meanings: “by himself” in which case it would here distinguish those who come spontaneously, as opposed to the Stranger who was brought by Theodorus; or “in person” so that it would point to this unknown Stranger able to present two appearances: “a man who is quite a philosopher” and “a god of refutation.” One will learn some time later that he will neither speak spontaneously nor speak in his own name, but will generously deliver, rather than jealously keeping to himself, a teaching that he received and has not forgotten. It remains to be seen from whom he learned it. The Sophist thus refers us to a threefold past: to the recent past of an agreement reached yesterday, to a discussion beyond the narrative between Theodorus and the Stranger on the same question asked by Socrates, and finally to the lessons of Parmenides that Socrates while still young and the Stranger as well both heard in a distant past, which they have both not forgotten. The sequence Parmenides – Theaetetus makes the Sophist a thi d dialogue of a trilogy that is prerequisite to understanding the trilogy that is about to be announced, of which the Sophist should be the first.
• Theodorus does not speak of an appointment, a meeting, but of an “agreement.” Is it an overinterpretation to inquire what kind of an agreement (homologia) he has in mind? When it is a matter of a pact, a coming together, or a contract – as is the case with a meeting – its objective content would be called in Greek a sunthēkē, and the agreement (homologia) is the subjective con ent of it. The Laws of Athens use the ritually complete formula, “by virtue of an agreement and a convention” (homologia kai sunthēkē), when they remind Socrates of the debt he has contracted with them, just like the duties imposed upon him in “normal” situations, where one must distinguish between the just and the unjust. But when Hermogenes hijacks this expression to present his theory on the correctness of names, Socrates regrets having to “have recourse once again to that gross expedient, convention.” While the existence of technical languages proves that there is indeed a convention benefitting from a general agreement that possesses “a supreme authority in the area of the rectitude of names,” their veritable rectitude will not be based on a principle so artificial: it rests “on an agreement and a convening with oneself.” The agreement of a soul with itself is the only valid foundation, it is the agreement on which all the others depend in order really to be agreements, as the great majority of passages in Plato show. In a discussion, the goal in mind is not an agreement among interlocutors which could be no more than a compromise, it is the plain agreement given by each to that which is affirmed or denied. “Truly then, it is from now on my agreeme t and your agreement that will bring the truth to its completion,” Socrates says to Callicles. After his dialogue yesterday with Theaetetus, it became apparent that three points previously “agreed to” contend “with one other” within their souls. If they were clever sophists, Socrates remarks, they would bring about a confrontation of “discourse against discourse,” but instead they want their thoughts to confront each other, in order to see “what they are, and if they harmonize or contradict each other.” Many conflicts of this sort had exercised Theaetetus yesterday: he proved to be incapable of defining the nature of knowledge but eventually acknowledged his ignorance, a condition we have known since the Meno to be necessary for preparing oneself to lear , and he fears he is not worthy of the role he will be required to play. It matters little that the search did not reach the definition being sought, if only it has succeeded to purge the soul of its contradictions and illusory certitudes:
• SOCRATES – Well, if you try to become pregnant with other things after these, Theaetetus, and if you do give birth, they will e better things you’re filled with thanks to our present examination; and if you are empty you will be less a burden for those around you, and gentler, because you’ll have the wisdom not to believe you know what you don’t know. That is the only thing my expertise can do, and nothing more ... (Tht. 210c1–5).
• The maieutic art did its job, yesterday. Has it “softened,” “lightened,” “moderated” the soul of Theaetetus only? Might it not have also purified the souls of the young men who attended the discussion and so lacked belligerence as well as dogmatic certainty? That would explain why Socrates leaves it to the Stranger to choose anyone he wishes as his interlocutor: none of them will be aggressive or timid. To the contrary all will be disposed “to speak and to listen in turn, according to a well-regulated order.” In other words each was led back to himself, his soul has more or less intensively submitted to the purifying effects of a Socratic maieutic. And joining their souls are the souls of those who, thanks to Euclid of Megara, will be able to read this dialogue through the future ages.
• Who wrote the Theaetetus we are reading? Plato? He is careful to make us aware that the Theaetetus is not a direct dialogue no a narration carried out by an interlocutor. Theaetetus gives his name to a dialogue that does not owe its transmission to him, one that is doubly mediated: by the fervent though sometimes failing memory of Euclid of Megara, and by the good memory of Soc ates. In the first prologue, Euclid tells Terpsion that having encountered Theaetetus he was reminded of the discussion Socrates had long since had with him, the arguments of which Socrates had described to him in detail (diēgēsato). Unlike the Antiphon of the Parmenides, Euclid does not know the Theaetetus by heart and he thought it would be safer if he noted down some “reminders” of the words of Socrates. As to “what he had not retained in his memory,” he sought out Socrates and asked him about it in he prison when went to Athens. The Theaetetus would therefore enjoy an exorbitant privilege: it would be the only dialogue that, short of being written by him, was in a way dictated by Socrates, whose transcription Socrates controlled and approved. But i s co-author in the end edited it: Euclid decided to suppress the narrative incisions in order to re-dialectize the continuous narration of Socrates. In their function as intermediary (metaxu), these incisions interpose the “I” (egō) of the author-narra or as well as that of his interlocutor, between the text and a public consisting in a plurality of “I” ’s. To transform the narration (diēgēsis) into an imitation (mimēsis) evacuates that sort of egoism and gives place for some “themselves” (autoi), with “he (Socrates) himself dialoguing with themselves” (autoi autois). Euclid thereby intensified the question-answer dimension, understanding that when Socrates removes himself he removes along with him a certain way of searching, inventing, thinking: he suppressed Socrates as narrator in order to hear more loudly Socrates as dialectician. It is a radical way of conforming to a rule never violated in Platonic writing, that a written dialogue must be presented as the transcription of a spoken version if one wants thinking to be present in actu. It would perhaps then be his refusal to count himself among the three others, his auto-suppression as narrator, that Socrates’s opening words in the Timaeus are meant to announce.
• In contrast, a rule just as fundamental – the rule of the “author’s” anonymity – does not apply to the one who passed his leisure time copying and recopying his “reminders”: Plato tells us that Euclid is the author of this written dialogue, Theaetetus. The reader is thus invited to read it differently from the other dialogues. For a good reason: the Theaetetus is not a text but a test, a test inflicted by Socrates, and whoever undergoes the test is affected in his beliefs and his convictions. If he resigns himself to abandon some of them and to let go some illusions, he will become more intelligent and lighter, but it is more probable that he will hasten to take on new ones. Impossible to summarize, to organize in a linear fashion, to reformulate deductively, one may like Theodorus the mathematician hear in the Theaetetus a foreign “dialect” (dialektos), or attempt to digest it piecemeal and allow its breakthroughs to lead to no conclusion. Integrally maieutic, no other dialogue is more profoundly Socratic; or to put it another way it is in the Theaetetus that Plato has recorded the essence of what Socrates taught him.
• Must one stop here and consign into the neo-Platonic shadows that second type of interpretation of Plato’s preludes that Proclus proposes? It deserves to be since it is “theological,” and yet doesn’t it prompt us to take a closer look and to ask ourselves whether the many flashes of memory and anticipation in this prologue might mean something?
• Though it is inconclusive, the Theaetetus is not “aporetic.” On the contrary, a path has been opened up:
• But it was not with this aim that we started the discussion, to discover what science is not, but to find out what it is. In a y case we have now advanced far enough to look for it no longer in sensation, but in whatever word we use to describe the soul when, itself by itself, it is dealing with beings that are. (Tht.187a1–6)
• As they advance, the two interlocutors are brought back to Book VI of the Republic and the division of the Line. To pose the question of science to mathematicians should have led Socrates to pose the question about the difference between the two higher modes of knowledge distinguished on the Line, which is barely treated there; but in the Sophist he seems completely uninterested in the distinction drawn in the Republic between dialectical knowledge and the knowledge there called “dianoetic.” It is true that after having suggested they deny the name “sciences” to the disciplines that correspond with the first section of the intelligible, he concluded that “it is out of place to argue over the name when one has to examine things of such importance.” He was similarly casual yesterday: knowledge may very well be sought after in some name “whatever it be” – in another name than its own, then? But this name epistēmē is not truly “proper” for it: it confers upon sciences a deceptive positivity and objectivity. Deducing knowledge from sciences doesn’t work – Theaetetus’s initial error proved that. Since the knowledge being searched for can be determined neither by its objects nor by its name, the solution of Protagoras seems to be the most lucid and the most courageous available.
• In his Correctness of Names (Orthoepeia), Antisthenes, the disciple of Protagoras (who himself authored a work of the same title), asserts that names do not designate “things” but “phenomena” that correspond to opinions; every science must semantically regulate this correspondence in order always to use the correct names. Knowledge (epistēmē) is thus an adjustment to the situation, a competence, skill, or mastery (sophia); and our Theaetetus, as an admirer of Protagoras, proposes as the definition of knowledge “a correct opinion accompanied by its justification (logos).” Thus it would suffice to supplement a correct opinion with the justification it lacked in order to transform it into knowledge, a justification moreover entirely relative to the place, to the moment, and to the subject who enunciates it. Demonstrating conversely, as Socrates does, that this justification adds nothing to opinions that cannot be correct unless they include it already, only moves the problem back a notch: by virtue of what representation of knowledge does one affirm that these justified opinions are not knowledge? The Theaetetus indeed ends in an aporia, but in a second degree aporia: knowledge can be neither the object of an opinion (for this opinion would have to afirm its difference from opinion in order to be knowledge) nor the object of a science (else one falls into the argument of the Third Man). The knowledge Socrates is looking for is not the knowledge of what knowledge is, but a knowledge that the soul can interiorize. By default, the pragmatic relativism of Protagoras seems to be the most acceptable solution. The notion of interest, of benefit, and of utility is a thousand times more dispositive than the notion of truth, for what is the best is the measure of what is true, and not the opposite. Socrates only manages to refute this last hypothesis by reversing the question: since it has to do with opinions one must not ask oneself what they lack and must be added to them to make them knowledge, but rather discover what they must be purified of and freed from. The image of the Line shows that what is present in all of them is their “confidence” (pistis) in themselves, a confidence so trusted that it is immunized against thinking. But against this evil there is only one remedy, the art of Socrates: his maieutic. Consequently it is necessary to suffer the fearsome eros of Socrates a d of his philologia in order not to share in the skepticism of Protagoras, momentarily embraced by Theaetetus. What was established yesterday is therefore the principle of all Socratic-Platonic dialectic: that having knowledge is not the same as having a opinion.
• While the opening words of the Timaeus are spoken by Socrates, the first words of the Sophist are spoken to Socrates. Though he falls silent he will not disappear: every word will be addressed to his silence. A silence that we are given to understand as provisional, since at the end of his conversation with Theaetetus, Socrates had explained why they could not come back together that afternoon but only on the next morning:
• Here is why: I must show up at the porch of the King to respond to the accusation Meletus has brought against me. But early tomorrow morning, Theodorus, let us come back together here. (Tht. 210d1–3)
• Between the Theaetetus and the Sophist an appointment takes place that will lead to the trial and the death of Socrates, who explained “yesterday” what seems to him the basis for his reputation as a dangerous sophist: by his questioning he instills doubt and uncertainty in his interlocutors, particularly in the young. And yet, if he judges that some of them will benefit the more, “he gives them in marriage” to Prodicus or to “other wise personages.” So it is because they have frequented other “wise men” that Alcibiades, Critias, and Charmides were corrupted.
• By coming up at dawn, all those present show their desire to listen to Socrates again, but it is not him they will be hearing. What came about yesterday afternoon and its implications will never come up in the Sophist. Or will that be the only thing it is about? Mightn’t one consider the Sophist as an apology of Socrates, not an oratorical one but one that shows he was not a sophist and at the same time explains how he could be accused of being one? For it will deal with the power of appearances and images, and it is hardly likely that Plato should leave out the tragedies they provoke.
• It is thus right that we should call “divine” those who utter oracles and those mantics we have just spoken of, as well as all the artists (poiētikoi), and that we should affirm about the statesmen that they are no less divine than those, and that haunted by a divine delirium they are inspired by the breath of the god by which they are possessed every time through speaking they achieve great things without the slightest knowledge of what they are talking about. (Meno 99d)
• With these words Socrates had with one hand taken back what he seemed to have given over with the other, a way perhaps of indicating that his enumeration parodies that of Protagoras in his celebrated genealogy of sophistic:
• PROTAGORAS – For myself, I declare that the sophistic art is an ancient one, but that those of the ancients that practiced it, fearing there was something offensive about it, tried to dissimulate by masking themselves, some of them with the mask of poetry like Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides, and others by performing initiations and vaticinations like those in the entourage of Orpheus and Musaeus; and some of them, I have seen, chose gymnastics – for example Iccos of Tarentum and that other one, in our days no lesser a sophist than any of them, Herodicus of Selembria (Megara in ancient times); as to your Agathocles, that great sophist, it is music that he donned as his mask, as also did Pythocles of Ceos and many others. In all cases, I repeat, it was out of a fear of envy that they used these arts as protective screens. (Prt. 316d–e)
• All of them are “sophists” because they displayed or display a sovereign mastery in their art; and because they know how to theorize it, they can transmit it and teach it, even in such domains as that of music or gymnastic where articulate language is not involved. To be among the men judged divine by Theodorus would thus be to be one of those Protagoras calls a “sophist,” an expert, but not an amateur controversialist or an eristic – the difference being a “more measured” way of speaking. Socrates does not say so much, but is this what would distinguish those he judges to be “real philosophers”? Wouldn’t it rather be a certain kind of “unmeasuredness”? Not the kind that consists in practicing the art of contradiction no matter what the occasion, but the art implied by Socrates the only time he calls “divine” a man who spends his life in philosophy: “having commerce with what is divine and well disposed (kosmion), the philosopher becomes well-regulated and divine as much as a human can be.” Given that “the eyes of the soul lack the power in most men to look toward what is divine,” this divine man who is a philosopher will instead be a superman – not for his virtues, which can pervert him, but because he desires to understand “what is the nature of each being in itself, with the part of the soul that is suited to it, the part that is akin to it.” The philosopher is only divine to the extent that he “looks toward that which is divine.” Assimilation to the divine (always guarded by a restrictive clause) is not merely a command for him: trying to remember realities that only he is able to posit is his customary occupation:
• That is why it is just that the only kind of thinking that keeps its wings is that of a philosopher; for it is toward these realities that his memory ever applies itself as far as is possible, these same things to which a god owes his divinity. (Phdr.24 c4–6)
• Such a claim could surely pass for a supreme sort of hubris, but for Socrates it simply means to think.
• The gods having not granted them the favor of appearing as they truly are, the genus of the philosophers is just as hard to discern as that of the gods, which explains the uncertainty of Socrates in the face of a Stranger who is presented as being such. Is he a god protective of strangers rather than merely a visitor, or perhaps he is “a god of refutation” (theos elegktikos). Theodorus replies that this is not how the Stranger appears to him: to him he seems (dokei) to be more moderate. He has presented him as a “man” who is truly a philosopher and he would not have brought him along if he practiced “eristic” discourses. But he does seem to him “divine” since according to him this is a title all philosophers deserve. This only complicates the problem for Socrates, since for him the divine kind would also call for discussion.
• Are we to give credence to those who tell us that the gods have the troublesome habit of showing themselves to men in various appearances, as Homer says they do? In the Republic, Socrates is strongly opposed to that:
• Do you believe that a god is a magician, capable to appear voluntarily in different times in different aspects (ideas), now exchanging his own for many different figures, and now deceiving us by just making us believe that this is happening? Isn’t he instead a simple being, the least able to depart from the aspect (idea) that is proper to him? (R. II 380d1–6)
• To think the gods are able not only to appear in multiple and varied figures but also to give us the illusion without even troubling to embody them is to lend them either a multiple nature which their diverse appearances corroborate, or else a nature deliberately deceptive. According to good Platonic theology, the divine nature of the gods and of the philosophers excludes these wo impious hypotheses. But it is by citing some verses of Homer that Socrates depicts the philosophers as “being gods of foreigners appearing in the guise of all sorts of nationalities and touring cities to survey the violence and orderliness of men.” Bu unlike the gods of Homer, they do not decide to conceal themselves in order to do so. If however the nature of the gods and of the philosophers is simple and one and honest, how can one account for the diversity of guises under which one believes he recognizes them and the many opinions he entertains about them? The cause is “the ignorance of men”: it enables them to take the gods to be other than they are. As to the gods, Homer is the master interpreter along these lines, and his poetry doubles down on it in a way, by divinizing the humblest of things and beings, as a way for a man to divinize himself. It is not an ignorance creating transfigurations and metamorphoses that is the origin of the triple appearances of the philosophers, nor is it the ignorance that consists in “not knowing that such a thing is this rather than that” (philosopher rather than sophist, god rather tha beggar), but more fundamentally the fact of not knowing that one does not know that a thing is this rather than that. It is neither an absence of knowing nor is it believing one knows what one does not know, but a belief in a false opinion.
• The philosophers appear (phantazontai) in various ways and they “seem” (dokousin) to some this way and to others that way: appearance and opinion are bound up together. The appearance is inseparable from a doxa and it has as its origin the opinion that has interpreted a sensory affection (visual or auditory); this then starts a process in the opposite direction, from an opinion that results from an appearance (“it seems to me”) to the production of an opinion about the value and nature of the thing of which the appearance is an appearance. An opinion as such has the power to be false or true – to seem so, that is; appearances, seemings, possess the power to give rise to opinions, to move one to judge, to judge on the basis of appearances. To some, philosophers “appear to be worthless and to others to be of the greatest value”: the opinion aroused by appearances almost always pairs up with a judgment of value.
• The second possibility Socrates introduces is that the Stranger might be a “god of refutation” come to blame him for the faulty argumentation he displayed yesterday along with Theaetetus. In other words, Socrates fears that this guest will behave toward him the way Parmenides and Zeno once did, and as Euthydemus with Dionysodorus did, those virtuosos of eristic, a caricature of which they had presented him. But why would Socrates fear them, he who has never feared refuting and even less being refuted, and even claims he enjoys it? What seems dangerous to him is not that this Stranger might be able to refute him but that he should refute for victory, without worrying about telling the truth.
• Under cover of a little pleasantry Socrates has introduced two essential themes: the falsity of appearances and the difference between an antilogical refutation and a veritable one.
• So it is not the sophist’s diverse ways of appearing that the Prologue heralds, but those of the philosopher. The cause of it is the ignorance of those who though not philosophers have opinions about them. But how can one have a true opinion about those who spend their live refusing to hold opinions? The “ignorants” know only the name of the philosopher, a name which their ignorance of the thing leads them to attribute to him a manner that is diverse, unstable, changeable – and when it comes to judgments of value, contradictory. The literally aberrant opinions that individuals or certain groups have of him engender simulacra. There is no more coherent and constant an identification of the philosopher with a certain image than there is of the sophist. The ignorant man does not take the philosopher to be a sophist or a statesman or a madman, but now one and now the other, or two o three of them at a time.
• Why, after having mentioned their diversity, does Socrates privilege just these three images? Because an image has to have some resemblance to its model, or else it will not be an image. The large part of those that arise from a misunderstanding of the thing are projected by the aberrant opinions: their opinions are not images of the philosopher, but phantasms that belong to individuals or a crowd. Yet three images seem to result from reasonable opinions, and correspond with figures generally associated with the name “philosopher.” The first one – “sophist” – is produced by the sophist himself, an illusionist able to persuade the ignorant that he knows what he does not know by means of an unconditional mastery of language, his own and that of others: he claims to be the model, the master (sophos) whom the philo-sophos aspires to become. The second image, the statesman, is ambivalent: it can result as well from the manipulations of these magician-sophists as from the governing of a good statesman, a philosopher king. As to the third, the madman, one could think that Socrates is kidding when he mentions it and that there is no need to waste time on it, but it is quite possible that a certain kind of madness is part of the very nature of the philosopher.
• In the Digression of the Theaetetus, Socrates attributes to the philosopher an outlandish behavior: when listening to the praises that others glory in, the philosopher “does not pretend to laugh, but laughs for real and so loud one takes him to be a weirdo.” The paradigmatic case is still Thales looking up to the sky and falling into a well, but within the dialogues it is most oten Socrates that draws this charge. Because he acts like a stranger in his own city, Callicles tells him, he has become literally “placeless” (atopos), extravagant, a misfit, a word used by Agathon when his little slave comes to tell him that Socrates, invited to dinner by him, has come to a stand on the porch of his neighbor: “Surely you are speaking of a misfit.” Anyone who acts against his own best interest has left his senses and this, too, is the case with Socrates who neglects his own affairs and shows himself unable to defend himself before a tribunal. According to common sense madness is not a sickness but a way of being that links together the irrational, the inept, the unregulated, the excessive, and the immoderate:
• Leaving behind the busy doings of mankind and drawing near to the divine, the multitude remonstrates him for being deranged in spirit; but he is possessed by a god, and the crowd doesn’t even suspect it! (Phd. 249c8–d3)
• The philosopher incarnates a form of non-humanity, of infra- but also supra-humanity, since the stereotypes of ordinary madness can easily combine with an admiration for the beautiful name of “philosophy.” Whereas the sophist is an intolerable image for the philosopher and the statesman an image he judges acceptable only on condition of redefining the model, the madman is the one image in which the philosopher could truly recognize himself. When he is animated by a kind of delirium that is not human but divine, he reverses the values against all reasonableness and can give the words he uses a meaning that is not at all the usual one.
• The question Socrates wants to ask the Stranger is quite disconcerting: he asks him “What do the people over there think about these things, and what names do they give them?” “What things?” Theodorus justifiably asks, but Socrates’s laconic answer, “Sophist, statesman, madman,” is as unclear as his question: is he using the three terms as adjectives or as nouns? Theodorus and he have just used “philosophos” as a substantive, but the question Socrates asks the Stranger can be taken two ways. If it is a matter of three adjectives, Socrates is wanting to know to whom the inhabitants of Elea attribute them, none of the three excluding the others. Why on earth would he care, he who opened the discussion of the Phaedo with these words: “let’s talk to ourselves and let those other people go”? Who asked Crito “is it the opinion of the majority we must follow and that we fear? or rather that of a single man who knows, if there is one?” Or again, who yesterday said to Theodorus, “if I cared about the people of Cyrene, it would be about the matters over there and about them that I would be asking you questions ... but since in fact I like those people less than those here, I would ask you ...” One would expect him to dismiss the Eleans and their opinion about the question in the same way, except that on this day to learn whether they have the same opinion as his compatriots is of primary interest to Socrates. If one thinks about the old Attic language, as Socrates says in the Cratylus, it confirms that the heroes were heroes because they declare themselves masters (sophoi), awesome orators, as well as dialecticians skillful at interrogation, for to declare (eirein) means to say (legein) but also to ask:
• What we are saying just now is that in the Attic language, the orators and questioners (erōtētikoi) are called “heroes,” so that the group of orators and sophists constitute the heroic tribe. (Cra. 398d5–e3)
• In “the old Attic language,” which becomes the Attic language per se – in other words, from the perspective of the Greeks – the heroes are those who know how to speak, to make a magisterial pronouncement: the orators as much as those who are able to ask questions. The text moves from “dialecticians” to “questioners,” finally identified with the sophists. The proof is that the Leontinians had sent Gorgias to Athens judging him to be “the most able to serve the general interest,” as the inhabitants of Ceos had likewise done with Prodicus. One can see why Socrates prefers to rely on the inhabitants of Elea and why the dialectician has to give an ironic decrypting of the Attic language in the Cratylus, and invents ironically again, given its “barbarity,” another language in the first part and at the conclusion of the Sophist.
• In response to Theodorus’s request for clarification Socrates reformulates his question:
• Did they think all these were one thing or two things; or perhaps since there are three names, do they distinguish three kinds and assign one kind to each, one for each name? (217a6-8)
• With this Socrates passes from the series of three images to a series of three kinds, in which the philosopher comes to take the place of the madman. He has just made the philosopher the original which the ignorant can only grasp through three images, but the privilege accorded to two of them, the statesman and the sophist, leads to a change in the status of the three names: Soc ates’ question now has to do with the existence of three different “kinds.” In his Against the Sophists, Isocrates creates the genus “political philosopher,” and classes those who claim or pretend to be “pure” philosophers among the sophists: so there are three names but only two kinds. An Athenian persuaded by the theses of Protagoras and Gorgias can believe that the exponents of an art, including philosophers and statesmen, are “experts,” “wise men,” sophists, and that there is only one kind. On the co trary, their difference is obvious in the city of Elea, but do the Eleans conclude from the existence of these three names the existence of three different kinds, or is it because there are three distinct kinds that these three names are present in their language? The Stranger thinks this is “not difficult” to answer, and sweepingly asserts that the Eleans go from the things to the names and not the opposite. In other words, saved by Parmenides from the “sophistic [i.e., linguistic] turn,” they do not believe that language has the power to produce things. But according to the Stranger, Socrates’ question calls for a preliminary definition of each of the three kinds. Will they then become objects of equal treatment? In that case the Stranger would be committing the same mistake Theodorus makes at the beginning of the Politicus, when he multiplies by three the gratitude all of them will owe to the Stranger at the end of his three inquiries. The mathematician had in this established an arithmetic equality among kinds judged to be equal in value (timē) whereas their relationship defies their being placed in any such mathematical proportion (analogia): two of them are out of proportion, the one by its excess (the philosopher) and the other by its deficiency (the sophist). Shouldn’t the incommensurable difference of the sophist be the starting point of the search, justifying a special treatment? The Stranger thinks, and is right to think, that one must not prejudge that difference but discover it.
• If one believes he can choose his own way of speaking he must strip dialectic of its erotic dimension and value coherence above truth. Socrates tries to convince every sophist he encounters that he cannot speak otherwise than the way he does. His way of discussing (dialegesthai) is less a matter of art, tekhnē, than of a “fearsome eros,” a relentless desire both himself to unde go, and to make others undergo, if they are able, the force of a logos that “leads one wherever it will” – in order “to put to the test both the truth and ourselves.” And yet it is he who asks the Stranger whether he prefers to launch into a long discourse by himself or to proceed by questions.
• The alternative Socrates proposes is based on the types of discourse used in judicial institutions. Protagoras just yesterday heorized this juridical oratory and got Socrates to adopt the second procedure instead:
• If you are able to dispute my thesis from the ground up, then do so with a discourse opposing the other, point by point. Or if you prefer to proceed by questions, use questions. for that is not at all something to spurn but rather the method any intelligent person must follow more than any other. (Tht.167d4–7)
• The paternity of the interrogative method, according to Parmenides, goes back to himself and to his disciple Zeno; Protagoras claims to be their heir, and on this basis reproaches Socrates for being guilty of the excessive behavior of such eristics as Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. During the face-to-face encounter between Socrates and Protagoras it is rather the latter who holds he high ground, for he wants to promote “a hermeneutic animated by an effort of understanding and rectification,” not by an unjust and bad-faith desire to defeat the other and cause him to stumble. Whoever chooses to proceed in this way will need to commit himself to “weighing the validity of the questions as well as the adequacy of the responses,” and if he is to correct errors, good will must be established as a principle and must rule the entire examination. Managed in this way the method by interroga ions will not discredit philosophical discussion but on the contrary will lead to philosophy. So at least does Protagoras judge the matter. This Protagorean reversal aims at disengaging philosophy from Socratic dialectic whose excessive radicalism excludes any correct appreciation of the pro and the con, of the good and the bad, with the result that instead of discrediting sophistic, it is philosophy that is dishonored.
• According to Theodorus, Socrates’ question is similar to those put to the Stranger before they got there, and at that time he had answered that he had heard as many lessons as necessary and has not forgotten them. The dialogue thus continues to be attached to a past that reaches further and further into the present, at the same time that the background is broadened even further, thanks to both Socrates’s and the Stranger’s memories of the lessons they heard from Parmenides, when he was quite old:
• SOCRATES – When you want to give to anyone an account of what you have agreed to treat, is it usually more agreeable to you to go through it just by yourself with a long speech, or through questions, as I heard Parmenides do in my presence when I was young and he was quite old when he went through his very beautiful speeches? (217c2-7)
• To what “beautiful speeches” is Socrates referring? In the first part of the Parmenides, Parmenides confronts Socrates with the difficulties brought on by his way of maintaining the hypothesis of the Ideas. His goal is not to refute this hypothesis, since he ends up encouraging Socrates to defend it better; rather, it is the inability of this too-young man to make his thesis acceptable that Parmenides wishes to reveal. Being questioned and refuted by Parmenides has made Socrates able (and ought to have made the interpreters of Plato able) to understand what kind of reality one must not give to the intelligible Ideas if one wants intelligence to recognize itself in them. The arguments used in this first part are powerful, but it is far from obvious that they are “beautiful”: instead they resemble Protagoras’s criticisms of Socrates. Once the refutation is completed, Parmenides accedes to the requests of those present and launches into a long demonstration of his dialectical method. It was here he spelled out his arguments, while as Socrates says “still quite young, I was myself present.” It is hard to make this sentence mean tha it was “in the course of dialoguing with” Socrates that Parmenides had given a sample of his dialectic: Socrates says that he was present, not that he answered. If one wants to learn what a “method by interrogations” means for an Eleatic, it is therefore not to the second part of the Parmenides one must turn, the part where Socrates merely assists in the “laborious play” of Parmenides in silence. Therefore, it is more likely that this is the series of Parmenides’s hypotheseis on the One that the Strange tells Theodorus he “has not forgotten”.
• What we have just been told is a story, even a “novel,” but Plato’s novels most often mean something. In attaching the Parmenides to the announced trilogy, he will be able to kill his father while proclaiming himself his legitimate son. But before giving his exhaustive exploration, Plato’s Parmenides instructs his Socrates on the rules that preside over the essential training regarding the search for the true:
• PARMENIDES – In short, about whatever may be hypothesized as being or as not being, and as well as undergoing any other affection whatever, it is necessary to examine the consequences first relative to itself and then relative to each one of the others, whichever you may choose, and relative to more than one, and then to all in the same way; and the others, in turn, must be examined what befalls both relative to themselves and relative to any other you may chose, whether you hypothesize what you hypothesize as being or as not being – if at least you really intend, having completed your training, to discern accurately what is true. (Prm.136b6–c5)
• The dialectical path traced by Parmenides enables one to discover which existing species of knowledge, or discourse, or activi y follows from the mode of being or of non-being conferred, by hypothesis, upon an object. In Socratic dialectic the question will inevitably persist in every answer, but in a Parmenidean one it is the hypothesis being examined that commands each of its consequences, so that to call it a “dialogued monologue” is to call it by the name that truly suits it. For this monologue is only fictionally a dialogue, with the questioner posing questions in which the answers are already included. To erase entirely what distinguishes the method of interrogation from a monological exposition on the formal level would therefore be the best way to protect it from its eristic caricature, but it is the interrogative character of the method that this in fact threatens to obliterate.
• Where Socrates spoke of what is “more agreeable,” the Stranger understood “easier”: the method “by interrogations” seems to him in fact “easier” provided the interlocutor is not unpleasant and is easy to lead. If the Stranger is betting on the docility of his interlocutor to avoid the risk of being condemned to “wandering and meeting with dead ends” he is mistaken, since this is exactly what we shall see happening. Would it rather be because, facing an aggressive and reluctant interlocutor, the questioner might find himself forced to improvise? In that case he would again be mistaken in saying he has heard lessons on the subject that he judges “sufficient.” What he tries to specify is that it is not jealous desire (phthonos) to keep his lessons to himself that has motivated his reticence in sharing them with Theodorus, but rather the scope of the discourse that he would have to deliver. But for one who has read the Sophist these lessons do not seem at all sufficient if one judges them by the succession of aporias for which they clearly have not prepared the interlocutors, and the discouragement they express again and again. The Stranger adds, besides, that he will not proceed by an exchange of brief statements (“word against word”: epos pros epos), and yet there is no shortage of such exchanges in the dialogue.
• What can be the point of all this unless to announce that this methodological declaration will be doubly contradicted, on the one hand since those lessons will be revealed insufficient and on the other because the nature of the object treated first, the sophist, will constrain them to follow another method leading to several definitions? In short, the Stranger rightly sees that his task will not be easy and it is in dialoguing with Theaetetus that he will have the best chance to manage it well, rather than by delivering a long discourse.
• Why, though no one at all asked him, does Socrates intervene one last time, so as to recommend an interlocutor to the Stranger? And why Theaetetus? Any of those present would be suitable, he says by the way, since he said it is only as being disposed the way participants in a discussion should be that they have arrived at dawn: all of them had been purified yesterday of their illusory certitudes. But yesterday it was Theaetetus that Theodorus put forward, insisting on his “good nature,” good and even exceptional since it brings together traits usually incompatible, which is a special property of the “philosophic” nature. He will confirm it by making the questions that are asked his own, and by taking on all the roles he is assigned, and the Stranger will even make an appeal to his nature to make argument unnecessary.
• Once this is settled Socrates will speak no more, but it is his question that the dialogue will answer, the question he has asked and will continue to ask anyone who is willing to listen to him.
• Theaetetus does not decline to take part in the discussion, but he is uncertain that his being selected will make everyone happy. The reply of the Stranger cuts short such talk:
• But now you must inquire in common with me since it appears that we are to begin first, right away, by defining the sophist and immediately to seek what he might be and make that clear in words. (218b5-c1)
• It is therefore with the sophist that the Stranger decides to “begin first, right away” without thinking it necessary to justiy his choice nor to explain its urgency. He thinks however that it is indispensable to prescribe for his young interlocutor how to behave so as to fully participate in the search.
• What is the first obstacle the Stranger thinks necessary to remove before undertaking their search for the sophist?
• For as it stands all you and I hold in common about him is his name: the activity (ergon) you or I have in mind that the name designates might be different for each of us: in all matters we must come to an agreement about the thing itself through discussion, rather than merely agree on a name without further discussion. (218c1–5)
• About the three kinds enumerated by Socrates, it is the task, the ergon belonging to each that is the “thing” (pragma) to be defined, and it is about this that agreement must be reached. The transitivity from the function to the thing is present in the Greek term: every thing (pragma) is the result of an action (praxis) and as such it is the object of a care, or a concern, or an inquiry, but can conversely be the source of embarrassment or inconvenience: in the judicial vocabulary it is a “case.” This principle, agreeing on the thing itself rather than on “the name all by itself,” was what Socrates advocated at the end of the Cratylus, but there he meant by “thing” a reality that was always the same and accessible only to an intelligence that can divorce itself from the fugitive, varying, and contradictory opinions that the body impresses upon the soul. As for Theaetetus, yes erday the Socratic maieutic has done its work – but it remains to make sure that this purification has indeed freed him from whatever private representation he might have of the sophist.
• What does “private” mean, here? Must we understand that each of the two interlocutors has a “representation” of the ergon – the activity, the function, the profession, the skill – of the sophist, that belongs to him in absolute singularity? In that case the representation would not only be incommunicable, it would be unnamable: there would not even be a “name” the interlocutors held in common, just an empty sound. Protagoras is right: every man is the measure of what he feels but he is not the measure of the words he uses since the words naming things belong to a particular language and their meaning can be modified only within certain limits. As long as it is linguistic, a “private” sphere is as “common” as a public sphere: it obeys a semantic and axiological code that belongs to a collectivity, no matter how restrained and precarious. It is thus to the extent that it is “particular” rather than “singular” that the representation that corresponds with the name “sophist” could not be “common.” Some names, and in this case the three mentioned by Socrates, lack any immediate and obvious relation with the thing they name. Their relation with the thing is always mediated by the representation that a subject makes of this thing, so that these names remain available for any opinion at all that is capable of making them signify “something,” and they can then be “dragged about by the whim of our phantasm” and convey any image at all. “Sophist” is exactly such a term. Uniquely ambivalent, it triggers a curious mixture of admiration and violent rejection, as the young Hippocrates testifies, who is so avid to follow the teaching of Protago as but blushes with shame at the thought of presenting himself to the Greeks as a sophist. And although Hades is said to be a “clever sophist” as is Eros – who while “spending all his time philosophizing” is an “accomplished sorcerer” but who because he “invents magic elixirs” is “a sophist” – and as is Diotima, the sophist on the other hand occupies the second-to-lowest rank in the hierarchy of Adrastus, one step above the tyrant. Pushed to its limit the unsurpassable particularity of the representation can lead to denying any relation between the names and the things, if the naming subject needs it to be. At any time and any place some words find themselves so hijacked by a group of individuals that impose the private representation they have of them a d condemn another group to bad faith or public scorn, to the point of making them subject to a capital charge. What blocks conferring this omnipotence onto representation, in the Cratylus as in the Gorgias and in the Sophist as in the Politicus, is the notion of ergon: by restoring to names their diacritical and iconic function, it attaches each of them to the thing it names, a thing that is defined solely by its function.
• If one is to treat important subjects correctly, it is a longstanding opinion followed by everyone that one must first proceed by practicing on things that are smallest and easiest before attacking those that are very important. (218c7–d2)
• Up to now, whenever the Stranger had specified his task he had evaluated it in terms of greater or lesser ease. The adjective “easy” is applied at first negatively to the enterprise of definition called for by the question of Socrates, and then positively to proceeding by interrogations as being “easier,” compared with that of continuous monologue; it then qualified negatively a d in the superlative the object of search, the “race of the sophist,” saying it is not “the easiest of all” to grasp, compared with an “easier” small thing chosen as a subject on which to practice – all of that giving place to affirming that the hunt to come will be “difficult,” “painful.” The Stranger is thus linked to Socrates, who never ceases to experience the intrinsic difficulty of what he is examining and is distinguished from the sophist who claims to be just as capable of long speeches as short speeches since for him they are equally easy. The choice of his method is determined by the greatness of the task (ergon): by its size and by its importance, and only a “small” art can serve a paradigmatic function. But what does the fact of being “small” mean for an art? That it is practiced only by a few men? But nobody would say that poetry or divination are “small arts.” That it is useful only for a few men? Even if the physician takes care of only a few sick people nobody will think he is exercising a “small art.” Obviously we must move from the quantitative to the qualitative and understand “small” (smikron) in the sense of “simple,” non-complex, not difficult to learn or practice, with this easiness making the art negligible and insignificant in itself but not necessarily in its consequences. The pair “large – small” must be given a qualitative sense in order to identify it with “hard – easy,” for the transition from the one to the other is the necessary condition for raising a rule empirically confirmed (i.e., to start with what is quantitatively “small”) to the dignity of a methodological principle – namely, to begin with what is “easy to practice.”
• The art of the angler fits this condition, but as for defining it, just as many steps will be needed as when it is the sophist one is trying to capture. Perhaps there will be some surprises but such is the principle that must be followed at the start. Starting with what is “easy and small” is a rule accredited “by everyone all the time”: will unanimity across time suffice to gua antee the value of a method of research? And by the way is that the sense of the word “paradigm”?
• In most of his dialogues Plato gives paradeigma the usual meaning of an example, a sample, un échantillon serving to illustrate, confirm, or refute an affirmation or an argument; sometimes he gives it the meaning of a model to contemplate in order to produce or oneself become an image that resembles it. The word “paradigm” thus designates either that which by being set alongside (para) shows (deiknunai) and makes one see, or the procedure that consists in putting alongside to make one see.
• Reporting “that in several passages in the dialogues Ideas are defined as paradigms” over and against sensible things, Victor Goldschmidt was right to add that two passages are exceptions: those that show up in the Sophist and the Politicus. According to him, in these two dialogues sensible things would no longer be “deficient images” of the Forms, but perfect images that “reproduce their structure trait by trait,” and would therefore be “like paradigms” compared to the Ideas. These passages would then reverse the old paradigmatic relation and would take exception to what is indeed a tenacious and lazy dualist tradition. This pu ative inversion, incapable of being either ontological or methodological, can only be terminological – a nicer way to say it is merely a play on words. But to turn Plato upside down is perhaps the best way to emancipate oneself from a dogmatic dualism of which one is in reality saving the essential ingredient, and which also forces a respectable interpreter to place the arts, the techniques (tekhnai), among “sensible things.”
• If the only function of a paradigm was to be an exercise, it would be possible to choose any object to practice upon as long as it is “easy” – that is, “small” and familiar. Thus when Meno does not come to grasp “the unique virtue that extends through all the others,” Socrates tries to make him find what he is looking for by taking a simple example. He asks Meno, “What is the thing whose name is ‘figure’?” and he specifies: “Try to say: it might serve as practice for your response on the subject of virtue.” If Meno comes to understand in the “small subject” of “figure” what a definition is, he will be able to understand what it is for the “large” subject of virtue. Figure and virtue here serve as objects for the same logical operation and there is no other relation between them: understanding a universal rule requires neither a generic commonalty nor a functional or structural a alogy between a small and a large subject, even though these are the two prerequisites for their being “placed side by side.”
• When in the Politicus the Stranger has recourse to a paradigm in order to explain what a paradigm is, he takes as his model a “universal and ancient art,” grammatistic – learning how to read and write. “No swimming or writing if you are ignorant,” according to the proverb: teaching these two arts was obligatory in Athens. The two of them not only enable one to survive a flood, – the one not to be engulfed in the water of oceans, rivers or streams, and the other in the ocean of forgetting – but also to acquire in the one case the mastery of a certain medium through a discipline of the body and in the other to open up, thanks to a “aide mémoire” – the remedy invented by the god Theuth, permanent access to a temporal dimension otherwise doomed to annihilation. To teach reading and writing to his pupils, the “grammatist” (school master) begins by teaching them a very small number of letters so that they can recognize them easily in a simple group (or “disyllable”). The difficulty is next to make them able to identify these in a more complex group. In order to achieve this he “sets alongside” and compares certain simple syllables already known with complex syllables made up of the same elements. Though a simple syllable is here called a “paradigm” it is not so in itself but only becomes so in the process of being compared, which is all that can be generalized as a methodological model. The syllabic paradigm can thus be metaphorically extended to all the “important” things, and makes it possible to decipher “the great and difficult syllables of things.” It does not make possible discovering other elements or other letters – the “things” in question being “well known” from the start – but it will provide the criterion that at each step of a division it will enable one to leave behind the part incapable of leading toward the object of search, and to retain the part that is capable of doing so. So that finally, after wavering and varying, the opinion one has of this object will become true and unique: it will no longer be possible to hesitate among several “readings.”
• If well chosen, a paradigm therefore is not only didactically useful, but also has an effect if not inventive at least heuristic, since it is in spelling out the constituent elements of the art that belongs to the paradigm that it becomes possible to identify them in the art of which it is the paradigm. But just how do we choose well? On this point the Stranger has no recommenda ion to make, and it is clear that he relies not on any method but on the intelligence of the dialectician. Since his choice will not show how pertinent it is except by its results, one can suppose that the dialectician must necessarily know more than he avows about the thing he is searching for, which in no way means that he will have spelled all the elements out but that he needs this paradigm in order to succeed to discover them. While it is obvious that the Stranger could not have chosen a better paradigm than weaving as a practice exercise for defining the action of the good statesman, it is much less so in the case of angling. After having defined it, the Stranger will however solemnly affirm (“By the gods!”) that one must not overlook that these two men, the angler and the sophist, are in truth “related” (suggenē). Kinship implies resemblance, but a resemblance that is at odds with its reciprocal and hierarchical resemblance like that between son and father – and that between the angler and the sophist. This similarity had at the beginning only been suggested by an adjective coined for the occasion: the sophist may very well show himself to be “difficult to hunt,” dusthēreutos. Whence this first imperative: “let us begin by practicing with a pursuit (methodos)” of a small subject “easy to know” and which without calling for great seriousness, effort, or attention (spoudē) requires as many divisions as those required by more important ones. Logical rigor needs not be proportionate to the things value as commonly assessed. The Stranger thus admonishes Theaetetus to guard against the error Parmenides brought against a Socrates who was too young and “stumbled at the obstacle,” when he dared not affirm that nothing prevents mud, dirt, or hair from participating in intelligible reality. But if they were unintelligible these things would be undefinable, while their definition can simply turn out to be easier and faster to formulate, which depends entirely on the number of species to divide.
• Since the sophist is difficult to hunt down one must choose an object easy to hunt down on which to practice. Why choose angli g from among the large number of kinds of hunting and fishing that were practiced during those days? Because it offers the advantage of having none? It ought however to present one advantage – that is, of having some trait in common with what it will be he paradigm of. The young rich men the sophist wants to capture in order to educate them are a prey made vulnerable by their youth, their inexperience, and their credulity – and to capture them is beneficial. They may still escape being caught, but they cannot defend themselves: they cannot see “past their nose” – like the fish described in the myth of the Phaedo.
• According to the myth of the Phaedo we humans live in hollows full of vapor and the air of a spherical Earth, and live in groups among a great number of cavities filled with water (oceans, lakes) like “frogs in a swamp.” The situation of humans is analogous to that of fish: “the weight of their weakness and their indolence” makes them prisoners within their natural element, the air being for the one what water is for the other. But we, the humans, believe we are living on the surface of the Earth, just as the animals that migrate into the ocean depth take the surface of the ocean to be the sky. Starting there, Socrates construc s a hierarchical topology with the aid of carefully staggered analogies. The condition that man imagines to be his is analogous to the situation that a courageous fish, able to lift his head above water, would be able to discover. In seeing our Earth through the air and no longer through water this enlightened fish would take it to be a sky, while it is the ground for the lazy men who are ignorant that the Earth “in itself is pure and situated in the pure region of the sky, the same one where the stars a e, and which the wise call ‘aether.’” As in every Platonic myth the places assigned to living beings correspond to their degree of intelligence, and as in the allegory of the Cave they only discover their situation in the course of leaving it. The most i telligent fish will not be able to raise his vision higher than “our” earth, but he will see at what point the “region that we (men) inhabit” is more finely articulated, more variegated, and more beautiful than his own. What the earth and its pits are for the least lazy of the fish, the sky and its stars are for the majority of men who wade through their lives in the swamps. However it is not impossible that there should exist among them a man comparable to this courageous fish:
• For if one of us should make his way to the peaks of the air, or suddenly provided with wings should fly, then just as the fish see the things from here below by raising their head out of the sea, so by raising his head he would be able to see the things beyond. (Phd.109e2–5)
• Up to this last analogy – earth, air, and sky are for men what air, sky, and aether are for him who is able to perceive “the things beyond” – all the “realities,” all illusions, and all superiorities are relative. If a fish must make his way through the water to its surface to understand what its real condition is in the lower world, a man must gather his strength and “traverse he air all the way to its end” in order to understand that of his own. One must become something of a bird in order to cease resembling a fish, and one must become a philosopher in order to be a man who is divine, as far as that is possible.
• Once the two extremes, fish and philosopher, are correctly identified, the Phaedo has set up an ascending analogy, but the las lines of the Timaeus carry out a genealogy that descends.
• It is by following these rules that now as before the living beings are transmuted into one another: to the extent they gain o lose intelligence and stupidity they undergo metamorphoses. (Ti.92c1–3)
• The principle of this hierarchic transmutation is that the physical peculiarities of the different species of animals result i the first place from misuse of the intelligent part of the soul, and in the second place from the domination of one over its other two parts.
• – The first metamorphosis doubles the human genus into masculine and feminine. Though an unfortunate consequence of the evil a d injustice that condemns certain men to be reincarnated as women, it is required for the survival of the species and reproduction.
• – A second metamorphosis (of feathers in place of hair) makes birds out of “the men who have no malice, flighty and curious aout knowing things from above, who imagine that is by looking at things in the air and by sight that one obtains the most secure knowledge.”
• – The men who busy themselves neither with philosophy nor with heavenly phenomena and who are guided by the part of the soul that resides in the breast give birth, in the third case, to walking animals, whether quadrupeds or those endowed with more legs than that; as to those of the humans that are even stupider and are in addition drawn toward the earth, they give birth to reptiles.
• – As to the fourth and last species, the aquatic, “it is born from men who have fallen to the worst degree of stupidity and ig orance;” in place of breathing pure air they paddle deep in the muddy water and “in punishment for their ignorance, their lot is to inhabit the lowest of climes.” The lowest species of animals lives in the lowest element, and this is the prey the fisherman is after. From metaphors into metamorphoses, and from metamorphoses into metasomatoses, this genealogy has itself declined intelligence, notably in contrast to what Socrates said about women in the Republic, but nobody is obliged to take it very seriously.
• Sophist and angler have in common therefore that they appeal to the stupidity of a prey that calls for no more than to bite in o a hook held out to it.
• Both of them are hunters, and it is “this way” (tēide) one must go, so that the latter can serve to trap the former. But although implying a series of divisions that distinguish species of techniques, the hunt cannot be made the object of a treatment exclusively scientific. It is not only a kind of dividing but an occupation that calls for a different type of discourse: a rheto ic of exhortation.
• At the end of his laws about education, once the rules that have to do with the place the mathematical sciences should be give have been laid down, the Athenian adds that he must still examine another art, that relates to the same task of “mediation” incumbent upon the legislator. A true legislator must “put in writing and weave into the laws all that seems to him to be beautiful or not to be;” he must pass judgment on activities that cannot be consigned solely to the appreciation of individuals or to private groups. The art of hunting is part of this but the many opinions about it will not have the force of law, for it is impossible to provide a reasonable number of sanctions, so many and variegated are the activities collected “under the single name” of hunting. What then is he to do but praise and blame the various hunting activities according to the single criterion “whethe or not they are appropriate to the work and occupations of young people”? It will therefore be the praises more than the blames that will have to inspire their behavior. Later one will call “exhortation” the rhetorical figure that “excites the sentiments that ought to lead to this or that action,” and the discourse of the Athenian fulfills exactly this function. Except that what follows his preamble is not an exhortation to practice the most noble kinds of hunt, those that would warrant the greatest praise. But as the legislator is not sure what must be sanctioned he judges that he must “immediately” cast blame, at least – which is not what he does, preferring rather to develop in its place a very curious exhortation: he does not incite the young to feel certain feelings, but rather solemnly hopes that they will feel nothing at all:
• My friends, may you not be taken with an appetite (epithumia) or a passion (erōs) for hunting at sea, angling, or in general for any pursuit after aquatic animals. (Lg .VII, 823d7–e1)
• Complete indifference would thus be the best safeguard, and all that angling deserves is to be dismissed scornfully. After all the Athenian will nevertheless arrive at the sole species of hunting that can be praised, hunting savage land animals, provided that it be done with a spear and the animal be captured with one’s bare hands.
• His outlook thus joins with that expressed by Xenophon in his Treatise on Hunting with Dogs.
• In his Cynegeticus, Xenophon begins by recalling the divine origin of the art of hunting: “it is from Apollo and Artemis that hunting and its dogs come,” and then specifies that they make it a gift to Chiron “in honor of his justice,” a payback perfectly justified if one stipulate that those who practice this art “develop their health thereby, learn to see and to hear better, and forget about growing old;” and especially if one understands that hunting is a school for fighting in war. For as a loyal disciple of Socrates, Xenophon knows that having one virtue implies having them all: since those who practice noble hunting must be courageous, they will in addition become “temperate, just, and experienced,” particularly because they will have acquired the experience of “a pleasure quite different from the shameful lusts.” As in the Laws hunting is part of the education of the young, and the value of a hunter is measured by the nature of the prey he hunts – preferably wild animals – in particular by one’s catching the prey with one’s hands, without the aid of some such instrument as a trap or a net. But in the Cynegeticus hunting ca be taken in its proper sense of hunting animals, as well as in a figurative sense if it is meant to designate a pursuit aimed at capturing knowledge (§12). It is with a division of this metaphorical sense that the treatise ends, introduced with this preamble: “In truth I admire these men they call sophists, who claim in general terms to lead young men to virtue though they actually bring them to the very opposite.” Their kind of hunting requires neither courage nor endurance nor a more accurate appreciation of reality; the sophists teach nothing that might lead to becoming a good man; and in their writings “they only excel at the arts of deception.” So there is something to admire about them: they succeed at making one believe they are educating him while in fact they are perverting him. They are different from philosophers in every way, since while both are experts, their hunting “in the one case is done with intelligence, whereas in the other it is done with shameful impertinence,” but this leads only to a negative exhortation: to distrust the sophists and not to disdain the philosophers.
• Xenophon in his Cynegeticus and the Athenian in the Laws uphold nearly the same thesis and agree both about which kind of hunting to praise and which to blame, and about the rhetorical character of the discourse that the art of hunting calls for. Philosophers and sophists are however for Xenophon perfect models, the ones of a good kind of hunting and the others of a bad kind, whereas in the Sophist the situation is more complex. If he wants to demonstrate that he really is of a kind distinct from that of the sophist, the philosopher must “capture” him. Philosophers and sophists are therefore not two species that result from the same division of the species, “metaphorical hunting,” for that would imply that they are engaged in the same activity. In that case they would only differ from each other in the nature of their goals. As a good counterbalance to Xenophon, Plato therefore prefers a staggered relationship: while the philosopher is a hunter, the sophist is a hunter being hunted.
• Apart from the Sophist and this passage from the Laws, the whole of the Platonic corpus provides only rare examples of a metaphoric use of the vocabulary of hunting. In particular, it is virtually absent from the Republic, which can be explained by the fact that the science of dialectic as it is described in its central books must not be depicted with an image. The scattered passages in the dialogues where hunting is taken up as a metaphor are however decisive in several respects. In the Phaedo, only authentic philosophers use thinking alone (dianoia) to “set themselves onto a hunt for the realities that exist;” only they understand that they must separate themselves as much as possible from the body, which never ceases to be an obstacle to their “hunt after that which exists.” But the body is not the only obstacle, as Socrates learns from experience in the Philebus: “since we cannot hunt down (thēreuein, Lg. VII, 823d7–e1) the good through one character (ͅidea) only, let us trap it through three.” Any psychic hunting is by nature metaphoric, but by a sort of double twist, in the Euthydemus Plato draws from his metaphor a dis inction between two types of science: the disciplines that discover new sciences and therein are practicing a sort of chase, and those that are suited to prescribe the proper use of what these disciplines “catch.” It devolves upon the philosophers to prescribe to the “mathematicians” the proper use of their results, which leads one to think that the philosophers are capable of doing both. When “learning” is compared, in the Theaetetus, to a hunt whose goal is to acquire and possess bits of knowledge as i they were birds, that does not help solve the problem brought out in the Euthydemus, since the knowledges of the different numbers flying about in that “ridiculous dovecote” have no connection with each other or with the soul that has caught them, so that there is strong reason to doubt that the soul has understood much of what it has stored in there. As to the second type of hunting, where it is a metaphor for the act of recollection, the soul sets out in pursuit of memories whose volatility enables us to explain the errors or gaps of memory. It does not suffice either to be knowledgeable or ignorant in order to learn: it is necessary in addition to desire and love learning, and in this way to become like that “awesome hunter” (thēreutēs deinos) that is the demon Eros, as he is presented to us in the Symposium. It is he who is the mediator between ignorance and knowledge, he who philosophizes, but he is also a clever magician, a maker of philters, a sophist. So it is not merely by dint of being “psychic” that a hunt will reach a true being: as to the power of eros it does not unfailingly orient itself toward what is beautiful and good. One must therefore distinguish, as does the Gorgias, between two types of hunt: the one in pursuit of what is good and the other of what gives pleasure, the latter subdivided into two arts, sophistic and rhetoric. Both of these claim to aim at the greatest good of the soul and “it is by dangling the bait of an extreme pleasure that they catch stupidity in their trap and their deception becomes total.” This sentence from the Gorgias furnishes the key for the kinship between the sophist and the angler.
• The species of hunting are thus distinguished sometimes according to the psychic power (dunamis) they put into action, sometimes according to the nature of their objects whether veritable or illusory, and sometimes according to the value of the goal they pursue. All these criteria are found again in the division of hunting proposed in the Sophist, but the question about the nature of the hunter who is hunted remains open.
• STRANGER: Come then, Let’s start with it this way: Shall we posit that he is the possessor of a certain art (technitēs) or a man deprived of art but endowed with some other power (dunamis)? – THEAETETUS: Certainly not deprived of art. (219a4–8)
• The term tekhnē denotes “savoir-faire in a profession,” it signifies “profession, technique, art,” hence sometimes “ruse, deception,” and more generally “a way of doing.” We need to go into such detail since “an ancient notion rarely meets a term in the modern vocabulary that does exactly the same things it does ... it overflows here but leaves some voids there” and it is united with other notions “by ties of association, contradiction, and unconscious evocations.” The word that translates the notion situates it “within another semantic field.” The semantic field of tekhnē has nothing idyllic about it, but has to do with the interaction and conflicts of many actors, real as well as imaginary, for ontologically, tekhnē is dunamis, power. Since the angler gives undeniable evidence of a certain savoir faire, the Stranger asks Theaetetus if a definition of him can serve as a paradigm and enables them to say what a sophist is. The term he employs, tekhnitēs – artisan, craftsman, expert – is a hapax in Plato, who habitually uses tekhnikos, an adjective that can apply to both the subject who is expert in the practice of his art and the object made by this art. But isn’t it the other word he introduces to define any art, tekhnē, that should first of all be noticed? This word is dunamis, power, and it has the curious particularity to be generally neglected by the interpreters of Plato.
• When a Greek speaks of tekhnē ambivalence is the rule: though a rational activity in terms of its means, what is striking abou it is the magic of its results; though an instrument by which man can break away from an animal existence it is also deadly-destructive, and it enslaves as much as it liberates.
• “Many are the marvelous things but the greatest of marvels is man,” sings the Chorus of Sophocles’s Antigone. What is stunning about him is not what he is but what he can do. To glorify the human inventiveness evidenced in the plurality of techniques is a commonplace among the poets, but it is always accompanied by a fear inspired by their increasing proliferation. So the Chorus of the Antigone concludes their song this way: “Cleverer in diverse inventions than one could ever hope, man brings about evil as often as good.” The problem posed by the proliferation of the arts goes back to their origin.
• Before it was conceived as a savoir-faire invented by humans, tekhnē had been something of a miraculous power which only the god who is its master can grant in his grace. In Homer that god is Zeus, a god who lacks a tekhnē but is sovereign over atmospheric phenomena and divides the arts among the gods, each god charged with dispensing his own among mortals. Any risk of an uncont ollable increase is thus foreclosed until Prometheus steals the fire of the gods and gives it to men, for “from fire these ephemeral beings will learn arts without number.” They will learn from it especially because along with the fire Prometheus gives them comes quick thinking (gnōmē) and memory. From that point on men need fire but they no longer need the gods. Polus is then able to proclaim, “There are many arts among men, discovered through experiment out of experiences.” In Book II of the Republic Socrates sees in the proliferation of the arts a sickly inflation of needs and desires, and his vengeful raillery is like a parody of the anger that the spectacle of this flood of emancipated techniques arouses among the jealous gods. For it is not only the gods that men thus claim to surpass but any form of the divine.
• Thus secularized, technique now has no limit, or better it fails to recognize the one thing able to impose a limit upon it: na ure. One art, medicine, is however forced to keep nature in mind: in order to do their work physicians need to recognize the function of the human body and the role played by its natural environment. This recognition excludes neither errors nor setbacks, and there are always people who make use of such to argue that medicine is not an art. The Hippocratic treatise The Art demonstrates by rather sophistic arguments that medicine is an art, but it is in the treatise On Ancient Medicine that the criteria fo evaluating any practical art are defined: 1) not leaving to chance the places and the times to act, 2) knowing what instruments to use in each case, and 3) fixing on a method that succeeds more often than it fails. In being carefully distinguished from any personal power and any divine power, art is here a power transmissible by apprenticeship and experience.
• The situation is obviously more complex when it is not practical arts but knowledge that must be taught. The sophists respond o what they take to be an overrating of the natural by claiming the omnipotence of their knowledge in any domain whatsoever. It is certain that the boundary line between art and science, tekhnē and epistēmē, is especially difficult to draw when it has to do with paideia. Must the teacher possess an art over and above the art he hopes to teach, or must we posit that the former is a matter of an art but the latter a matter of science? And yet if pedagogy is an art and not a science how would a pedagogue be able to teach a science he does not possess? And conversely if in turn it is within the art of transmitting and persuading that science lies, all art is then reduced to nothing but experience acquired by practice of a particular object. The controversy over the respective role of scientific competence and technical competence (this latter indissociable from the nature of the teacher and the student) in the education of the young was the main issue in the struggle against the sophists led by Isocrates, the Socrates of Xenophon, and Plato, but also by poets like Pindar and Aristophanes, partisans of a “reactionary” and rudimentary education that nevertheless produced athletic and military heroes. Each of them thus gives to “sophist” a meaning that brings ogether under the one word everything they oppose in defending of their own kind of knowledge.
• Tekhnē is not a thing easy to confine to a definition, first because of the virtually unlimited variety of things brought toge her under this name, including things contradictory to each other, and second because one comes up against the problem of auto-definition. Introduced in the Charmides and taken up again in the Republic this problem is confused with that of the nature of dialectic. Whereas it is in Books VI and VII of the Republic that one would expect to find the expression “dialectical science,” in particular when Socrates ends up denying the mathematical disciplines the name of science, the difference between epistēmē and tekhnē never stops being relativized there, even at the very moment when what is at issue is to distinguish them. Is this merely a matter of words, as he claims? Is it insignificant that when the Stranger is forced to define the politician he begins by dividing “all the sciences” in order to find the one that will permit him to act in the most technical way possible, whereas he divides all the arts when it is a matter of defining the one who claims to be “omniscient,” the sophist? In the Politicus it is the existence of a political science that one must affirm and constitute, against those who see in politicians nothing more than situational technicians; in the Sophist it is a sophistic science that must be denied, by opposing those who sell it as bei g capable of providing all technical competence. To divide all the arts in order to trap the sophist means that the omnipotence he is selling is not that of a science but an art, with the connotations of mētis and ruse that belong to that word. Would the sophist then possess an art, a perverse one capable of passing itself off as knowledge?
• The line between tekhnē and epistēmē is, in truth, almost impossible to draw, for no art can be totally destitute of knowledge, and conversely all knowledge is committed to adopt, in a manner more or less rigorous, a “technical form,” As Socrates says to Protagoras, “since this activity is metric [capable of measuring, whether quantitative or qualitative] it is by all necessity, I think, an art and a science”: For one can be an expert (epistēmōn) in “an art” as well as in a science. It is therefore a philosophic Stranger – not to call him Plato – that divides all the arts in the only dialogue where the words “dialectical science” are spoken: our Sophist. As to the initial divisions of the Sophist and the Politicus, they overlap with each other, here going together and there apart. In conclusion: in Plato “the notions of tekhnē and epistēmē apparently make up all the professions” for “they are always supposed to be and always are side by side, according to a game of substitution and of exchanges that are difficult to grasp.”
• The Stranger has decided to adopt the method of interrogation set forth by the great Parmenides, but while he keeps to its pri ciple of questioning and answering, he will simplify it in its application: he opts for a method of division. Far from constituting a method different from dialectic, it “marshals all its power”: it is dialectic itself, only freed of the need to patiently examine opinions. Resemblances and differences will thus be grasped immediately, without demonstrations or tests, and this is why the method of division, like any other dialectic method but to a greater degree, calls for the “just and pure” eye of a philosopher and an interlocutor who sees in it something more than an opportunity for controversy. It takes place in a notional space of “intersections and bifurcations,” “directions and orientations” “to the right and to the left”: it is thus necessary to k ow how to orient one’s thinking and to pursue freely the path that opens up before it, without the need of justifying it at every step. Exactly as prescribed in the Phaedrus, even if the object to be divided is simple it can be divided according to the mode of acting and undergoing that belongs to it, for if it has a nature it necessarily has this two-fold power. It may seem that we are here dismissing too hastily and too loosely a good number of discussions this method has aroused; but isn’t it enough to recall that it must be carried out by a philosopher – the only one who possesses the “science of free men” – and to specify that it is the power that belongs to this science that permits it to distinguish between powers? These two terms, philosopher and power, are notably absent from almost all analyses, interpretations, and discussions of the method of division in the literature: Shouldn’t this be what counts as hasty and loose?
• What does the Stranger do? He starts from a positive hypothesis concerning the genus to be examined – tekhnē, the genus contai ing all the arts – and examines in the first place what consequences follow for them from their existence. Being neither sensible nor intelligible, the arts exist inasmuch as they are powers. They are defined therefore by what they are able to do – their type of activity; and by what they are able to act upon – their object. It is also according to their power that he divides the activities that belong to this genus, whether they possess different powers or operate on different objects capable of undergoing them.
• The angler clearly possesses a specific ability clearly distinguishable, but for the sophist the case will prove much more dificult.
• The first line of separation between all the arts passes between two types of power.
• What all the arts assembled in this species have in common is that they each are part of a producing art (poiētikē tekhnē). Diotima had defined the action of producing (poiēsis) in almost identical terms:
• You know that production (poiēsis) is something very manifold; that which is the cause of something, no matter what, passing rom a state of not existing (ek tou mē ontos) to that of being (on) is a production, whence all the operations carried out by all the arts are “makings” (poiēseis) and that those who are makers of these are all “poets” (poiētai). (Smp. 205b8–c2)
• But Diotima is well aware that this is not the name that only belongs to those who are involved in music and verse, and that o her “producers” must be given different names. So the Stranger is more careful:
• Any art that brings subsequently into its own way of being a being that previously did not exist can presumably be said to “produce” it, while the thing so brought into being is “produced.” (219b4–6)
• He does not mention the “producers,” but the thing they produce. For producing is not a matter of pulling something out of nothing or non-being, but of bringing a thing from a state in which it was not and was not definable. The art of producing does not produce “being” but realities that have their own “way of being,” an ousia that belongs to them, is inseparable from their power, and makes them definable, and that can be natural or given to them by the art that produces them. For three kinds of art do not go about this in the same way:
• Farming and as many arts as take care of mortal bodies as a whole, and also take care of what is put together and fabricated – in brief, of ‘utensils’ (skeuos) as we have called them – as well as the mimetic: all this we could quite justly refer to with a single name. (219a10–b2)
• The first species of the producing arts includes, it seems, three parts. The first one cited is the only one that deserves a name: geōrgia, farming. It probably owes this privilege to what had been said before about the genesis of the “city of pigs”: if it is the first art mentioned there, it is because “the first, in any event, and the most important necessity is to procure nut ition for the sake of staying alive.” And yet, it is into the seventh and last species in the classification of practical arts that the Stranger ranks it in the Politicus, where only the farmer will be named. It seems that although Plato does single this art out, he does not want to glorify its fundamental character or its nobility. It is not for him the first art to involve calculation and strategy, the practice of which calls for the extensive advice provided by Hesiod in The Works and Days; and it no longer has the role of the “mother and nursemaid of all the arts” accorded to it by Xenophon, nor is it “the most useful, the most pleasant, the most beautiful, and the dearest to the gods,” and therefore the “school of all the virtues.” This ability of p oducing what will serve as nourishment is but the easiest to learn, and yet it is also the first sign of the marvelous ingenuity of the featherless biped: without this nutritional art he would not have been able to emerge from his nomadic existence, reside in a city (polis), and stay alive. In other words, without agriculture man would never have been a “political” animal.
• What comes surprisingly next is all that is taking-care (therapeia): isn’t taking care of something a matter of busying oneself with a thing already produced, to maintain it and keep it in the best possible condition? Oughtn’t the arts of taking care be part of the second species of arts, since they are occupied with realities that already exist? The reason will be given in the Politicus: agriculture is part of the arts capable of “taking care of the parts of the body,” for they blend together; but these bodies are “mortal bodies” and agriculture must make them live and not risk letting them die. To oppose them to artifacts mea s that they are living, but not necessarily ensouled, bodies, capable of moving themselves in time but not in space: these are the entities that grow on their own, vegetables. Using the adjective “mortal” is illuminating as to the nature of the method: i s goal is not to classify empirical classes but to decide what characteristics will situate the object in one genus or another – in the present case, what character it must have to undergo the action of the producing species, namely its power of “taking care” (therapeia). This object has to be “corporeal” and “mortal” as opposed to being “put together” or “fabricated,” the latter two being distinguished according to whether the materials they are made of are rigid or malleable.
• So it is rather their heterogeneity that emerges from this enumeration. That which is a “mortal body” has a certain nature endowed with a certain power that the art must work with so as to increase or to restore it, whereas the care rendered upon fabricated or molded objects has as its goal only the needs and desires of men.
• The last technique mentioned, mimētic, is presented only in passing, as if it were only necessary to take note of its presence in this first species before later giving it a central role in the definition of the sophist.
• The dividing line passes between two types of power: if the first brings about several types of existence, what can the second do? The definition of the modes of acquisition is so confusing that its translators have a hard time resisting the temptation to break it up in their own ways, the most economical solution being to sketch out a schema. And yet it “draws a line through each and all the parts” of the ktētic art (219c6–7).
• Why this conscious refusal of all careful syntax, even audible and visible? What does the Stranger mean about the second species of art by saying that it includes as a first species, the “mathematical” – that is, what consists in getting knowledge – and then three others arts, one being an art of accumulating riches, another hunting, and another fighting? They all match the firs in having the suffix -ikon, and all they have in common is not possessing the preceding power:
• since none of them creates (dēmiourgei) anything as a craftsman does but rather they overpower things that are or have already come to be, in some cases by means of words or deeds, while in other cases refusing to leave them to those who have already taken mastery over them. (219c4–8)
• They do not “create” anything, nor make anything be, but are arts no less since they are designated by names with the suffix -ikos. All of them deal with existing things and hang on to what they have taken. Their taking control over what is “already there” and their obstinacy not to let it be taken away from them is “unproductive,” “a-poiētic” by definition. But it is no less necessary to tie together the parts of this single art of acquisition (ktētic) by drawing a line through all of them.
• The first criterion employed for dividing the totality of the arts into two species is thus the kind of power that belongs to each. The division of the group of arts does not pose a logical problem: the first species possesses the power to make something come to be, the second that of appropriating intellectual and material assets that one has not produced – perhaps in his case one must think of Marx, or at least salute the perspicacity and modernity of his analysis. And since it is in the unproductive species that the paradigm that has been chosen is situated, it is this that must now be divided.
• There are two ways to exercise one’s power to acquire: by mutual consent or by violence. This second step is not only directed at dividing the previous one, it announces the three parts of the definition of the angler: the first part indicates in which species of acquisition it participates, the second determines the realities on which it bears, and the third specifies the ways it is effectuated.
• – For everything related to exchange, or to the “metabletic”: whether gift, rent or purchase, the conveyance (conditional or final) of goods is done by an owner to a buyer who will become owner in turn. It supposes two kinds of equality between the acquirer, on the one hand, and the giver, renter, or seller on the other: the exchange requires both an equality in legal status and an equal capacity to decide. The majority of exchanges involve goods or money, they are “khrematistic.” An exchange only deserves the name if it is “by mutual agreement” – otherwise it is a “takeover.” The verb specifying an art of acquisition in general – “taking over” – reappears, matched with the same precision concerning its two instruments, speech and action, but this division makes of this part a species, defined by its difference from another species. What belongs to acquisition by violence whether in deeds or in words, the kheirotic art, is opposed to that which belongs to acquisition by exchange, the metabletic. Since naive young men do not meet the two conditions of equality required by the exchange any more than fish do, it is the art of seizure by force, the kheirōtic art, that must be divided in two.
• – The third step takes up again the parts enumerated in connection with khrēmatistic: the art of contest (agōnistic), is opposed to the art of hunting (thēreutic). But why deny that hunting, or at least certain forms of hunting, is agonistic? and why see in the fact of acting underhandedly, “by stealth,” the criterion that distinguishes thēreutic from agōnistic? The famous debate in Euripides’s Heracles between Lycus and Amphitryon may provide the beginning of an explanation. According to Lycus, Heracles has acquired his reputation for bravery by fighting against wild beasts, but as he carries “a bow, the most cowardly of arms, he was always prepared to flee.” He has never fought “man to man,” body to body; he has never had the courage “to await, open-eyed and staring down face to face, the assault of a field of spears, and to hold his ground”: he is always hidden behind the cloud of his arrows. Amphitryon responds to this praise of the hoplite with a eulogy on the art of the archer, “an invention of pure genius” that allows “keeping one’s distance” and “saving one’s skin.” A joust presupposes the simultaneous arrival of the opponents, a condition for its providing a spectacle, whereas the hunter must set out on the chase for his prey without alerting it, so as to bring it to the place most favorable for confronting it. The pursuit is done under cover: the pursuit is essential to the hunt. If even hunting for savage beasts requires dissimulation and ruse, so much is required in all other hunts. Thus it is a matter of guaranteeing the double application of the method and of justifying the choice of the paradigm.
• It would therefore be alogos, says the Stranger, not to proceed to the right in order to divide hunting in two. What does alogos mean in this context? It is usually translated “absurd” but besides the fact that this translation paradoxically has the effect of banalizing it, it does not bring across the presence of logos in the word: “illogical” is therefore preferable, except that logos does not mean a logical discourse for Plato but a rational one that is able to “give an account” of itself. Nothing that is done “without reason” (alogos) can be an art (tekhnē); it would thus be “irrational” to abbreviate without clearly delimiting on what the art of hunting exercises its power. Would it not however be the number of divisions devoted to specifying it that could appear to be alogos, for who could doubt that hunting fish is what the angler wants to do? One can also fish for mollusks, or shellfish or sponges. The following steps will show the need for proceeding with three new divisions to get from the art of hunting (thēreutic), to that of fishing (halieutic) and from halieutic to sophistic.
• – Fourth, we must set on one side the inanimate kind and on the other the animate. In replying “if at least both exist,” Theae etus is hardly contesting that these two kinds exist but only that both could be the objects of the single kind, hunting. What inanimate objects could be objects of pursuit, since they are by definition unable to change places? The Stranger is content to say that with few exceptions he does not need to busy himself to denominate the entirety of this small part on the left. That does not in itself mean that it has no name but that naming it is of no use if angling is what one is searching for; and it is for the legislative art to distinguish and specify the many species of acquisition of inanimate things on land and in water done “secretly,” something for which the “civil code” composed by the Athenian will hardly suffice. It will be better therefore to aandon the left branch to anonymity, with the exception of a particular way of acquiring inanimate aquatic things: those the capture of which requires the art of diving. Their hunting can be called “kolumbetic,” and giving it a name at the same time confi ms, in a way, the scientific character of the division and the existence of the art set off by it – an existence far from insignificant, by the way, since this art is the example Socrates chooses in the Laches and the Protagoras when he wants to distinguish true courage from unreflective recklessness. Diving is dangerous in itself, but it is truly courageous only if one also knows how to swim. Socrates has the feeling he is in a situation analogous to the moment in the Republic when he dares “to take up he question concerning the community of wives and the raising of children”: he has hesitated for some time but “whether one falls into a small tub or the largest of oceans one still has to know how to swim.” Both literally and figuratively, the art of diving combines the courage to dive with the science of swimming: it deserved therefore not to remain anonymous, but conversely does include some scarcer parts one may well dismiss whether having named them or not. For in order to reach angling it is the ki d “hunting-for-living-ensouled” that must now be divided.
• – In order to do this, the fifth step associates the criterion of the kind of locomotion with the kind of place that makes it possible or necessary. A hunter can either pursue animals with legs that move on land, or swimming animals that live in a humid medium. Hunting animals with legs includes “numerous kinds that have numerous names;” some of them will be analyzed in the firs definitions of the sophist, since the latter has only to do with this type of animal, which is not the case with the angler: he only pursues swimming animals.
• – A sixth step is now required: certain animals provided with wings can also swim. Water, for them, is more an element than a medium, since they do not live in it and for this reason their medium is called “humid” (enhugron, 220a10) rather than “aquatic” (enhudron, 220b2). Are these flying swimmers objects of two kinds of hunting or only one, or none? Nothing more is said on the subject, which can be taken as further proof that Plato is not working toward a classification of animals but toward a distinction between specific capacities that belong to different objects hunted. If inanimate and aquatic, they can only escape being taken over thanks to the depth of the water or the agitation of the waves where they happen to be; if animate and swimming, they can flee by flying, by swimming, or both. It is from themselves that their hunt gets its name, ornitheutic (hunting-birds) for the one, and for the other a hunting that is “not quite in totality” a hunting of aquatic animals (since it might in part be ornitheutic), namely, halieutic (fishing).
• What remains is to specify by what means halieutic is carried out.
• – By shutting up or by striking. The seventh step does not give fishing a very attractive image: the fisherman can collect and retain a quantity of aquatic animals thanks to a diversity of instruments that evince the range of human cleverness. “Baskets, nets, snares, traps and the like,” since they have no function other than to “enclose,” should be called “enclosures.” Some of hem (baskets and nets for example) can perform another function, to protect against aggression from the outside, for example, or to transport what they contain: here, again, the specification of the kind is unstable. But insofar as they are useful in fishing they are all death-traps. This hunting by enclosure, herkothēric, does not damage the bodies of the animals it captures but it is not less violent than that from which it must be separated, which is overtly violent – fishing by striking, plēktic. The brutality of this last name leads the Stranger to ask Theaetetus if he perhaps has a better name to propose, which elicits this answer from him: Whether one calls it by this name or another, this kind of hunting consists in striking, in blows dealt by “hooks or tridents.” The variety in the means of capture thus would lead to distinctions among several kinds of hunting by enclosure, but hunting by striking can be divided into two.
• – One would expect to hear a division about what the two sorts of instruments, hooks and tridents, are to be used upon, but the eighth step introduces an unexpected criterion: it separates hunting by night and hunting by day. The former is done “by the light of fire (pur).” There is no need to coin a name for this division since this kind of fishing is already called “purētic” y those who practice it. Angling is distinct from this since it happens during the day, but since that is true of almost every kind of hunting, the division has a totally destabilizing effect. It is so shaky it will be omitted in the summary definition: why then was this criterion introduced – “at day” or “at night” – if it is abandoned so quickly? One possible hypothesis is that the quantitative inequality it leads to validates a contrario the rule that a dichotomy into two parts is to be as equal as possible. This is the object of one of the lessons the Stranger will inflict upon the Young Socrates in the Politicus, but here he simply jumps from one criterion to the next without warning: “But the one that is done by day, given that tridents also have hooks at the end of their points, is in its entirety “hunting with hooks.” Between the act of fishing by day and the including of tridents in the genre of hooks, the relationship is hard to grasp and it is here not easy to gainsay Aristotle: The Stranger seems to be proceeding by “any difference, no matter which,” all the cuts being done “randomly” and following each other with no interconnection. So much so that immediately after making fishing by trident a part of fishing with a hook, he posits them as mutually exclusive. Probably because once he has arrived at this point, the goal of the dialectician is not to establish an exhaustive taxonomy of kinds of fishing, for if that were the case “fishing with torches,” purētic, would have to figure prominently. Leaving it out shows the specificity of this method of division: it decides about its criteria in terms of the capacity to advance toward the definition being sought after. But when it will be the sophist that the division must enclose in its nets, it will perhaps be necessary not to forget the play of shadow and light that will lead toward an art of deceiving its prey by making it think the night is day. For the moment the eighth decision of the Stranger is that the part of hunting by striking that he will have next to divide is hunting by a hook.
• – The ninth step thus sets aside the part of hook-hunting that is done ... with tridents. This latter is called “something like ‘tridontic’ hunting” (tridontia): it lacks the -ic suffix (-ikē), which would have guaranteed that it is an art rather than mere massacre. So there remains on the other side only one kind, differentiated by the orientation of the striking: it also strikes but does not strike from above on any or every part of the body, but is aimed only at the head and the mouth in order to yank its prey upward. It is on the act (praxis) of upward pulling, designated by the verb anaspaō, that this kind of fishing forms its name, “aspaleutic.” And what is it about this sort of pulling or extracting of fish out of their habitat that is decisive not only in the angler’s activity but also in that of the sophist? Protagoras explains it to Socrates:
• When a man who is a stranger comes into powerful cities and persuades the best of the young men there to leave their usual associations – those with their relatives as well as with persons not of their family, the older as well as the younger – so as to attach themselves to him alone, thinking that associating with him will make them better, the man who does this must watch out or himself ... (Prt. 316c5–d1)
• Eventually Protagoras will be condemned to death and will flee, all his books will be burned, and he could dispute the charge since he had claimed the name of “sophist” for himself. But how can one maintain that Socrates is not so also when he produces comparable effects on the same prey? Perhaps by showing that there was at least one young man he made better, the one who did no assist in his death and preferred instead to make him immortal by writing the Phaedo, and by defending him twice, in the Apology and in the Sophist.
• The division of the art of angling allows us to deduce some methodological particularities that belong to a division of powers (dunameis):
• – a power must include all the parts into which it is divided, which does not mean that every act of division of one and the same kind will result in the same set of parts, as shown by the two divisions of practical arts found in the Sophist and the Politicus: this has to do with the fact that the criteria are chosen according to the perspective imposed on the process by the power to be defined.
• – one and the same power can be found included in another power and then opposed to it due to a change in criteria, and thereby in perspective: hunting with a trident is part of hunting with a hook if one is considering it from the point of view of the instruments being used, but it is a different species if viewed in terms of the direction of the striking.
• – to separate a part ought to “purify” it logically of all the elements included in the part from which it is being separated; but although a predicate can and should in this case be exclusive, a power may on the contrary coexist perfectly well with a different power in one and the same species – as is the case of the flying-swimmers or the trident-hooks.
• – one and the same power can pursue opposite ends and thus act in a contradictory way upon the thing it affects, for example to hunt in order to capture and to hunt in order to kill.
• – in order to be exercised well, or exercised at all for that matter, a power must take into account the places, understood in terms of the elements, environments, oriented spaces or parts of a whole, and of times (implying differences in visibility).
• All these particularities are the consequences of one and the same difference in principle: each must make it possible to move forward on the path leading toward the activity being defined. Since this principle is not strictly logical, this method of division does not rule out instability in the kinds and in the species, any more than a disconnection – not to say random – charac er in the sequence of the chosen criteria. It is the interest the interlocutors have in what they are looking for that orients the research, not their desire to grasp what it is in truth. In the sense that it is meant to validate an opinion and grasp an activity or a function, not an essence, the coherence of this division is therefore “formal.”
• This formal character manifests itself in the absence of two terms it seems difficult not to mention when speaking about angli g: the Stranger abstains from naming the angler’s prey (ikhthus – fish), and in so doing he abstracts this art from perceptual and everyday experience in order to transport it into a context where this sort of aquatic animal will be nothing more than the object of the techniques invented by the hunter. The Stranger abstains just as carefully from speaking of a lure (delear), for the hook is not a lure but a tool for striking, as is the trident. Is the angler seeking to deceive only when he is using a torch? Since fishing is a species of hunting and since – in distinction from battle – hunting is not done in the open but “by stealth,” one must deduce that even when he is fishing by day the angler is hiding in a way, behind his line, and remains invisible to his prey whose curiosity he means to excite. For it is not gluttony that causes the undoing of aquatic animals, it is their curiosity that makes them rise to the bait. The angler does not therefore use a sort of flattery analogous to that of the cook, another hunter of rich young children; his art is the aquatic correlate of the sophistic art that consists in promising exciting insights sheerly on the basis of their being novel. These two words “fish” and “lure,” which belong to the everyday vocabula y, had to be left out if one wanted angling to play its paradigmatic function as a smaller art comparable to a greater one.
• The different techniques have successively “acquired a name that is proper to them” because the name “conforms to the nature o their activities.” Creative terminology is required by the method of division, a creativity that is here somewhat repetitive, since it is always limited to adding the same ending to the various activities. In this particular, the name-giver has used a technique hardly more sophisticated than the one he is denominating: he has in the end relied upon an image and on an assonance of endings. Besides, every technical language invents its vocabulary but borrows its syntax from the natural language, which mus as such be reduced to a minimum. Enumeration is the minimal syntactical form, and the Stranger overuses it in a written text does not even benefit from the rhythms of an oral presentation.
• It turns out that the relationship between the angler and the man endowed with the great name of “sophist” is not only paradigmatic. They are both of the same lineage. The angler indisputably possesses an art: humble as it may be he is not a “layman.” This is why he could serve as paradigm in the search for what a sophist “truly” is who, for his part given the name he bears, should be completely and not partly a knower, and an expert. The Stranger can therefore hope that their kinship – i.e., their belonging to one and the same genos, a natural family and logical kind – “will provide us with a method of definition that will not e unserviceable.” But between narrowing down the whole dialogue to a “handbook for dividing” aimed at the students in the Academy, and so turning it into a “school dialogue,” as some of its interpreters do, there is a huge gap one is not allowed to close.
• STRANGER – Up to that point the sophist and the angler proceed together from our starting point, the ktetic art. – THEAETETUS – So at least it seems… – STRANGER – But from the zoōtheric forward their paths diverge, since for the one it is to sea, I think, and to rivers and lakes he goes, in order to capture those that live there… – THEAETETUS – Surely so. – STRANGER – … whereas or the other it is toward land and rivers of a different kind: toward meadows, as it were, abundant in wealth and youth, in order to master the creatures (thremmata) to be found there. (222a2-11)
• “The opposition between sea and land keeps its literal sense; the second vaguely suggests the image of potamous (rivers); the third, taking advantage of the alliteration (limnas, lakes – leimonas, meadows) interprets the latter term, leimonas, in a figurative sense.” In fact, it is not to hunting that a metaphorical sense is to be given but to the game, as well as to the place where it abounds. These places have nothing humid or aquatic about them, nor anything rural or natural: they are only found in rich cities, all those that understand Greek and speak it. Their kinship does not exclude their difference; the commonness and circulation of the Greek language is the condition for the first four (or five) definitions of him for whom this alone is his “homeland”: the sophist.
• Hunting walking animals, though left behind on the left when it was necessary to define angling, is now taken back up, placed on the right, and divided into two large parts: the “tamed” walkers and the wild walkers. At first glance this well-known opposition poses no problem, but that is not the case in the following division where it is the nature of their game that will serve as criterion for the two species of hunting.
• The division of living beings into wild animals and “tamed” animals ought to raise a difficulty, if one is willing to pay close attention to the translations generally given for the adjective hēmeros. The best dictionaries agree: “tamed” (apprivoisé) is the primary meaning of the word, confirmed by the authority of Chantraine. Everyone, along with him, goes from this first meaning – “tamed” or “domesticated” in “speaking of animals” – to the meaning “cultivated” as speaking “of soil and plants,” and then to “cultivated manners, civilized, gentle, polished,” of men or countries. With some variation everyone invites us to adapt our translations to the kind of objects to which the adjective is being applied. The verb “to tame” means to “render an animal less ferocious, more manageable, more docile; to domesticate”: What can “tame” an animal besides a human intervention? The very term therefore includes implicitly a distinction between beasts and men, and the overestimation that man thus makes of his own nature will later present us with a severe lesson about dialectic. Add the fact that when attributed to “man” hēmeros means “civilized”: who can civilize men if men are all wild by nature? Gods? A god? Divine sages? Although a dictionary can decide such problems without even posing them and thus differentiate the results of one and the same activity without believing itself bound to specify who or what brings that about, translators of Plato mustn’t ignore that these are exactly the questions Plato poses in the Republic and in the Politicus. It happens that the first occurrence of the term hēmeros in the Republic cannot rightly be ranslated with “tamed” since it is one of the natural tendencies within the soul, which the primary education must preserve and strengthen: “gentleness” is an attribute of the “philosophic” part of the soul, while education must correct the “wildness” na ive to its “energetic” part. So also in the advice Socrates gives to Theaetetus: even though he has been emptied of thoughts he will be gentler (hēmerōteros) toward those who associate with him. In the Politicus the first lesson on dialectic the Strange gives is also a lexical lesson. The prescriptive part of cognitive science could only concern itself with the genus of animals that live in herds:
• That comes down to dividing the entirety of the genus animal into tamed (tithasōi) and wild (agriōi), since those endowed wi h a nature that lends itself to being tamed (tithaseuesthai) are called gentle, peaceable (hēmera), whereas those who do not yield to this are called “wild” (agria). (Plt. 264a1–3)
• When he means “tamed” Plato uses the term tithasos, not hēmeros. It is precisely “gentleness” that the Stranger is here bringi g in, the fact that this quality can also be as natural in certain walking animals as aggressiveness can be. How could the distinction between wild and peaceable animals be constituted by a criterion distinctive of the human species, since this cleavage already resides within its nature? The nature of man is in fact just as undecided as it is uncertain what he might become: “human” can neither be an essential predicate nor a generic predicate. What solely is unique in men will be, for the Athenian of the Laws, that they can go further than any animal species in ferocity as well as gentleness: “If by chance his education comes out right and his nature is a happy one, man can become the most gentle of animals – that is, the most divine; but if his educatio is neither sufficient nor suitable he will be the most ferocious of animals ever to walk the earth.” Between the savage beasts, tyrannic and incurable, and divine men, the philosophers, there is no happy medium – not for men – but only variable and precarious degrees of humanization that are also degrees of animality: man, an imitative animal, can mimic all these figures. He is therefore a living contradiction, an alliance of the inhuman with the superhuman: “for Plato everyone, with the exception of the philosopher, is on the point of becoming sub-human,” says Dodds; or to put it as Nietzsche does, man is “a rope stretched across an abyss.”
• The several translations in the dictionaries nevertheless have the merit of conceiving dynamically – in terms of becoming rather than being, in terms of tendency and capacity rather than fixed nature, of degrees and not a black and white opposition – the relation between this animal and all the others. Still, they bar our access to the meaning of this adjective “of obscure etymology,” which has two derivatives, the substantive hēmerotēs and the verb hēmeroō, which even dictionaries do not hazard to translate otherwise than “gentle” and “make gentle.” To conclude, hēmeros means gentle, peaceable – not “tamed.”
• The two large parts of hunting those on foot are “hunting gentle animals, and hunting animals that are wild.” Upon hearing this Theaetetus blurts out, “So there is a hunting of gentle animals, then?” since hunting, thēra, seems deal with wild beasts (thēria). By responding “Yes, if indeed man is a gentle animal,” the Stranger introduces a word “man,” about whom any Greek knows hat for from being a solution to an enigma, is enigma par excellence. So he must ask Theaetetus: why did he think that the existence of hunting gentle animals is patently impossible?
• – Did he mean that no walking animal is gentle, or that some are but man is not one of them? It is not necessary to affirm tha all walking animals are wild if one wants to view man as a wild animal: it would suffice to judge that it is possible that some should be. Nothing then prevents there being a hunt after men, since to hunt them would not be hunting gentle but wild animals.
• – Did he mean on the contrary that every man is a gentle walking animal and that just as there certainly does not exist a hunt after the gentle, there is no hunt after men? Under the first hypothesis, which affirms that there is only a hunt after wild animals and that man is among them, the hunt for rich young men would make sense: these little wild animals would surely profit to be the objects of an education by an expert, a “sophist.” Under the second, according to which there is no hunting after men since all men are part of gentle animals on foot, one would have no chance of finding the sophist since one would be denying the existence of the kind of hunting he practices. Theaetetus’s choice is proof of his “admirable” nature, or maybe of his recently gained dialectical competence, since he will avoid both conclusions. Indeed, both of them would deprive the research they have undertaken of all meaning. If he “thinks” that we – the “we” made up of all the interlocutors real and imaginary that accept going on a hunt for the sophist – are a gentle kind of animal (opting thereby for a very limited version of the second hypothesis) that will not prevent “saying” that there is a hunt after men, but that it would be the hunters rather than the hunted that would have a wild nature, as the appellation implies: “hunting after the gentle,” hemerotheric.
• Would we, then – we gentle animals among the human animals – engage in a hunt for other gentle animals, the sophists? It is no the hunt for the gentle, the hēmerothēric, but the hunt for men that is divided into two, into the hunt by violence (biaia) – like robbery, the hunt for slaves, tyranny, and like war in all its forms– and the hunt by persuasion, “pithanourgic,” practiced in courts, public assemblies, and in private encounters. From this second division therefore results a species in which a function (ergon) – persuading – is mentioned. The art of persuading is not an art of acquisition; is it therefore an art of producing that we are to grant the sophist? That would be to misconceive the fact that the “great beast” of a crowd, as well as the young rich men so full of themselves, are only persuaded if one tells them what they want to hear and if one counsels them to do what they have already decided to do. Just as the sophists only confirm what has already been decided upon they bring nothing new into existence and therefore produce nothing. They surely hope so, so as to exercise a certain power over those who are listening, but they exercise no force, since they only persuade those who are already convinced. Hunting by persuasion is therefore divided neither by the pair “voluntary / forcible” nor by the pair “in words / in deeds” but by the distinction between “covert / overt.” What is opposed to hunting by violence is hunting by ruse, astuteness, and covert maneuvers. Theaetetus therefore is right not to include a priori the human species among the species incapable of violence nor among the species that are wild by ature.
• Pithanourgic hunting (by persuasion) is then divided according to whether it is practiced in public, as by political orators and lawyers (the logographers), or in private. Being “private” – “idiothēreutic” – is not determined by the number of auditors but by its taking place in the homes of private individuals rather than in an institutional setting such as the courts or the assembly. Such private hunting brings us quite close to the sophist, but the Stranger thinks it must be divided further, thanks to a rather surprising criterion: it can either be dōrophoric – done through the offering of a gift – or mistharnetic, if the hu ter (man or woman) is able to make the case that his activity merits compensation (misthos). Up to this point, the Stranger has not had to correct the errors of Theaetetus as Socrates had to do yesterday, nor to dissipate his doubts, as he will in his encounter with the Young Socrates. Now, for the first time, Theaetetus does not understand. He obviously has no experience as of yet in this very particular area: erotic hunting, which is just as “interested” as the salaried type. Erotic desire is an appe ite for a beautiful body, which is only beautiful to the extent it is coveted and as long as it is coveted; giving presents to obtain its favors is a more refined way than paying cash. But it is the same sort of pleasure that is anticipated, and pretty girls and pretty boys do not need Ronsard to know that it isn’t for nothing that someone offers them roses. The inexperienced Theaetetus judges nevertheless that what the Stranger is saying is “very true.” “Let this then be the species of erotic art,” the Stranger solemnly proclaims.
• The third step will leave this species on the left, but if one followed the dōrophoric kind of private hunting, where or with whom would one end up? With the only art Socrates has acknowledged he possesses: “I am worthless and competent at nothing in other domains, but by virtue of a divine gift I know immediately how to recognize who loves and who is loved.” He can therefore never refuse to pronounce a eulogy on love, this man who declares he knows “nothing except for things having to do with Eros,” and adds that in this field he is “awesome” (deinos). In the Phaedrus he ends his palinode by praying to Eros not to strip him of his “science of the matters of love” and “to remain even more in the good graces of handsome boys.” How could the most handsome boys in the city – Alcibiades, Charmides, and many others – become attached to such an ugly man? Because, having within him the demonic power of Eros, he is “his own go-between,” as Antisthenes said? Or because he uses philters, namely a discourse whose so crude and even obscene topics contain nevertheless a divine power so inspired that it succeeds to reverse the usual relationship of lover-beloved, as Alcibiades says? What gift could a personage of such legendary poverty and frugality produce for these rich and handsome men, so as to attract them? It is perhaps the Athenian who tells the story most charmingly: “the soul is the most divine of our assets, and belongs to us most intimately, but no one among us honors it in the way it deserves.” In never ceasing to remind those young or old who hang around him to give honor to their soul, in inciting them to free themselves from the repetitive and disappointing fascination exerted upon them by the multiplicity of beautiful bodies, Socrates offers them the possibility to unify themselves and become what they are capable of being: “fine and good.” He returns each of them to themselves by making them remember the power of their souls. It is thus toward Socrates that this kind of hunting leads but it is a philosophic Socrates since it is philosophy that he says he is in love with, and it is this love that he desires to share. The philosopher stands in the background of this first definition of the sophist, as he will once again in the penultimate one.
• Since it is the sophist that is to be defined, it is the species on the right, the salaried species of private hunting, that must be divided. A precise description of the art of doing business with his charms comes next “by making pleasure into a lure” in order to ensure his own sustenance. The “art of procuring pleasure” – of “decorating,” “seasoning,” “spicing up” the sexual act – is an art we call “pornographic,” but which according to the Stranger everyone would call the “art of flattery” (kolakikē) or “pandering.” To get an idea of the ambiguous and “extra-moral” relation Socrates had with those who possess this art, as well as with being paid in general, one must turn to the Memorabilia. In Book I, Xenophon takes up three discussions Socrates had with Antiphon on the subject. In the first (I, 6. 2–10) the sophist criticizes Socrates for his impoverished way of living although he spends a good deal of time among young men from whom he could earn some money, money that is pleasant to earn since “possessing money allows one to live a freer and more pleasurable life.” Socrates has exactly the opposite opinion: “those who make money are obliged to do what they are paid to do, whereas I, who never touch it, am not required to talk (dialegesthai) with anybody I don’t want to.” The financial independence a salary would offer is sometimes welcome, but not if it is paid for by prostituting one’s talking. Then, in a second discussion (6.11–14) Antiphon tries a better argument: he no longer reproaches Socrates for preferring to lead an impoverished life but says he thinks that although Socrates is a just man he is not a wise one (sophos), for in refusing to get himself paid he shows how little value he places on the practice of seeing him and conversing with him. To which Socrates responds by assimilating the educational link with an erotic relationship. A young boy can either sell his body or befriend a virtuous lover, and “it goes without saying as to knowledge: those who sell it for money to whoever wants it are called sophists,” whereas “the man who befriends a person he recognizes as having a good nature by teaching him whatever he knows that is worthwhile” gains an immense profit from thus weaving together a society of loyal and virtuous friends. In another passage from the Memorabilia, Socrates explains to the rich and beautiful courtesan Theodota how to chase down rich me , using hunting for hares as a paradigm. The hunter must know the habits of this animal in order to choose the right dogs and place his nets in the paths by which they would flee. But the most important thing is that the rich men, once captured, become good friends. The praise of the benefits one would get from this is so persuasive that Theodota would plead with Socrates to get her some such good friends, though he would have been content to advise her against flattery the negative effects of which another courtesan would have taught him: every flatterer lives in dependency to whoever listens to him, but to make one pay for this little pleasure is far less to be condemned than promising to bring naive young men into excellence and making them pay a grea deal for what is but a false semblance of education, a doxopaideutic.
• So to recapitulate this last course of reasoning, Theaetetus, it appears that the oikeiotic art, part of the ktētic, of the thēreutic, of hunting walking animals living on the land, of the hēmerothēric, of hunting of men, in private, of the mistharnic, numismatopôlic, doxopedeutic, is the hunt of young men rich and reputable, which our reasoning at this moment requires of us be called the “sophistic” art. (223b1–8)
• The differences between the steps taken in the preceding division and those referred to in this summary are obvious when the successive editors of the text do not decide to be so charitable as to correct “errors in memory” or errors due to Plato’s being casual. It might be more worthwhile to examine the terms more closely. This art of hunting is part of the genus “appropriation” (oikeiōtic) specified as being a part of the “ktētic” art because the hunting can also produce food; it is hunting walking animals since certain winged animals live on land; a hunting hēmerothēric, which pursues animals gentle and not wild – men, objects of this anthropothēria, being able to be the one or the other – and it draws a “salary” payable in money (it is nomismatopōlic) and not in work, as is hunting for slaves. In order that this definition can be applied to sophistic, it was necessary to me tion all these terms, and not to suppress some of them with the excuse that they are unneeded.
• However, in noticing a small difference between the reasoning we just went through step by step – and which as such has become a statement separated from the subjects who did the stating – and that with which we are now confronted, the Stranger indicates that no matter how recent it was, the past is not law. To repeat identically calls for a good memory whereas to say the same thing another time inevitably leads, if at least one does not stop to think, to modifying it a bit and sometimes disrupting it altogether. The recapitulation of this first definition also contains a good number of “omissions” in relation to the divisions that came before, as if the distinction between what was incidental and what was necessary were coming into focus.
• – 1) First Compression:
• The division of the arts had distinguished:
• poiētic ktētic
• metablētic kheirōtic
• agōnistic thēreutic
• The summary keeps only oikeiōtic on the right, the “art of appropriation,” which amalgamates acquisition and taking over, ktētic and kheirōtic. One can only appropriate and use what is already there, and humans have the art of feeling “at home” (oikoi) in their environment: man behaves as master and possessor of all the places he inhabits.
• – 2) Second and third compressions:
• thēreutic
• inanimate zoōtrophic
• for swimmers for walkers
• wild hēmerothēric
• violent pithanourgic
• public idiothēreutic
• In the summary, hunting has as its object “living walking” – a compression of the walking and the land animals that are gentle, therefore human – a compression that conforms with the hypothesis chosen by Theaetetus. As a result the pithanourgic technique, as part of the hēmerothēric, is opposed to the “violent.” So persuasion can only be gentle? Would ruse, with all its play of dissimulations, traps, calculation, its calumnies or attempts to seduce, nevertheless be a gentle means? It should be, but would it then be part of the sophistic art?
• Before arriving at the last three steps of the division that came before, the summary seems really to bristle in its infidelity, an infidelity perhaps significant. Especially since one had encountered nothing like this in the recapitulative definition of angling: the nature of the object to be defined must have something to do with it.
• – 3) Other arts and new names:
• idiothēreutic
• dōrophoric mistharnetic
• (erotic) kolakic doxopedeutic
• the philosopher the sophist
• The summary only mentions the “private” part of hunting men: it is not the orator but the sophist who must be defined, and such is the answer to the questions that have just been asked. The part of private hunting to be subdivided is thus called “salaried,” mistharnetic, whereas the recapitulation says that it practices “the art of selling for money,” that it is “nomismatopōlic.” Silver, coin (nomisma), is the basic unit for assessing values, it ignores qualitative differences and counts only those that are quantitative. A first critique addressed to the art of the sophist allows itself to be guessed at in the summary, but still more striking is the irruption of doxopedeutic at the end. During the division it is “by having in view their excellence (are ē)” that the sophist claims to work with the young men; in the resumé what is sold for money is opinion (doxa), in which the sophist is highly qualified, and what he teaches thereby is a false-appearance. The term that will help to contain the sophist more tightly, doxa, thus arrives without warning at the end of his first definition. Between the two, between the recapitulation and its summary, which takes it up again, there is a difference that is far from negligible: the first defines sophistic but the second defines the sophist. Theaetetus can thus think it obvious that they have finally trapped the sophist, but for the crowd and for Aristophanes it is Socrates that they have trapped.
• The “very easy” art of angling was able to serve as a paradigm for a definition whose recapitulation was able to reduce it without damage to its principal traits. According to the first definition the sophist seems to be “involved in making a market in a new kind of education.” This image allowed another aspect of his personage to show through: his inability to give “freely.” To receive money is the only “gift” the sophist expects from his game, and for that he must bring to bear not just one but several techniques, and practice an art that “is not at all simple.” Though he performs a single type of hunting he practices two or three types of business. As Socrates says to a certain rich young man of good reputation, that at least, is how the sophist appears to him:
• A sophist, Hippocrates – is he not a businessman or a merchant who sells commodities to be consumed by the soul? So he appears to me. (Prt. 313c4–6)
• “So let’s go look.”
• The Stranger begins by recalling the division of the art of acquisition, but he “rearranges” the previous reasoning so as to adapt it to his new perspective. He no longer divides the ktētic art into metablētic (exchange) and kheirōtic (takeover), which can be taken as contraries; he embarks on another path that distinguishes two different things. The “changing” of ownership, metablētic, is now only one of the species of exchange governed by monetary equivalence. The opposition thēreutic–allaktic orients the search toward a contractual mode of acquisition where an aggressive sort of persuasion concerning the value of the mercha dise prevails, with a view to getting a better price. Contractual exchange, allaktic, includes in turn two species, the dōrētic art (barter) and the agorastic, the art of concluding a deal in a public place (agora). This last species is then divided as according to the origin of the merchandise – direct sale (autopōlic) by the seller of the results of his own efforts, or a re-sale of things stemming from the work of another – and it is again “metablētic,” a commercial exchange, that is involved. Almos half the commercial exchanges are carried out locally, thanks to the seller serving as the intermediary between the producer and the buyer: this sort of exchange is called “kapēlic.” But if purchases and sales circulate from city to city in a give-and-take of import-export, one will call this sort of trade, or wholesale interurban commerce, “empōric.” Food can be sold for the body or for the soul, and in the latter case it is called “psykhempōric”.
• One can ask oneself where these divisions are headed: to specify the terms of the commercial vocabulary so that they can be applied to historical sophists, to identify all the activities entitling those who historically practiced them to the name of “sophists,” though they have nothing in common? This is possible, but then the Stranger stops his division: this psychic species requires one to slow down, since it would be possible to challenge whether it even exists. Since this definition places the sophists into the species of itinerant traders, what despite their differences, will all of them be selling?
• To sell “everything that can nourish or be useful to a soul” is the foundation, which could go unnoticed, of sophistic teaching. Whereas traffic in bodily goods (objects, foods, etc.) raises the well-known problems of organization and transportation, the situation is not the same for the goods relating to soul, at least not until the sophists invent “psychotraffic” (psychemporikē). Socrates does not refuse to accompany young Hippocrates as he goes to Protagoras, but he wants the young man to know “what a sophist might actually be.” And it is then as a trader (emporos) or a merchant (kapēlos) that he describes him, not as a hunter. In the Sophist this single aspect is the object of three definitions, even though it may not seem to be his most dangerous or important feature. To accept the analogy between food (trophē) for the soul and food for the body is to misconceive the nature of the soul, and of knowledge and how it is taught. It is not out of moral scruples that Socrates does not require being paid but because according to him no mercantile value should or can be placed on such things: teaching belongs in the political sphere not the economic. Given that the nourishment the sophist sells is not nourishing, that he cares neither about its inherent utility nor what use a soul might make of it, what does he provide them with? “Music” – musical and poetical culture – and graphic art and the exhibition of extraordinary phenomena are then listed. The Athenian will give a more detailed enumeration of the foods of the soul as aiming merely to entertain it: in music are included the various genres of poetry peddled by the rhapsode, as well as song, comedy and tragedy, and puppet shows. All this can be transported and sold, which is proof that psychotraffic is indeed a reality and that all these “artists” are traders. Psykhemporic art is divided into mathēmatopolic, the art of selling serious sciences, and epidictic, the art of “display.” An epidictic discourse was a formal lecture offered by a sophist to give a sample of his wares to the notables in the city he had come to, as Lysias does when coming through the town at the home of the rich man, Morychus. This speech was generally meant to defend a thesis or to remove objections, past or future, the goal not being to have the thesis adopted but to showcase the virtuosity of the orator and the subtlety of his means for making the thesis convincing. To present a sample of the art one is trying to sell and to demonstrate its potential in this way are proven marketing methods. This “epidictic” art is said in the end to be as ridiculous as its name, formed from the verb epideiknumi, o exhibit, to show off, to make a display.
• The next cut must then answer the question, “what sciences do you sell?” Protagoras answers: not specialized techniques “such as calculation, astronomy, geometry, and music,” but the art of making good decisions, domestic and civil, and “thereby to acquire the maximum power both in action and in speech.” To declare that acquiring a general culture procures an excellence for the soul, a “virtue,” does not a priori seem at all to be sophistic. Acquiring “the sort of culture (paideia) as is appropriate for a private individual and a free man” is the benefit the young Hippocrates wants to receive from Protagoras. It is true that the sophists sought a market for their teaching but it is also true that they were filling a void. Having completed what we might call “elementary school,” young men received no teaching to prepare them for the private and public functions they would have to take on. The sciences the sophists propose provide the soul political virtue – an ability to deliberate and judge well: here again nothing condemnable, unless all it means is conforming oneself to the political institutions without criticizing them. Meno on the other hand specifies that “what he admires most about Gorgias is that you will never, in fact, hear him promising that [sc. to teach virtue]: he mocks others when he hears them promise this. Rather, he thinks he must make his students redoubtable at speaking.” Their distinction between technical and general education is nevertheless perfectly acceptable. It is their concept of exchange that isn’t: in the Phaedo Socrates opposes exchange on the same level (of the same for the same) to the exchange that has only thinking as its currency. By making their sciences a business the sophists make them “monetizable,” equivalent to the money for which they are exchanged, as are bodily nourishments. In doing this they devalue their “serious” sciences, for how could a science be a science and a virtue a virtue if they don’t make one think, if they do not lead to asking oneself questions about the nature of science and of virtue? The young Hippocrates had in fact deeply understood what he could hope for from the teaching of Protagoras: that it would make him able to speak well on any subject, anytime, anywhere. This sophia can be sold in all the ways merchandise can, and will always be sophistical. In selling knowledge about speaking the sophist cannot however totally annul the difference in what he is selling. For this sophia, essentially imported in the sense that it always comes from the outside and passes from him who knows to him who is ignorant, leaves its imprint on the soul whether one wants it to or not. To learn from Protagoras or Gorgias is thus to buy at a substantial price an “alien voice” and to condemn oneself never to find let alone seek one’s own.
• So come, let’s recapitulate and say that the selling that belongs to the ktētic art, the metablētic part of the agorastic, of he emporic, psychemporic selling of speeches and teachings relating to general culture and virtue, is the aspect under which the sophistic art made its second appearance.
• To teach the young men aretē, virtue, excellence, in the end is possible, yes, but only if they opt for the long and gradual educational program of the Republic, which ends in a dialectic conceived as a perpetual desire to learn, and does not identify excellence with the ability to deliberate rapidly or to speak efficaciously merely in order to acquire an enviable social status or political power.
• This definition is extremely brief and continues to place the sophist in the realm of commercial exchange. The first sentence simply specifies what takes place when the exchange is local, “agorastic”: it is the merchant-type (kapēlos), not the trader-type (emporos), that must be divided. Besides the great “international” sophists like Protagoras, Gorgias, and Hippias, there are in addition “minor” ones, who are “local”: this involves “masters” founding a local “school” of rhetoric, or oratorical dialectic, or music, “all of them having in common that they get paid for their lessons.” The kapēlic art, selling by a merchant estalished in the city, includes two species: sale of purchased merchandise that was sold to him and which he resells, and selling “of sciences related to the same subjects that he himself fabricates and puts on sale, having resolved to make his living this way.” He “fabricates” them, he does not “produce” them: the verb tektainō has the pejorative connotation of machinations and plotting. In other words he deals in a deceptive gimmick or patchwork designed to impress and therefore be saleable, but which in itself adds nothing new. Is this a matter of two or of three species of sophistic? The problem is raised by what the Stranger refers to as “third,” which can be announcing either a third division or a third species. It is Theaetetus who treats as fourth the following species, but after his general recapitulation the Stranger speaks of six definitions: the one that follows is therefore the fifth. Whether it is due to Theaetetus’s inattention or faulty memory makes no difference: there is indeed a third division that distinguishes two kinds of metablētic, as the recapitulation shows.
• So the part of the ktētic art that is metablētic, agorastic, whether kapēlic or autopōlic indifferently, as long as it be mathēmatopōlic of this of sort things, you clearly will always call “sophistic.”
• Two or three brief definitions, then, but which both sum up what was for Socrates the essential purpose of the putative sophis ic art and what the sophist would measure the value of his knowledge by. They all have the linguistic peculiarity of a progressive replacement of the feminine suffix -ikēs by the neuter suffix -ikon, and it becomes systematic in the last one. As a result, in 224e4 it is not hē sophistikē (the sophistic art) that is being defined, but to sophistikon (“the sophistic thing”). When it is placed within the region of “commercial exchange” (metablētic), with the first term put into the neuter, sophistic is no longer a tekhnē but a “thing,” a business, confining itself to an exchange of merchandise for money. It is a good thing to keep in mind, in connection not only with the Stranger’s third and fourth earlier divisions, but also with the sixth.
• The three (four) definitions so far defined sophistic as the art of doing business with a certain merchandise. But what about its vendor? In the exploration of the field of exchanges we saw that the sophist is everywhere. The Stranger obviously concludes that it is needless to justify moving on to another definition, since each time the thought has crossed his mind to look elsewhere, and to follow a different path, he found the sophist again. He will therefore now try the branch on the left, sure to find him there. But under what aspect will his art appear this time?
• Once he has arrived at this fifth definition, the Stranger states that the sophist possesses an art they had judged to be part of the kind that tries to take over things that already exist. In what other species of acquisitive art might he take refuge? What other means might he adopt to capture his game? This time by fighting in the open, by practicing an agōnistic art. Agōn denotes an athletic competition, an artistic contest, or an oratorical debate – all forms of contest taking place between adversaries. It is an overt rivalry, a joust, rule-governed: among the Greeks, Nietzsche says, the desire to be better “flares forth in he joust, and because of that it was reined in and subjected to rules.” These rules enabled them to pass from “the state of ruthless beasts” to that of the citizen: Greek society became civilized only because it was agonistic. Jealousy and rivalry ruled elations both between cities and between citizens within the same city – the institution of ostracism aiming at controlling this dynamic energy, as the banishment of Hermodorus by the Ephesians testifies: “Among us nobody is to be the best; but if somebody becomes so, let him be elsewhere and among others.” Contest is not war; it is requires an equilibrium among the forces involved, all the cities in the Greek region forging its unity through a plurality of conflicts that some incontestable superiority would render unnecessary. The agonistic art therefore does not belong solely to the sophist but his art might be one of its species. The former aims to acquire glory as a superhuman mode of existence – as escaping from anonymity and entering into the light so as to survive in the memory of men. It is not for that that the sophist contends, but for assuring his livelihood by participating in “controversies” where it is not bodies that confront each other but speeches. These are not public or forensic in form: the sophists have in fact extended this sort of debate into private controversies on general subjects such as the true and the false, or the just and unjust. Able to treat “all the things men talk about” these speeches are also capable of making the same thing appear to possess one predicate and then its contrary or contradictory, to the same auditor. Having taken on a private form this species of controversy is not limited to opposing any speech with a contradictory one. Its mode of argumentation can also be broken up into questions and answers: the usual name given this type of controversy is “antilogical.” This in turn is divided: the species that proceeds without art is nameless and is left on the left side, but the artful one “we ordinarily call ‘eristic’.”
• “Eristic” is not an adjective made up for a species that arises in a series of divisions, it is the name of the art that enables the sophists to boast that they are able to triumph over any adversary in a private discussion. Hippias pretends to be able to teach Socrates the art of “overturning” (kataballein) anyone who questions him by answering in a way nobody can refute; for how could those he claims to teach recognize as their master someone whose knowledge can be impugned? It is this art of “overturning” that a Socrates full of admiration says he wants to acquire in the presence of two brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, older men become wise “in no time at all.” He also promises to comply with the rules of their wisdom (sophia) without protest. The first rule requires one to respect the distinction between the roles of the questioner and the answerer – but Dionysodorus sees himself forced to reprimand Socrates: “You are finishing this long speech without taking the trouble to answer. Come on, then! Since, my good man, you do not contest my wisdom, obey me and answer!” Ctesippus will do the same a bit later: “Aren’t you ashamed, Socrates, that when one asks you a question you answer with a question?” The one they interrogate must answer and be content only to answer, if they are to inflict upon him their double-whammy so that he will find himself obliged to contradict himself by reason of their competence in the equivocity of names. Just so, “to become” is not to be what something was, but “not to be” also means “to perish.” The second rule prohibits requesting qualifications or specifications such as “always?” or “at which moment?” or “in what relation?” for these introduce “additions” that “destroy the argument” and relativize the contradiction – the fundamental principle of eristic. “Will you not stop,” Ctesippus says to Socrates, “again blurting out addings?”
• Socrates explains however to the exasperated Clinias what is serious in all this play, and in what way therefore “eristic” is “technical.” For these elderly wise men, resemblances and relations constitute identity and exclude all difference (“if your dog is a father it is in being yours that he is a father, whence the dog is your father”); and reciprocally, every difference is absolute and tolerates no specification (“to want someone to become wise is to want that he will no longer be, and thus that he perish”). What they have nevertheless revealed to Socrates is his ignorance regarding the word “learn”: it can be used by men inding themselves in opposite situations, both by those who know and by those who do not know. This is a real problem and Plato only resolves it, if it can be called “resolve,” with his theory of reminiscence. Beyond his exploitation of the ambiguities o language the eristic appeals to the possibility of reversing every argument “pro” into an argument “contra” – the art Socrates displays so magisterially all through the Lysis and brings to bear, dialectically, in the Phaedrus. Another technique enables one to silence and defeat an interlocutor taken on as an adversary from the get-go: it consists in improvising a discourse off-topic and interminable so as to make him lose the thread and thus reduce him to silence. It is in the Euthydemus that we encounter three times, “one must philosophize.”
• Theaetetus now wonders, Who could say anything else about this prodigious personage without being wrong? and the Stranger answers by recapitulating his definition:
• [It is]nothing else than, as it seems, the khrēmatistic kind, which is a part of the eristic, itself a part of the antilogic, amphisbētētic, makhētic, agōnistic which are all parts of the ktētic art: here is again, as the argument has now signaled us, the sophist.
• His conclusion uses the verb mēnuō, to “point at,” for this definition does not show an “aspect” of the sophist but indicates where to seek him: the definitions so far have revealed an aspect that could be taken as accessory, while with the fifth, one learns that it is in a certain use of discourse that he must be sought.
• The Stranger in fact starts from the last criterion, which helped him distinguish the personage, in order to go back to the fi st kind his sort of art falls under: the art of acquiring, not producing. Making money therefore would be the decisive characteristic to get back to the kind of art the sophist practices. This khrēmatistic aspect, present in all five divisions, disappears in the general recapitulation: “In the agōnistic field he was an athlete of words since he appropriated eristic to himself.” It was under the aspect of an athlete in words, an aspect he reserved for himself by appropriating eristic, that the sophist makes himself seen. But that is also why he can take Socrates to be a sophist. The difference between them – more exactly the opposition – is briefly indicated: “So when because of the pleasure in debating about these subjects [sc. things just and unjust in hemselves] one ignores his personal affairs, and his way of speaking is unpleasant for the majority of those who hear him, that, in my opinion is called nothing but “chatter’ (adoleschia).” A contest, a debate among arguments, is a fine spectacle and ca be viewed with pleasure, but only if the combatants do not give the impression of splitting hairs and of dropping reality out of view, or of including the business of their private life and thus starting with their own. Socrates was complaining yesterday of having a “slow mind,” of turning the arguments upside down, and thus of being boring and “chattering,” which recalls one of the charges laid by Aristophanes. This “chatterer” sacrifices his own business and the pleasure of his auditors for his own pleasure: he prefers pleasure to money, a curious pleasure that consists in tirelessly questioning.
• The first four definitions define sophistic, and their multiplicity was attributed to the diversity of the arts practiced by the sophist. But the fifth has taken a new turn: it is the sophist that it has defined, in terms of his “aggressive” use of discourse. Viewed under this angle it is no longer his art that is said to be variegated, but the sophist himself. It is in his use of discourse that he appears to be a wild beast whose tracks we must continue to pursue, still another thing to remember as we interpret this sixth definition.
• The return to the metaphor of hunting recalls a dimension that the other definitions almost made us forget. They implied the existence of a non-violent hunt after gentle animals, and in this vein the sophist appeared to be sort of hunter-hunted. But if he is a “wild beast” (thērion), we must try capturing him in a different way and “use both our hands.” It will indeed be necessary to go through many more steps before arriving at this sixth definition. The animal to be captured will not show himself to be any more “ferocious” than he was, but like any non-domesticated animal he will appear more noble, and thus more dangerously similar to the knower he imitates. To put it more clearly, his art will prove to be more effective, and this art is the kind of which the eristic has just been said to be a species: the antilogic art. To define the genus after the species is rather disconcerting, but it must be kept in mind when it is a matter of knowing to whom this sixth definition applies.
• As he did each time he had set out to define the power of an art, the Stranger begins by collecting examples that characterize it. It turns out that the examples are here not arts but activities, and (contrary to what the term “wild animal” suggested) “domestic” activities that we carry out at home (they are oiketic). In contrast with hunting, contest, or commerce, these turn our attention toward “myriads” of practices familiar to everyone. All of them are dihairētic: the art to be divided in order to try once again to capture the sophist is the art of dividing itself – a second-order art; since being neither acquisitive nor p oductive, it can be applied to all the other arts.
• Whether empirical or logical, each dihairētic process ends in a series of dihaereses produced by a “diacritic” art, which consists in discerning, sorting, relating, sectioning, deciding, arbitrating, making a diagnosis. In the dialogues the term diairesis is only applied to divisions made by the logos on the logos, for example to those done on words of one’s language by Prodicus, by Socrates on the sectioning of the Line in the Republic, and by the dialectical operations that are the counterpart of “gatherings” (suntheseis) in the Phaedrus. In the Sophist, diairesis is used in the singular to denote a procedure, and more often one of its outcomes, and once, at the end, to denote both. It is division that is being alluded to by all the examples of diacritical activities, but certain of them, like carding, untangling, passing through the shuttle, separate the like from the like; whereas others – filtering, sifting, winnowing, slicing, separating out – aim at dissociating the better from the worse. All therefore imply a judgment, a krisis, an ability to decide: the dihairetic art is by its nature diacritical. In other words, to divide one must know how to judge between two possibilities.
• Theaetetus, who admits that he assimilated the diairetic with the diacritical art a bit too hastily, now finds the distinction between the two species of the diacritical art obvious. The first dissociates the similar from the similar, and it is placed on the left and remains nameless; the second opens the Sophist, in a sense, since the philosophers are judged “divine” by Theodorus, but it appears it might be the difficulty of distinguishing them that makes them seem like gods. Such a justification is obviously quite insufficient, and Heidegger insists on the fact that like every judgment of value, this one must “highlight and se in contrast the specificity of any diacritical activity.” This “setting into relief” is a danger the Stranger denounces in the Politicus. “Almost always,” tastes, characters, virtues cannot be mixed: each type praises what is similar and derogates what is different. If the valorization of the similar becomes exclusive and the devaluation of the different becomes systematic, it can come about that “they are fated to find themselves in a civil war (stasis), the worst disease that can afflict cities. Shor of reaching this extreme, sorting implies that a totality will only become what it must be if certain elements are separated out and dissociated from certain others. The sorting performed by the diacritical species on the left side can therefore conceal a violence no lesser than the more flagrant one on the right, and to return “home” means to return to the sort of familiar brutality that belongs to all the species to come.
• The name commonly given to the species that separates the worst from the best is “katharmos.” Katharmoi are practices of purification (katharsis) that, allied with religious rituals such as that of the “scapegoat,” are meant to symbolically expel from the city any form of criminality, before the festivals of Artemis and Apollo, the latter being the god of all kinds of purification. There are two species of it, which the Stranger thinks obvious but which Theaetetus does not see, probably because of the use of the term katharmos in the didactic hymns of the ancient poets, Empedocles in particular. To help him see it the Stranger egins by dividing the species of purifications that deal with bodies:
• As for living bodies, their internal purification consists in distinguishing correctly what belongs to the gymnastic art and what to the medical art, and their external purification is empirically provided by the art of bathing, to give a trivial example; as for inanimate bodies, the gnapheutic art and the cosmetic art as a whole take care of those, and break down into many little parts that have gotten names that seem ridiculous. (226e8-227a5)
• As the usage of terms in -ic indicates, the Stranger has just made a thorough division of the techniques of bodily purificatio . Is one right to judge that he has just wasted his time as well as ours since he is the first to say that all these arts are ridiculous? Surely not: the arts that have been divided may be ridiculous but their division is not, for it is pursuing one and he same goal: “to acquire intelligence of all the arts by trying to reflect upon their kinship and lack of kinship.” From this point of view it judges them and must judge them all equitably. Kinship is a natural bond, but like belonging to the same genus it must be recognized and that can only be done dia logōn, by discussing or dialectizing so as to eliminate counterfeit kinship (often due to homonymy) but above all in order to bring paradoxical kinships to light and defend them without fear of ridicule. The kinship between the sophist and the angler, or between rich young men desirous of following the lessons of sophists and fish that are eager to swallow the bait, are good examples of this, but the Stranger illustrates his principle of neutrality by he more provocative example, the kinship of lice killer’s art to that of the general. To articulate the kinships one must dare to be paradoxical: it is not a matter of a methodological rule but of a deontological principle, similar to that which Zeus imposes upon the judges in Hades in the Gorgias, namely, to judge the men stripped “naked” of all the attributes that during their lifetime vouched for their wealth or power. The pretentiousness of the names one gives them or which they give themselves must e resisted if one wants to succeed at dividing the art of purifying them, and a method analogous to that of bodily purifications must be employed. For the purification called for by the sophist applies to a rational thinking that he wants to distinguish rom all the others. If one believes what came before he wants to purify judgments of value carried by common opinion and the common language, and reveal their instability. The analogy between bodily purgations and psychic purifications provides a way for the former to serve as a guide, because they are obvious and their names belong to the common language – “unless we really understand what he [the sophist] is after.” This sixth definition obviously differs from all the others, since according to them the sophist had been after only one thing: money.
• Theaetetus understands, and he promises that he will follow the steps of the division without reservation. The species of “separating” of which purification constitutes a part is the one that separates the good from the bad. To purify means to reject what is bad and keep what is good. What is bad in the soul, its perverseness (ponēria), is analogous to the diseases that overcome the body, themselves described in political terms as dissensions “that come from a breakdown of existing agreements among things related by nature.” The Charmides offers us an inventory. Socrates there takes the role of a pretend doctor and continually uses procedures like examination, listening, and talking with the patient to detect the clinical signs, to establish a diagnosis, and to prescribe remedies. His patients are the young Charmides, who has a headache (“heaviness of the head” is one of the symptoms of “dementia” mentioned in the Hippocratic Corpus); Chaerephon, who has an agitated comportment; and Critias, who besides being unable to contain himself seems to suffer from a “cognitive deficiency,” a lack of lucidity (gnōmē) that physicians complain of in their patients. And under the effect of an erotic inspiration Socrates himself fails for a moment to control himself: in the grip of a verbal delirium he finds himself in a state of “aporia,” a sentiment of “not being able to break out of it” described in the eighth case-study presented in Book III of On the Epidemics. The conclusion is that “all those among us who are bad men (kakoi: vicious, evil) become so by the action of two quite involuntary causes: a malignant bodily disposition and a education badly managed.” The psycho-physiological analysis does not here result in a physiological determinism of psychological maladies, and the same goes for the Timaeus. The vices of the soul are pathological states for which one must blame, besides physiological disorders, the parents rather than the children, the educators rather than the educated, and the governors rather than the governed. No one is willingly bad.
• The other evil that can affect the soul is ignorance (agnoia), analogous in the soul to what ugliness is in the body. Bodily ugliness consists in a disproportion (ametria) of certain parts or certain organs (the bulging eyes and disproportionate noses of Socrates and Theaetetus, for example). That of the soul results in a disequilibrium between the force exerted by the drives (appetites, pleasures, pains) and that of certain regulating determinants: opinions, laws, rights, energy (thumos), or reason (logos). Discord among them grows and multiplies despite their underlying kinship, and this pervasive disproportion makes the soul’s every impulse toward truth go afoul and miss its goal, so that a mental deviance (paraphrosunē) sets in. Socrates had examined several causes of error in the Theaetetus and had shown that the act of erring cannot have an agent, since no one errs willingly. The Stranger here sets out to define error not logically as if it were the contrary of the truth, but dynamically as a movement that goes off the rails because of a disequilibrium between one’s desire to learn – which orients the soul toward the truth – and the influence of urges that constantly prevent one from getting there. No one is ignorant willingly.
• Theaetetus admits that these two species of evil can affect the soul, but he still must be convinced that purifying the soul consists in keeping what is better and discarding what is worse – a “worse” that, once recognized as involuntary, ceases to be so, but becomes simply “bad.”
• “Alright, then: In the case of the body, at least, are there two techniques to remedy these two states?” The art that deals wi h bodily ugliness is gymnastic, and the one that deals with diseases is medicine. The best psychic equivalent of the medical art, the art most able to unburden the soul of such vices as intemperance, injustice, or laziness, is the kolastic art. To heal the soul of its evil diseases one must work on the body and establish a good politics – which makes its healing rather improbable. But for freeing it from its ugliness, ignorance, it is on the soul itself that one must work, by cultivating it and educating it.
• The art of educating is a multiple art, since there are many arts to be taught. The surest way is then to begin by seeing if i is possible to divide the ignorance that is to be suppressed. If “ignorance” (agnoia) denotes a specific ignorance neatly localized, some technical and professional teaching will suffice as a remedy. But there is another species of ignorance, which is also more important, more invasive, and more recalcitrant: amathia, or “a refusal to learn and to understand (manthanein).” Insofar as it calls for a purification, ignorance could not merely be a void needing to be filled: understood as a positive obstacle the name given to the teaching able to expel or surmount it is paideia – a name the Athenian Theaetetus credits his compatriots for inventing, though the Stranger from Elea credits “almost all Hellenes.” Paideia, formation, culture, has a Greek name because this sort of education, focused on an ideal of excellence, has belonged to and continues to be a possession of the Greeks.⤀
• This in turn can be divided, its first species being the ancestral sort of education used by fathers on their sons. It is called in general “nouthetic” (admonitory), or more precisely “the art of inculcating a bit of intelligence (nous)” into those who still lack it, by means of a series of severe reprimands and well-intentioned warnings. Protagoras makes himself its clever advocate when he describes paideia as a continuous training effected in succession by nurse, mother, father, coach, schoolmaster, and the “professors” of music and other arts, as well by all the democratic institutions. All this private and public caregiving aim, according to him, at teaching “the virtue proper to man,” that is, the capacity to become a citizen. Education is thus provided by the entire city, but at each age different people contribute to it more than others. “Because everyone teaches excellence as well as he can,” as he concludes, Protagoras infers there is no individual that teaches it, and that he would no sooner find “the master who has taught us to speak Greek.” This argument is superbly convincing but what is bothering the Stranger at his moment in the Sophist is not the “little something” about which Socrates torments Protagoras – the fact that everybody is teaching a virtue that nobody can define – but the meagerness of the remedy proposed, whose inadequacy Socrates describes in the Charmides. The Delphic injunctions to moderation – a sort of “nouthetic” addressed by the gods to men – have never stopped the Greeks from massacring each other; the refined interpretation of “Know Thyself” offered by Critias will fail to keep him from becoming the worst of tyrants; and the natural moderateness of Charmides is powerless to reduce his anxiety and to heal him of his headache. So how are we to bring the soul “to think that it knows only what it knows, and no more”?
• Some, having discussed the matter among themselves, having realized how inefficacious admonition is, and having admitted that o one is willingly ignorant, and having demonstrated that one who thinks he knows will never consent to learn, have developed another method for expelling this belief (doxa) from the soul: How are we to expel amathia from the soul of a man who believes he knows and thus refuses to learn? First by interrogating this man, so that something gets said, even if what he says is meaningless; next by examining his opinions one by one; and then by bringing them together into a single argument that confronts them with each other and shows that they are incoherent and contradict each other at one and the same time, on the same objects under the same points of view and in the same relations.
• Most of the following discussion is devoted not to this method, but to its effects. First there is the anger it provokes in the respondent and the enjoyment the spectacle of the rout provides for those who are present. That one or several interlocutors become angry is what may happen when Socrates questions those who are thought to know something in the Apology, or Thrasymachus in the Republic, or Polus in the Gorgias, but never when it he is facing eristics (instead, it is Ctesippus who becomes angry i the Euthydemus), or “great” sophists like Protagoras or Gorgias. The refuter is next compared to a physician: just as it is necessary to evacuate the body of internal hindrances so that it can profit from the appropriate nutrition, one must free the soul of its false opinions so that it can benefit from the knowledge (mathēmata) that will be administered to it. Administering k owledge to the soul will therefore be forcing it to swallow knowledge that is as alien to it as the food one eats is alien to the body. The method will therefore be a preliminary – indispensable for sure but only negative – to the teaching of positive disciplines such as can be recorded in textbooks. Though it fights against an ignorance it defines as a pretense of knowing what one does not know, the practitioner of this method has the same notion of knowledge as the ignorant man: he thinks knowledge can be administered to the soul from the outside.
• He who has undergone the method defined by the Stranger is said to have been “refuted,” and refutation is “the most important and most powerful of purifications.” This translation of elegkhos is not without problems. Within the dialogues the noun is given a range of meanings. It can denote a “proof,” and even an extra-discursive proof, but whereas the verb “refute” sometimes does mean “prove,” it is always a matter of proving discursively, and therefore of “submitting something to an examination.” It all depends on the context. It is surely a method of “refutation” that Socrates employs in his Apology, when he turns the tables o his accuser and questions Meletus. Certain treatises on the art of oratory show that “refutation,” as well as “refutation of a refutation,” count among oratorical techniques inspired by forensic interrogation in the course of which the prosecutor has a chance to question the defendant during the trial. This sort of cross-interrogation consists neither in refuting nor contradicting, but in making someone contradict himself and thereby to devalue all the arguments he has put forward. The Stranger appears o be referring to this kind of procedure since he speaks of “contradictory” opinions without specifying whether they are true or false: the opinions are meant to be refuted merely by the fact that they are contradictory. This incidentally is why it is no very difficult to get rid of them. But the discussion of the method ends with praise, including a cluster of superlatives reinforced by the figure of the Great King who, if he has not submitted to a purificative test, will be condemned never to have enjoyed the beauties and happiness this method brings. The method is therefore not intended to triumph over one’s interlocutor, but to free him: to purify him. “Satire is dropped. The tone is serious and sympathetic,” and this division is completely dissocia ed “from the earlier ones.” One asks oneself, then, if this “methodical” remedy is truly different from the other one, the nouthetic, especially since it is to a young boy that a final threat and exhortation are addressed: “For all these reasons, Theaete us ... .” This abrupt shift in register calls to mind how in the Gorgias Socrates decides to reinforce his conclusions, “adamantine” as they may be, with the forcible supplement of a terrifying eschatological myth. A nouthetic supplement is perhaps necessary to prevent an antilogical remedy from leading to misology.
• If one thinks only of their purificative goal, the difference between Socrates and the sophists becomes elusive. They administer the same remedy: “it is the psychic images (phantasiai) and opinions of the interlocutor that one must undertake to refute or eliminate.” From this point of view Socrates and the sophists fulfill the same function and are allied in the same fight. They act like physicians of the soul, they diagnose the instability of opinion and employ the same remedy. In doing this they run the same risk: to create disciples that resemble those “young dogs” and “by dint of refuting and having been refuted” no longer elieve in anything. Antilogy is contagious, the antilogist engenders other antilogists, but “taking pleasure in constantly bringing forth contradictions in discussions is not veritable refutation,” the Stranger will say, when he returns to the question o elegkhos after what is known as the ontological section of the Sophist. So there will be an “ignoble” sophistic – eristic – that practices a merely verbal refutation, tugging the argument now this way and now that, and creating an image of logos as being unable to avoid contradictions. The sophist can then be granted an expertise in the science of victorious argumentation. For to employ the principle of non-contradiction so as to produce contradiction is also a technique that belongs to “veritable refutation”: the difference is not based on the means used but the significance accorded to its result. Thanks to an art of refutation it becomes evident that anything, including truth and including being, cannot be upheld simply because it excludes its contra y since setting two terms into contradiction is enough make them equal in worth. Sophistic is precisely an art of equalizing forces, or making weak what is strong and strong what is weak. Zeno learned it from Parmenides and it is in their sovereign art o contradiction and in their paradoxes that sophistic finds its “noble lineage.” Insofar as it forces the soul to be ashamed of its impurity and leads it “to think that it knows only what it knows and no more,” it is “the most important and fundamental pu ification.”
• What name is to be given to those who use this method? For myself, says the Stranger, I am afraid to say that these are sophis s, since that would give them too much honor and accords sophia to them, implicit in that name. To which Theaetetus objects, “And yet what we have just said really seems to resemble someone of that kind.” Just as a dog resembles a wolf, replies the Stranger. Instead of “playing the devil’s advocate” a Greek says “playing the advocate of a wolf;” terrified by the intervention of Thrasymachus Socrates compares him to a savage beast (thērion), which he then likens to a wolf when he says “if it he had looked at me first, rather than I at him, I would have lost my voice,” following the popular belief that if a wolf looks at you before you see him, you will be struck mute. The wolf is an animal all the more dangerous for resembling a dog so closely that he ca be mistaken for one and might attack the very animals dogs are meant to protect – young lambs in particular. After saying that resemblance is “a very slippery kind” and that it is necessary to notice where it crosses the boundaries, the Stranger decides not to decide: let us admit for the moment that Theaetetus is right and that those who practice this method resemble sophists. As to the matter of tending to the boundaries, which in fact is the object of the entire dialogue, they will return to it when hey have been drawn and can then be carefully guarded.
• In the meantime, he recapitulates his sixth definition as he has the previous ones:
• Let it therefore be of that diacritic art kathartic, and of kathartic let the part that deals with the soul be distinctly sepa ated, and of this, the didaskalic part, and of the didaskalic the paideutic, and of the paideutic let refutation deal with an empty seeming of knowledge – as the reasoning has just now showed us – be called nothing other for us than a noble sophistic of oble lineage. (231b3-8)
• The use of an active imperative followed by passive imperatives instead of present indicatives indicates the normative character of the divisions: they do not arise on their own, they have to be made and made by us, for it is incumbent upon us to recognize the value of this remedy of an ugliness that might affect “our” soul. To believe one knows is not to know oneself: would having been refuted, conversely, be an access to self-knowledge? Would such a sophistic then be medicine for the soul of the sort Socrates practices when he asserts that he can heal Charmides of his headache? Yes, but the physicians are not immune to the diseases they treat. The sixth definition thus ends with this conclusion: this sort of refutation is “nothing other for us than a noble sophistic of noble lineage.”
• This oxymoron has released a flood of ink: is one to attribute this method of purification to the sophist or to Socrates? If we put the problem this way, as an alternative – that it is either a Socratic refutation or a sophistic one – we find ourselves in the following situation: if there is a noble sophistic it can only be that of Socrates, but then even though he calls it “noble,” the Stranger makes Socrates a sophist. Not only does he decide not to decide, but he insists on the resemblance and remains silent as to the difference. Why does Plato make him act this way? Probably because the alternative is a false alternative. Bu is it false simply because one should have said “and also” instead of “either ... or”?
• Indeed, when does this hesitation about the denomination actually occur? Only when dealing with the species of purification that is aimed at unburdening the soul of its ignorance, understood as a belief that one knows, and therefore of its ignorance in the Socratic sense. One and the same evil, one and the same ugliness, calls for one and the same remedy: and the noble sophist would be employing a Socratic method unless Socrates were employing a sophistic method. This does not mean that Socrates is a sophist, but only that he operates as a sophist operates or that the sophist operates as he does. If one focusses on the task of purification the difference between them is indiscernible: both of them destabilize opinion, both do this by means of evincing contradiction, and both are acting like physicians. As the physician, with his remedies, replaces the symptoms of the disease with those of health, the sophist will know how to replace, by his discourse, an appearance that is valueless and useless with another one that is better and useful, says Protagoras. And Gorgias: “The relation of language to the disposition of the soul, is identical with the prescription of remedies to the disposition of the body.” So there exists a noble use of sophistic: antilogy, which is opposed to its “ignoble” use, eristic. This sixth definition would therefore make us understand what sophistic could have been: an awareness of the pitfalls of language, of the equivocity of its words, of its capacity to cause words to be taken for things, and of the unstable and groundless character of opinions that have not undergone refutation. Just like Socrates, the sophist knows that for most men, to “think” means to have an opinion, and he knows as Socrates does that opinions are like the statues of Daedalus. But when the sophist refutes them and derails them, he does so to replace them with others, to replace those he judges harmful or useless with useful or beneficial ones. Thus the method has only a negative function and is but a necessary preliminary. For if a noble sophist empties the soul of its opinions, it is for filling it up with his “teachings” – that is, opinions he judges to be more advantageous. Such is not the goal Socrates grants to his didactic method: after having shown the slave boy that he did not know what he imagined he knew, Socrates says to Meno, “Consider then what he will discover as a co sequence of this embarrassment by searching in common with me who would only question him without teaching him anything.” Every sophist in his own way shares the sterility of Socrates, but that of Socrates derives from the maieutic aspect that must be present in every art of teaching: to relieve a soul of its Socratic ignorance (amathia) is not aimed at enabling it to become sophos, but at opening up for it a future and awakening in it a desire to understand and to learn.
• Some interpreters, and not only the minor ones, think however that it is the Socratic method that the Stranger-Plato has just described. The kind of ignorance being combatted in both cases is indeed a belief one knows, but does freeing the soul of its fleeting and contradictory opinions free it from its belief that having an opinion is knowing? For the Socratic maieutic, to puriy the soul means to purge it of the opinion that it has about opinion, to free it from the obtuse and obstinate certitude that opinion entertains about its value, for it is this that is the cause of its refusal to set about searching and learning. Though he operates as the sophist acts, Socrates is not for all that a noble sophist, for in his role as physician of the soul he always delivers the same diagnosis as to the deep root of opinions: what drives one to defend them and to cling to them so irrationally is the absence of self-knowledge – put otherwise, the powerlessness of the soul to remember its own power. And yet, codified as it has just now been, the “method” cannot but apply to Socrates, and can only appear to be a bad repetition. However, even when it is understood as noble and antilogical, sophistic is not a path toward reminiscence, it does not entail a return of the soul to its power of thinking, of searching, of discovering and inventing, since the only desire the sophist hopes to awaken is that of following his lessons, and of paying for them as he judges they ought to be.
• In the recapitulative definition, the trivial art of the angler is defined with an avalanche of terms whose hermetic claptrap seems hardly appropriate for the modest and trivial object the definition defines. In other words, this definition takes on a parodical tone recapitulating itself. To parody is to “sing to the side,” to sing in another key, to contravene the principle of he harmony to be maintained between what one is speaking of and the language one uses to speak of it. While a parodical intention seems obvious when it comes to the definitional formula of angling, may one extend this to all the definitions of sophistic? Each of its species is defined as an art identical to the sum of the species of arts that stem from the division of a given genus – hence comes the cascade of neologisms fabricated to designate them, expressed by feminine partitive genitives (in -ikēs) or by accusative neuters (in -ikon). They are aimed at assuring a semantic univocity in terms of a lexicon that, in contrast with that of ordinary language, can brook no discussion and requires a logical memory of the sort required in mathematical demons ration. For the Stranger is not parodying technical language in general: that of the mathematical arts is totally justified since it speaks of objects that it constructs from the get-go by defining, and which must be hypothesized as principles. As to the operations that these objects authorize, this language also begins by defining them. But according to the method of division as it has been practiced so far, a definition is on the contrary only valuable if it is the final result of a go-through whose steps the recapitulation lists off, each designated by a neologism in -ic. Is one to see in their accumulation a proof that these definitions are parodic? It would then tend to make us aware of the disconnect between their technico-scientific form and the nature of the object being defined – an hypothesis that can hardly be counted fantastic since it enjoys the authority of Campbell.
• Don’t these definitional formulas owe their parodical character to nothing but the abundance of neologisms Plato has formulated for them? They respond to a need that belongs to the languages of mathematics: to purify their terms of all connotative richness as well as any empirical reference. Beside the neologisms designating the elements of which this definitional lexicon is almost exclusively composed, these formulations have the other particularity of an utter absence of syntactical articulation, for which successive enumeration is taken as a substitute. Whereas the final definition of angling links together all the arts mentioned with a particle, no particle is present in the first five definitions of the sophist; in the sixth, five particles reappear, accompanied by verbs in the imperative and sentences in everyday language, which does not happen in all the others. The first five definitions each time ridicule a new pretense of sophistic as being an art rivalling the mathematical languages in syntactical rigor and semantic precision. But while a surge of neologisms in combination with an absence of syntactical articulation makes these definitions doubly unintelligible – and leaves little doubt as to their parodical character – providing explanatory translations of them and introducing the logical articulations they lack runs counter to the goal Plato has in mind. Are we not o learn anything from this totally and deliberately artificial language? Must one get rid of it by caving in to the imperative of fluidity or by blaming it on the method of division?
• This question has been and is widely debated, but to speak of errors in connection with these definitions of sophistic seems hardly defensible. For the sophist does in fact possess all the arts that he claims to have, but he practices them in his own way. He is a hunter who practices a hunt that does not exist, a hunt for gentle animals; a merchant who sells in any possible way a merchandise that is not a merchandise; a wrestler who deploys an incomparable ability in juggling with words in order to bring it about that nothing is said. An educator of rich young men, trafficking in cultural goods of all kinds, an unrivalled virtuoso of language? The sophist both is and is not these things, for in educating he perverts, in disseminating culture he corrupts it, and as for his mastery of discourse it only serves to demonstrate the incapacity of language to say what truly is. His “definitional images” must be taken into account all the more because by forcing the sophist out of his box and demonstrating his ubiquity, they get closer and closer to their point of emergence and convergence. As to the method of division, it constrains us ot only to reflect on the difference between a way of talking that must take its definitions as principles and a language set upon finding them without ever being certain that it is definitions it must search for. It allows us to get a glimpse of the kind from which sophistic derives its fascinating power, regardless of whether the sophist is acquiring or producing.
• We must stop defining, take a pause, and recapitulate “for ourselves, under how many aspects” the sophist has appeared. A necessary pause, since up until this point it is sophistic that has been defined, the sophist only being defined by the art one attributes to him, and each definition being dependent on the point of view of the spectator-auditors. But the point of view adopted “in common” by Theaetetus and the Stranger is different, since their goal is to answer the question asked by Socrates: “Philosopher. sophist, statesman – are they three distinct kinds?” Thus it is as an “object to define” that the sophist perforce appea s to them, so as to distinguish the genus. Yet in all that comes before, the genus of the sophist was not brought into relation with the other two, unless furtively or by accident. As a consequence, Theaetetus and the Stranger are now no longer sure how many definitions of the sophist they have come up with. And they must take the time to count them up.
• Up to this point, searching for the definition of the sophist was taken on as an end in itself. But since it is the mastery of an art that defines the artisan, it is sophistic that defines the sophist, and it is sophistic that they have defined. They have discovered it to be a possible counterfeit of all the arts they have examined. Its definitions must be reformulated so as to ecome definitions of the sophist, of his different figures: goodbye therefore to neologisms required by the science he is selling, and hello to a return to ordinary language. The first and second definitions are introduced with “it was found that”: they are presented as the results of a search. The third and fourth tell “how he showed himself” which attributes to the sophist responsibility for his aspects. The verb “to be” figures discretely in the imperfect tense, in the fifth: since he confined himself to the eristic art, the sophist “was” an athlete at speaking; he only accedes to a semblance of being by devoting himself to verbal fights. But it is with the sixth “that we have recognized in him (autōi) the fact of himself being (auton einai)” able to purify the soul of its opinions: the object of this definition possesses being and identity only at the very moment it is not certain whether the activity one assigns to it really can have the sophist be its subject.
• Once this is expressed in terms comprehensible to all who speak the language, the problem posed by their plurality comes to the forefront: to give six different definitions to one object we call by one and the same name is obviously unsound. The Stranger thus decides to “take a breath,” to abandon the field where his definitions could only be parodical and take on the status of eing descriptive – which exempts them in two ways from the principle of contradiction.
• It is in fact tempting to accord to them the status of “definite descriptions.” The definitions successively stated by Plato the Stranger would be as it were devoid of denotation, and therefore of reference, only because “the sophist” is known by the descriptions we and others have made of him. His name is thus not a name that “belongs” to him since it only refers to descriptions of the ways he “appears to someone,” which are therefore entirely relative. “The sophist” would thus be a description camouflaged either as a subject or as an object to be defined, both subject and object being imposters sheltered by the ambiguities of ordinary language which an analytic method would be able to unmask. This grammatico-logical transposition of a hunt in pursuit of an elusive prey may seem to clear things up, but let us take a look at the example brought up by Russell: “Scott is the autho of Waverley.” If we say, for example, “the sophist is an athlete in speech,” then “the sophist” signifies nothing other than “athlete in speech,” so that one has according to Russell a tautology and not a definition; or “the sophist” signifies something other than an athlete in speech and the definition is invalidated as a definition. Without entering into a discussion of these assertions, what comes out of this analysis is the ability of the “sophist” to outwit analysis by demonstrating its inability to deal with a professional impersonator and with an object complex in its nature. The sophist is an athlete in speech and also a hunter of rich young men and also a retailer of intellectual merchandise, etc. Taken as subject, “sophist” is not an expressio that has no reference, it is an expression that has too much of it, since his appearing always exceeds his being. And taken as object, his multiple images, because they are images, avoid the principle of contradiction. His name, by the way, is itself an image. The sophist arrives in a mask: he presents himself as a man who knows (sophos). If it is not this name that led Russell to his theory of definitional descriptions and later to modify it and see them as symbolic expressions, it is the one name tha more than any other could have constrained him to do so. For the word “sophist” has only a symbolic existence: it is a floating signifier, deprived even of the consistency enjoyed by any imaginary personage, a signifier always waiting for a point of view that will give it sense and existence. Deprived of any manner of being or power of its own, the sophist is a being that possesses all the powers that language dispenses and suffers all the servitudes language implies. The goal of the preceding definitio s was “to acquire intelligence of all the arts in showing what is and what is not akin.” If the sophist has appeared under several aspects and has been called by several names, it is not because of an inadequacy or an imperfection of the method. To the contrary, the method has succeeded to show, more than one could have hoped, that the variegated character of the personage depends entirely on the diversity of views people have of him. “The sophist” has only a relative and relational existence: he is only appearing and seeming, without being.
• One of his appearances had seemed to the Stranger to reveal the sophist better than the others: his practice of “antilogy.” And with good cause. logos is present in all the definitions, it is the means for capturing the rich young men, the merchandise the sophist sells, wholesale or retail, whether as fabricator of them or a distributor, and it is also his means of fighting and of teaching. But it is especially heard in the art that belongs to the sixth definition, anti-logy.
• On what topics does the sophist claim to know how to raise controversy and how to teach it? Any and all:
• Besides, he who understands the art of speaking will know how to speak correctly about everything. But if anyone is to speak well he must speak about what he knows: therefore he will know everything; he knows the art of all kinds of speech, and all kinds of speech are speeches about all realities. [...] And so he can dialogue succinctly, if he has to give answers to questions, a d about everything. Thus he must know everything. (Twofold Arguments, D.-K. fr. VIII, 3–5 and 13)
• Indeed it seems to me that this antilogical art amounts to providing a special ability to stir up controversy on any subject a all (232E2–4).
• Anything? An inventory of the parts of this “anything” will set out all the realms of knowledge along a descending hierarchy, according to the diminishing dignity accorded to their objects and to an ascending hierarchy of their usefulness. It goes therefore from “speculative” and disinterested discussions on invisible divine things and visible meteorological phenomena, to political and legislative battles. These are the most remunerative, since nobody would betake himself to the school of the sophists if they did not undertake to turn out redoubtable debaters in such fields: it is from this that one obtains eminent positions within the city. Between these two extremes are placed private controversies on pairs of general notions such as the just and the unjust, or becoming and being – and, to round out the survey, the writing of manuals that enable one to get the upper hand over he specialists in any art.
• “But you, by the gods, my boy, do you think that possible? It may be that you young ones have a sharper eye on this point, and we a duller one.” By including Theaetetus in an age group, the Stranger connects the question of the possibility of such an omniscience to that of a possibility that “the young” may see more clearly on that point than “we,” of advanced age. Would Theaete us then no longer be the young mathematical genius endowed with an exceptional nature, nor the docile interlocutor, but the representative of a certain age group? Why, moreover, does the Stranger pretend to believe that the vision of young men, and that of Theaetetus in particular, is sharper than that of men of his age, whereas he knows very well, and will soon enough say so, that it is the young men who are the most fascinated by the power of sophistic antilogy? Vision, like all the sensory faculties, diminishes with the advance of age, but Theaetetus could object without great difficulty that there is another kind of vision. Moreover, would being the same age constitute a stronger and more natural bond than the one forged by shared research? If the St anger decides to suggest this before embarking on a much spinier problem, it is because he needs make sure that Theaetetus acquiesces “in full knowledge of the facts,” rather than “because the flow of the argumentation” and mere habit has “swept him along to acquiesce in it so quickly.” The Stranger wanted a young and docile partner, not a wishy-washy respondent
• The real knowledge Theaetetus possesses prevents him from believing that an expert could be expert in everything. He followed without difficulty the elaboration of each definition, but now their enumeration gives him the feeling of being at an impasse. In the case of six mathematical definitions of the circle or of even numbers, the alternative would be that one or perhaps two o them are true and the others false, or else that all are false. But these first six definitions are not all false, nor all true, nor are some of them true and others false: they are all possible and more or less similar to the truth, verisimilar. The problem posed by the plurality of definitions of the sophist is not only that some or all of them should be false nor that some or all should be true: it obliges us to ask how it is possible that one and the same personage appears and seems to be expert in all the arts when he is not. To be omniscient “is manifestly (ephanē) impossible” and still the sophists “appear” (phainontai) to possess all knowledges. Thus the Stranger can conclude that the sophist “has in the end appeared to us” to be the possessor of a semblance (doxastikē) of universal knowledge, and Theaetetus thinks that this is the most correct thing that has been said about him.
• To be able to cause a contradiction on any subject is one thing; to be able to fabricate anything is another. How to respond i case someone affirmed that he knows not how to “speak and contradict” but to produce “and make any and all things without exception, thanks to a single art”? This time the Stranger enumerates not domains of knowledge but realities, moving from the closest to the most remote. “All” means “you and I,” and all the animals, the plants, “the sea, the sky, the earth, the gods, and all the rest.” What else could there be? In repeating Socrates’s enumeration in Republic X almost word for word, it would have to e all that is in the sky, and all that is in Hades, beneath the earth:
• For it is one and the same craftsman that is able to make (poiein) not only all artifacts but also to produce all the plants hat come up out of the ground, and who fashions all living things including himself, and in addition earth and sky and gods he fashions, and all the things in heaven and all the things in Hades beneath the earth. (R. X 596c4–9)
• In this passage from Book X, the verbs are carefully calculated so that in every production is a fabrication, and the fabrication a production of appearances. The living are bereft of their life, and the works that will later be attributed to a divine production are here attributed to just anybody on condition that he has a mirror to hold up and turn around, or else that he prac ices a “graphic art.” Artisan or artist, the person being envisaged is one who is capable to “re-produce” with little effort and in no time, all fabricated objects, and to “fashion” everything that lives above, upon, and beneath the earth. The spatial distance blurs the visual perception – “when we see things at a great distance it blurs and clouds our vision, so to speak” – but to “go there and look up close” is all it takes to make the fog disappear. If childhood and youth keep the hard realities of lie at a distance, growing up and maturing will clear the fog, will constrain one to change his opinion, and will entail a reversal of values: what before was held to be negligible becomes important and what had been held difficult will seem easy. The graphic art will thus paradoxically serve as a paradigm for a discursive technique that is able to “display spoken images of all things.” Just as the painter must display his works “from a distance” to naive and ignorant children to make them think they are real things, the sophist will only fabricate an illusion on condition of addressing his “spoken images” to young men whose youth holds them at a distance from “the truth of things.” Painting is an excellent paradigm: reflections, drawings, and paintings are appearances (phainomena) that do not exist in truth (R. X, 596e1), and while they do not stop at merely displaying themselves but adopt the goal of creating an illusion, one must speak of illusory appearances, of phantasmata. The possibility of bewitching credulous young men, not through their eyes but their ears by making use of “spoken images,” proves both the existence and power of a different art, discursive and not graphic, and at the same time the existence of spoken images. When they are employed with art they can seem (dokein) true and be taken to be, and he who fabricates them can seem to be “the greatest expert of all.” This different art of sophistic enables one to exploit the power of opinion (doxa) and the sophist knows this, at least: hat for the majority of men knowing consists in reaching an opinion. Which leaves no doubt as to the species of “truth” he makes us believe in, the fleeting, changing, and absolutely relative truth of doxa – which is always the dupe of the power of images.
• When he passes from the “truth” the visual simulacra lead one to believe in, to the illusion that these simulacra of logoi (i.e., of discourses that can give reasons for what they say) can produce – controversies – the tone of the Stranger becomes more and more nouthetic, and noticeably differs from the tone Socrates had used yesterday to complete the examination he had subjected Theaetetus to. The rendering of this paternal benevolence is a bit blurry: what are the trials (pathēmata) the Stranger hopes to spare Theaetetus as much as possible? Who are those who join him in achieving this? Most disconcerting is that he becomes guilty of two dangerous slips.
• The first is that he seems to believe that becoming older will suffice for one to “enter into contact with reality.” Would the e then be a truth of facts, an obviousness in the truth in things that could oppose the deceptive discourses of the sophists? The second is that the Stranger opposes act, the only way to acquire experience of things, against words which only make noises or convey fictions. Laches the general thinks only those deserve to speak who will have proven in their acts the reality they claim for what they say: if Socrates has, according to him, the right to speak about courage, it is only because he has shown himself to be “courageous” in the sense a warrior would give to this term. To oppose “in deeds” to “in words” is tantamount to divorcing action from all reasonable deliberation, and Laches goes so far as to think that he who has dived into a well without knowing how to get back out is performing an act all the more courageous for being unreflective. Valorizing action is of course coupled with a scorn for any talk that leads to no practical consequences, but the most serious thing is that Laches and those like him abandon speech to the very talkers that have made them misologists since they think speech is “mere words” and empty chatter. But what do we change when we come upon (prospiptō) and touch (proshaptō) the things that are? Only our opinions, the way we talk to ourselves about things. Thus getting older has the sole effect of substituting opinions that are correct, moderate, and reasonable for opinions that are false, and the “realities” that clear and correct perception will enable us to grasp and which will dissipate illusions, errors, and dreams, are thus empirical realities.
• Spatial distance and temporal distance are natural causes whose consequences can be annulled naturally, by the advancement of age, but also by technical means (a calculus) if the distance is spatial, and by learning if it is temporal: learning can serve to shorten the distance and can shorten the length of time needed. Thus, when Lysis pleads his youth in order to explain to Socrates why his parents do not let him become involved in any of their business and do not allow him to do what he wants, Socrates replies “Perhaps it is not that that prevents you.” For there are some cases when his parents leave it up to him – to read or to play the lyre for example – and despite his young age the child is able to make a response: “That’s because I know those things.”
• However, to the spatial distance that naturally obstructs the vision of the eyes from being clear and distinct, and to the temporal distance that prevents childhood and youth from having a sufficient experience of hard realities, one must add the artificial and artful distance that every magician and every imitator projects and plays with. Who or what is responsible for this? Noody but the sophist. He is the imitator able to produce playfully “imitations and homonyms of things,” the former to be seen and the latter to be heard. But whether he wants to respect them or violate them, every player must know the rules of the game he is playing, and the sophist is a virtuoso player of the most technical but also most charming species of mimetic, its charm (kharis) consisting in the pleasure it procures.
• It is a different kind of experience that can enable one to resist bewitchment or to become unbewitched. It does not lie in ac ing and undergoing things, it must question and answer, prove and refute, move on and then take up the whole thing anew and not, like sensory experience, simply happen. And that is so since this it is the state called “knowledge” the soul is searching fo , and knowledge is not acquired merely through the passage of time, it is not subject to “time that marches on” inexorably, according to some unchanging rhythm. It requires learning and understanding the things that are in truth, and the time of both these is “the time of always.”
• Yesterday, Socrates thought that his maieutic was enough to orient Theaetetus correctly, but when it is as a magician that the sophist makes his appearance, as a sorcerer able to make one believe the truth of the “spoken simulacra” he pours into the ears of young men, the Stranger doubts that this antidote will be efficacious against such poison. And yet it is not the method tha must be changed: on the contrary one must continue dividing, ever more rigorously.
• “Is it not fairly clear at this point, given what we have said,” that the sophist is “a magician (goētos), an imitator (mimētēs) of things that are (tōn ontōn)?” It has therefore become impossible to grant him the omniscience he claims to have. Now that their reasoning has succeeded enveloping their game in a net from which he cannot escape, it is among the producers of marvels and extraordinary things (thaumatopoioi) that he is to be placed. Thus it is necessary to define as quickly as possible the genus of producing images, the eidōlopoiic.
• Placing the sophist within a productive art has the remarkable effects of contradicting the definition of the poietic genus and of blowing it up. Contradicting the definition, because not only does the sophist make nothing come to “be” (on), but even less does he bring anything to a “manner of being” (ousia). Yet he is here said to belong to the genus of those who produce “marvelous and stunning things (thaumatopoioi).” This term is used in the Republic to designate puppet masters who fabricate puppets and manipulate them from behind a small wall; the puppets rise above the wall, between the burning fire behind in the cave, a d project shadows on the opposite wall which the prisoners are forced by their bonds to face. Moreover, their manipulators are not content only with making them see the tricks of their trade: they speak. So the prisoners are not only fascinated by the spectacle before them (they cannot turn their heads) but if they happen speak to one another, they talk only about the shadows passing by before them, which they take to be realities. And they also believe they are hearing the shadows speak although the wo ds they hear are only echoes of the words off the wall they are facing, uttered by the manipulators of whom they are unaware. As to the words that come out of their own mouths when they speak with each other, they echo those they believe are coming from he shadows, which themselves are only uttering words they have been made to utter. This text, all too well known, is surely the most radical Plato ever wrote on the power of sophistic, a redoubtable power in that it consists in a masterful use of another power, that of graphic or sonic images, whether motionless or moving. But what is it that makes such a very forceful denunciation possible? An image.
• When the verb “produce” has the sophist for its subject it means to cause something to appear that was not appearing before and that has the power of making one believe that it exists. When he had divided the genus of production (at 219a8–b1), the Stranger had distinguished caring for living bodies, the fabrication of objects, and mimetic, this last being given no further atten ion. It was also in the Republic that this species was defined: after having banished from the “beautiful city” all imitative poetry, Socrates asks Glaucon “Could you tell me what imitation is, in general?” His question elicits the example of the three beds that will culminate in a definition of the imitative art (mimēsis). The first bed is that which a divine gardener causes to grow out of the ground, a paradigm on which the carpenter fixes his gaze so as to fabricate the second bed, the sensible bed o which the third is an image that an imitator “makes exist, anywhere and instantaneously.” His mimēsis does not therefore aim at imitating “what is (to on), but what appears (to phainomenon), as it appears” – as it appears to different eyes from different vantage points. But when the Stranger asserts that the sophist is “an imitator,” he says of him that he imitates “things that are (tōn ontōn).” This apparent contradiction is explained by bracketing the first of the three beds – the intelligible bed, the only veritable paradigm. The real bed therefore now becomes the sensible one, that of the carpenter; it is this that is imitated by the arts of the painters and poets, which are at this point in the Sophist paradigms for the art of the sophist.
• Just like the Great King, the Stranger presently declares that no kind “will be able to boast having escaped from a method equally applicable to each kind and to all of them.” So it is not the method that must be changed: to the contrary one must continue to divide, ever more rigorously, by applying to the arts of production a technique analogous to the one applied to the arts o acquisition, a technique the Stranger compares to the method of quartering decreed by the “Great King,” Darius: “When they take over an island the barbarians would capture its population in a net, as it were. Here is how the thing works: the men take each other by the hand to form a chain stretching from the north shore to the south shore of the island, then they advance beating down the inhabitants of the island.” After having described it Aspasia-Pericles concludes that “the power of the Persians is not at all unbeatable and that any number of men and all the riches one could want hold no candle to bravery,” as the Battle of Marathon proves. The reference is thus double-edged: this strategy is only effective when is practiced on a suitable terrain and against adversaries that lack courage: it fails when these two conditions are not met. While an analogous strategy succeeded to flush out the sophist each time it was applied to an art of acquisition, will it remain effective when it is applied to an art of production of the mimetic type?
• Mimetic being “an art of producing images,” it is this art that must now be divided, and if it has several species we must determine into which to enlist the sophist. That will not make Theaetetus more capable of saying what the sophist “really” is – to define, that is, his essence – but the sophist alone is responsible for this since he has no essence – or to put it in a more sophisticated way, because his essence is not to have one but exist nevertheless. This is why there is no other way of capturing him than to define the one power his many arts have in common.
• The Stranger does not think it worthwhile to expatiate here on the nature of images, but it comes out in the analysis that follows that they are triply relative: relative to the nature of their model, to the nature of him who produces them and the end he is pursuing, and to the nature of him who perceives them and of what he is looking for in them. To distinguish between the two ways of producing them what matters is their different orientations. The first species of the mimetic art is the art of producing images that conform as closely as possible to their model. This eikastic species, scrupulous to reproduce its proportions and to give it only the qualities that belong to it, differs from the phantastic species, the art of producing images with a concern only for the effect they produce on the spectator-auditor. The images that respect the model’s structure and the way it orga izes its multiplicity of parts are “likenesses” or “copies” (eikones) – such respect renders them natural, verisimilar, appropriate. The goal of the second species is only to appear harmonious and to seduce. It does not necessarily imply one is ignorant of the model but it calls for a different skill since it must take into consideration the observer-auditor and make its calculations on that basis. A “goal” of persuasion thus requires the sacrifice of the true, which consists in the “correct or exact,” o a “useful” or to a “beautiful” entirely relative to the perceiver. This sacrifice is the principle of all rhetoric, but it is the silent rhetoric of the sculptors and painters that the Stranger takes as his paradigm for explaining how a single and unique reality can give place to a plurality of images some of which “appear (phainetai), but are not likenesses (eoike).”
• The imitation that results is not any simpler, for it is “a reproduction of a model operating on a different order,” or more exactly it is “more transcription than reproduction, or even transposition.” So it is important to distinguish between the productive imitation of the sophist, which presents itself not as a production of images but of “realities” that only exist when appearing to exist, and “artistic” imitation as we may call it, as long as this latter does not claim to abolish the distinction between image and model. In the Book X of the Republic, Socrates sets apart the art of producing likenesses which procures a harmless pleasure, such as that of the painters, on the condition that they “imitate what appears as it appears” and do not pretend they should be taken for reality. It is what painting does with trompe-l’oeil or skiagraphia, which through the use of shadowing and light gives paintings a third dimension, a depth, an illusory “perspective.” As to the poets, it is up to them to demonstrate in their verses on the one hand that what they are doing is really a different game from the harmful game of the sophist, and on the other that poetry can be useful if it seeks more than to excite the emotive part of the soul (thumos). Which can be formulated as follows: “two questions usually serve as principles for knowing this type of beings called images: the first is their relation to the original, the second is the goal they are pursuing.” Such are the two questions to which the Stranger is responding by dividing the mimetic genus in two.
• For the moment, it has appeared that an unlimited antilogical ability allied with an irresistible power of enchantment is the “unreachable species” (aporon eidos) into which the sophist has taken refuge, and the impasse is equal for the prey and the hunter. Impasse, aporia, is a paralyzing experience: one who is subject to it is drawn forward by his desire to continue, but he is stuck in place by his awareness that he is unable to find the path to follow. “By Zeus, I know nothing about it, but I am really struck with dizziness in face of the impasse the discussion has come to,” Socrates says in the Lysis. This dizziness is what the prisoner suffers when he exits the Cave: “doesn’t he think that he has found himself at an impasse (aporein), and will take the things he saw before to be truer than what he is seeing now?” The Stranger-Plato partakes, in the Sophist, of the “demonic fate” of his Socrates: he truly finds himself condemned “to wandering and perpetual aporia.”
• Theaetetus would thus be wrong to continue to agree, readily and easily, for it is necessary to reorient the hunt, and to attack no longer what the sophist does, but what he says:
• The reality (ontōs), my blessed boy, is that we are involved in an extremely difficult investigation. For to appear and seem ut not to be, and to say things but not true things – all this is always fraught with impasses, of old as well as now. How is one really to succeed to claim that saying things that are false and having opinions that are false can really be the case, without being entangled in a contradiction in the very act of uttering it? That, Theaetetus, is an extremely difficult question. (26d9-237a1)
• Why would one be “entangled in a contradiction”? “Because one would dare suppose that what is not” – the false – “really is.” So what one must first succeed in doing is to convey the upheaval in the Greek language caused by the three verbs, appear (phai omai), seem (eikō) – and therefore make believable – and be (einai), an upheaval produced by them and in them brought about simply by putting the first two in relation to the third: in brief to reveal the struggle within the language itself in the course of its becoming “the language of being.”
• The sophist can appear to be what he is not and he can seem to say what is while saying what is not. So he is taking the way Parmenides had called impossible, and he draws the logical inference that if it is impossible one cannot accuse him of taking it. How indeed can we claim that the sophist says the false if saying the false is to say that which is not, and if that which is ot, is not?
• Why does Plato choose then to cite the first two lines of fr. VII of his Poem –
• For never will this saying be tamed: that non-beings are;You who search, turn your thought away from this way.
• – in preference, for instance, to the last two lines of fr. II? Because Parmenides contradicts in fr. VIII what he had affirmed in fr. II. Though the goddess had announced “the only ways one could conceive” she now declares “inconceivable” the second way, that of “is not”: so there is only one way left. It is exactly on this point that the Stranger sees the crucial access through which to escape the difficulties the “great Parmenides” plunges us into. For it is from the impossibility that what is not could be, that the prohibition to take an impossible way derives. Moreover, Parmenides here speaks a language that “is no longer completely natural,” a language (logos) that breaks with the casual use of the “noisy tongue” (glōssa) of the two-headed mortals and which, subordinated by a goddess to the demands of thought, leads toward that which is and toward truth: “Without being (tou eontos), within which thinking finds its expression, you will not find thinking” (fr.VIII, 35). “One would expect the opposite instead,” remarks Pierre Aubenque, but it is Plato who has accustomed us to expect from thought that in the strong sense i is what confronts us with what is – being in the strong sense. For Parmenides it is on the contrary the possibility of substantivizing the present participle of the verb by means of the neuter definite article (to on) and thus “neutralizing” it without excluding it of the temporal aspect (as the infinitive einai would), which distinguishes those who are able to think and those who are unable to do it. “It is the structure of Greek that was to destine the notion of being to have a philosophical career.” To stick with Plato, Socrates says in the Republic that one must call “philosophers,” and not “philodoxers,” those who aspire to grasp each thing in itself as it is, “those who know each being (hekaston to on).” As codified by Aristotle the question of being takes the form, “what is it that is (to on)?” But for Parmenides, his preference goes not to the participle but to the conjugated form, “is” (estin), which is the form best suited to speak of a permanent presence without reification. It is only a a second stage that because it is given a subject, the verb plays its usual syntactic role as copula in the Poem, a use that makes it more systematically “veritative” than any other verb: the way of being is one with the way of truth. “To be” and “the being” (einai and to on) are thus the only acceptable subjects for “is.” In this way Parmenides testifies to the dazzling presence of a being that absolutely is, which, because it shows by itself its possibility, has as its counterpart “that it is not possible not to be.” By ripping being away from its common use and marking the “act of birthing Western metaphysics,” by denying its contradictory and prohibiting that non-beings should be, he makes of this non-being – this unthinkable and unsayable non-being – the background in which absolute truth of what is stands out.
• The first aporia the Stranger criticizes follows from this. The Parmenidean ontologization of discourse as discourse about tru h entails the ontologization of non-being, implied by the very negation of its possibility. “From [Parmenides] we have this testimony, but discourse itself would prove it more strongly than anything, once it is put to the test with care.” (237b1–3). To put the discourse of Parmenides to the test is what the Stranger and Theaetetus must do if they do not want to be convinced of the creative omnipotence of words, of grammar, and of syntax, and to speak the language they lead to.
• The Stranger next tells Theaetetus this is not a matter of “playing” or entering in a mere controversy, but of something serious. That it is not a matter of that? or no longer so? While they had been able to play a bit up until now and sometimes turn the sophist’s own cleverness against himself, the difficulty now changes in nature and imposes a different sort of discourse. For o grant to Parmenides that false speaking consists in saying what is not, and is therefore impossible, boils down to providing the sophist with an impregnable refuge. For three reasons.
• If Parmenides is to be believed, “it is obvious” that what is not cannot be oriented toward (eis) or approach (epi + accusative) any being, and therefore get from it either its reference or its meaning. No one thus would “dare to pronounce” something that is deprived of both. But it is equally obvious that it is the meaning given to the term “being” (on) – the meaning that Pa menides gives it – that is indispensable for this double absence of sense and reference. Couldn’t one refer “that which is not” not to “a being” but to “something or other,” to a ti (neuter accusative of the indefinite pronominal adjective tis)? This something is by the nature of the case something that is, something being, on ti. If referred to a “something” that could be anything at all, “what is not” acquires only an indeterminate reference, but this is enough to confer upon it a sense that distinguishes “that which is not” from “nothing.” It is necessary to note here that translating the Greek ti with “something” risks making that indefinite pronoun more definite than it should be and stripping it of its lighter sense of “almost nothing,” such that in Greek when placed after a noun or a pronoun or an adjective it attenuates the noun’s signification or makes it approximate (“a sort of” or “a certain”); when it is a matter of opposing something to some other things its plural is not tines, which would make it definite (N.B., the indefinite pronoun can always be taken up by the interrogative tí = “which”?), but enioi, “some or other.” Parmenides’s absolute being would refuse being to ti, a nearly zero degree that could be placed between being and non-being:
• [The other way], “is not” (ouk esti) it is necessary not to be (mē einai).That one, I tell you is a track from which nothing can be learned.For you would hardly be able to know what is assuredly not (to mē on), since it is inaccessible, nor could you tell it.
• (fr. II, 5–8)
• These last verses of fr. II contain a simple and objective negation of the conjugated form “is not,” the subjective negation o the infinitive “not to be,” and the apodictic negation of the substantivized participle “that which is assuredly is non-being.” These negations are not carefully extracted out of an argument, but are brought together and interlocked with each other in four verses to increase their power, a fierce pre-emption that prohibits all possible ways of denying “is” grammatically – whether by the indicative, the infinitive, or the participle. What is the violence aimed at? At forcing the savagery of non-beings to be, or at forcing being to multiply itself into non-beings? The hypothesis of a statement that cannot be tamed, cannot be said, since it contains an absolute contradiction, each term implying the annihilation of the other, seems most compatible with the interpretation of Plato: that which absolutely is not is forcibly “unpronounceable, informulable, and unsayable.”
• Theaetetus now believes they have arrived at the end of the impasse, unless it is just the height of an aporia (telos aporias being ambiguous). If speaking of not-being is speaking of nothing and therefore not speaking at all, they only have to not speak about it but speak about something else. To think it will suffice not to pose the question of non-being in order to be unburdened of it will not however prevent them from going from contradiction to contradiction every time they speak of errors, imitations, and false appearances. But the principal contradiction and the source of all the others was present in all their previous statements, and it constitutes an even more insurmountable aporia. In uttering “the non-being,” “the non-beings,” they have in effect interwoven the being of number with what they claimed not to be, for they have said that “the non-being” (to mē on) in i self is (estin) unthinkable, informulable, unpronounceable. Which is certainly ridiculous, but most importantly shelters the non-being and with it the sophist from any attack. Whatever experience the Stranger might have is of no avail since according to his own confession he has always been defeated in his examination of non-being. Must we see here a reference to Socrates and his attempts to refute the sophistic thesis we find in the Euthydemus and the Cratylus? Instead of that, given that it is his father Parmenides he is preparing to kill, it is the last hypothesis of the Parmenides that he now repeats, the one Gorgias agrees with, “But if the non-being (to mē einai) is, being,” he says, “its opposite, is not. In fact if the non-being is, it follows hat being is not.” Gorgias has put being into non-being and negation into being, but for him being and non-being are empty words, words that denote nothing. “If,” says the Parmenides of Plato in his turn, “there is neither the one, nor the others, [consequently] nothing is.” “Nothing” is not equivalent to “non-being,” it embodies the possibility of repeating without limit a negation of both the terms of an exclusive disjunction. Thus it is not, like being and non-being, a name too full of or lacking a de ermination, it is the result of an operation: if any third term is excluded, and if necessarily A or not-A, as the real Parmenides affirms, then nothing. The unity of non-being would then confer a meaning upon it that would make it possible to affirm tha saying “something” is not saying nothing at all. But still, in denouncing the contradiction hasn’t the Stranger just demonstrated that the non-being is unsayable?
• He then asks the impossible from Theaetetus: to try to speak about non-being neither attributing to it any manner of being (ousia), nor the being included in any number. Theaetetus gives up, saying this is not matter of experience or of daring, and that neither interlocutor is more able to solve this problem than the other. By dismissing him and himself the Stranger initiates a decisive turn.
• Thus the sophist takes the floor, who suddenly and unexpectedly seems to be the savior the Stranger claimed to be waiting for. Claimed, for his goal is in reality to resume the hunt for the sophist. When they defined him as a “producer of appearances” they allowed him to “turn their formulas against themselves”: every sophist is literally paid to know that the image weaves together what they had thought was impossible, and that in an image that which is always gets bound up with that which is not. So we must not underestimate his ability to pose good questions when it is a matter of “saying.” For in spoken images it is not only he being of number that is bound, grammatically, to some non-being, it is that what is not passes itself off for what is. To say what is not, without at the same time saying nothing or saying the false, is the only way left to follow, assuming that it is possible. To get out of the impasse where the sophist has got them confined by denying the existence of the false in all that is related to discourse, the Stranger will dislodge him from his position as contradictor, well protected in his cage as a producer of discourses all of which are necessarily true, and move him into the role of questioner. He will do the thing Socrates never stopped doing: he will dialogue with the sophist.
• The sophist asks them “Roughly speaking what can they possibly mean by ‘image’?”
• Theaetetus is to answer, and he makes the same mistake he made yesterday in his first answer to Socrates: he gives an enumeration instead of a definition. It is no less interesting in itself than in the response it elicits. The incurable Theaetetus begins by citing two places where images appear: on the surface of water, which corresponds to the divine production of images; and in mirrors, the human means of producing images of all things. He then gives two examples of “artistic” fabrication: sculpture and painting. The sophist’s response to his examples is that of a man “who knows nothing about vision” and his question will have no bearing “on what was just said.” The sophist has no eyes, and if he has and he obstinately keeps them closed: he pretends only to have ears. It seems not only that Theaetetus has never seen a sophist, but also has never heard what they say, particula ly Gorgias: “for he who says says, but says not a color nor a thing.” Saying only says a saying, this limit cannot be gotten beyond, so one cannot at all say what is – i.e., what one perceives. Shadows and reflections in water or mirrors but also portrai s or statues are perceived as things and situated externally among the other objects of the world, and these objects have literally nothing to say. It is only if one names them “reflections” or “shadows” or “portraits” that they acquire the existence of images. For the sophist there are no images except for spoken images since all the other images are perceived as things. In fact for him there are neither things nor images, there are only words which due to their power will make things exist that each will understand in his own way, things whose existence is entirely relative to the language one speaks, as the plurality of languages and their respective “untranslatable” terms show. It is thus language that makes “things” appear and makes them appear in as many ways as they can be spoken of. For in addition to words there is the way of associating them and it is such discourses that make the “things” about which they speak exist, in ways that are more or less convincing. Discourse is the master of the ways they appear, and the sophist is the master of discourse. Protagoras can therefore state that perception is infallible, not because it is perceived but because it is determined by the way the perceiver perceives it. The names one attributes to the percep ion (“man” or “horse,” “evil” or “good”) correspond not to what one perceives but to what each one decrees the name to be the name of, which itself depends upon the way it appears to him. Since each is the measure of what appears to him, thing and image are thus for the sophist one and the same, for while the “thing” only exists by being perceived, it is named with a name that belongs to a language both arbitrary and conventional: thus the “thing” is neither more nor less an “image” than the image.
• But must we conclude from this that there are good and bad images? As they derive their whole being from the Other, images are triply relative: to a model, since they are the images of a thing they claim to resemble, to the art and nature of him who produces it, and to that into which it projects itself – which may be the khōra when dealing with these images that are sensible things (Ti. 50c sq.), the soul, that studio where the painter’s imagination (phantasia) is at work (Phlb. 39b–c), the logos in which this painter imprints images of opinion (Tht. 206d), or again the surface of the liver on which oneiric images are projected (Ti. 71a–72b). Poets and painters produce images which are only images (R. X 598b3–5) – that is, images of images: the graphic image “is like a human dream made for the use of the awakened” (Sph. 266c7–9) and this applies also to the poets’ inspired words since it renders the way they dream the world – a happy or a tragic dream. They can do so because the images they create, filled with human opinions, emotions, feelings strike chords in the irrational, human too human part of our soul. When with great efforts “these factors taken separately are rubbed against each other, suddenly, as a light lights up when the flame leaps up, that takes up in the soul and now feeds itself on itself all by itself” (Letter VII, 341c5–d2). And if they are put to the test “by the interchange of questions and answers free from jealousy, thinking and intelligence suddenly illumine each thing” (344b3–7). Poetic and graphic images are alluring at their dawn only, as they rise, heavy with promises and able to carry the heaviest, the most corporeal upwards or to give wings to language; but when they will be no more than the remnants of a forgotten strength, new images will appear that are strong enough to destroy them. For, just as the presence of the god now lights on his statue, the presence of thinking in some images makes them atemporally present: the only “good” image, the only one whose resemblance is not deceptive, is therefore to Plato an agalma, an image animated by the grace (kharis), the divine life of thinki g. This is the way Alcibiades explains in the Symposium the effect caused by Socrates’s words, and it is this effect Plato strove his whole life long to produce, as he never could conceive differently what an apology of Socrates should be. If one conside s “discursive images (eidōla)” in general, or “the appearances (phantasmata) inscribed in discourses,” these images would be true if they were the transposition of a true discourse. As only opinion can be true or false, “true” means “correct,” “verifiale,” since the only discourse (logos) that Plato considers true and never false is that which proceeds through questions and answers and bears on realities reachable by intelligent thinking alone. According to Socrates any judgment of the value of an imitative image “in painting as well as in music and in any art whatsoever” must use as its criteria, first: knowledge of the model; second: correctness or conformity with the model; and finally, usefulness. Esthetic imitation must not only aim at giving pleasure and producing charm (kharis), which would lead it to sacrifice correctness and no longer to resemble anything. When is a recourse to images (about which the Socrates of Plato is far from shy) called for? Most often when it is a matter of destroyi g other images, for example of gods all too human, or the silly happiness depicted in a Golden Age, or the soul-as-harmony, or again a democratic city that will always prefer the cook to the physician. But can one infer that since they destroy bad images the ones that do so must be taken to be good images – that is to say, “likenesses” of their models? Plato’s position on this never varies one bit: no image is true, but there is a good use of images, a use that some images allow and others do not. Drawn geometrical figures are inaccurate, and so are all phonetic images, but they allow for their rectification by the art of the geometer or of the dialectician; hymns to the gods and praises of noble men are also full of falsity, but they can be used by a good statesman who knows that all education must include use of music and myth. Still, this good use is only possible for certain images, images produced in a certain way. The graphic image is “like a human dream for the use of those who are awake,” and so also is the inspired language of poets: it expresses their way of dreaming the world and all that is in it, and it is this vision in a dream, a dream happy or tragic, that they impose upon us. If they are able to do so, it is because the images they fashion, full of opinions, emotions, and feelings, find their echoes in the irrational, obstinate, and human all too human part of our soul, and not in the divine part. The phantasmata, appearances and apparitions, find expression in the language belonging to a civilization, to a species of tekhnē, and to the vision of an artist, all at the same time. The vision used by poets, painters, and sculptors congeals into a world, and their images, which are the elements in this language, have meaning only within and hrough this language: it is a world of this sort, a Homeric world, that Books II and III of the Republic systematically set out to destroy. Conversely the Platonic metaphors, analogies, or allegories are not, like the images of the poets, products of an “enthusiasm,” but result from the discovery of a point of view that is able to bring to light a clarifying resemblance, the effect of which is most often (but not always) reductive. The most obvious example is the image of the Cave, but this is also what happens when Plato takes his reader to Hades so that he can judge the souls and lives of men. Image possesses a power of illusion that it draws from a way of seeing whose value is determined by the power of the convictions and the affects of the one who produces it. That is why “the poets lie too much,” and above all why their lies have the power to incorporate themselves into things and to fashion them and to claim themselves to be them – in short to engender a world that is able to impose its insubstan ial reality. The phantastical art can therefore succeed in dissimulating alterity and producing illusory effects of resemblance: its falseness is two-fold.
• If appearance is going make itself pass for what it only falsely resembles, it must make itself pass for “being.” How then can the Stranger hesitate to place the sophist into either species of mimetic? Probably because in addition to his power to bewitch (ensorceler) the sophist possesses also the power to contradict, and contradicting can perfectly well be an effective way to unbewitch (désensorceler) – but this in turn is also a way of bewitching, as Alcibiades was able to perceive in the case of Socrates. Probably also because the word “mimetic” has not yet lost its ambiguity: does the term denote a real technique of producing illusory appearances, or a counterfeit art that is actually unable to produce anything but simulacra? Does the sophist possess the power of a falsifier, counterfeiting in action or in words the products of any and every other art? Or that of the magician, able to persuade that the mirages it causes to glitter are real? The Stranger says he cannot yet answer these questions. Why doesn’t he explain himself further? And why does Theaetetus not ask him to do so? Because one must wait until he has reached he end of the course and has posed and settled the question of falsehood, and therefore of non-being.
• Since Theaetetus has called all the examples he listed by the same name, “images,” the sophist has refuted him by showing that names themselves make images, and thus that images only exist in being spoken and that in being spoken they produce the things one is speaking of, since it is not possible to communicate what one only perceives. To refute this refutation, Theaetetus must specify what he means by this word. He defines the image as that which is “such and such” (toiouton), that which is such and such as resemblant (eoikos), that which is resemblant as what is not veritable, that which is veritable as what really is (ontōs on), and that which is not veritable as the contrary of the true (enantion alēthous). He would then have to conclude that what appears on the surface of water, in mirrors, or within the soul, is not, since it is not veritable. But the young man recoils in the face of this obvious contradiction:
• “So are you saying that that which resembles is not, since you say that it is not veritable? And yet it does exist. – THT: How? – Not truly, given what you are arguing? – STR.: No, and yet it really is a likeness. And so the thing we say really is a likeness, really is not. – THT: Hmmm! Maybe there is a sort of intertwining that weaves non-being with being: how very disorienting” (240b7-c2)
• The sophist has therefore forced them – somehow despite himself and despite themselves – to grant that what is not is in a cer ain way: to intertwine being and non being.
• Thanks to his awareness of the power of language, Gorgias drew from the discourse of the great Parmenides another implication, which enables the sophist to avail himself of a second counter-hold, a more successful one than the first. For the sophist is right to attribute to discourse the power to make things appear that are not but seem to be and seem to be true, since they conform with the opinion conveyed by the language of those who are listening. In principle, to say is always to say something, and thus to say what is; and to say what is is to say truth. This concatenation of equations provides every sophist his refuge: it e ables him to declare that it is impossible to say what is not, and this is what now must be attacked.
• Yesterday, Socrates had presented this definition: to say is “to make one’s thought evident through the medium of the voice, with discourses and names, by imaging one’s opinion in the words issuing from one’s mouth, as if on water or as in a mirror.” Since discourse is an “imaging of opinion” this image is structured like a discourse, and once again the sophist is not wrong. But he is not right to deduce that there is no false discourse, which comes down to defining the false in an Eleatic way as the contrary of what is. Since it is only under this condition that he can take refuge in non-being, it becomes necessary to commit a parricide in order to smoke him out and define anew the art of “the hundred-headed sophist” as an ability to urge the soul to conceive false opinions.
• What is a false opinion, and is it the contrary of a true opinion? At the end of Book V of the Republic, at its dialectical tu n, Socrates posits a third kind of beings, powers. Knowledge and opinion are two powers, and to define a power consists in specifying what it does and delimiting the field in which it operates. If one is to speak correctly one must call knowledge (gnōmē) the thinking of him who knows insofar as he knows, and opinion (doxa) that of him who opines insofar as he opines. The term g ōmē denotes also a “vivacity of thought” whence it connotes the involvement of the knowing subject in what he knows and of the subject of the statement in the statement that has been made: the distinction between knowledge and opinion is to be understood both from the side of the object and that of the subject. “Knowledge by its nature applies to what is, in order to know how what is, is.” This is not a definition since what is to be defined is included in it, but it suffices to establish that science by definition cannot be wrong, though opinion can be. “Thus each of them applies to a different thing and is capable of a different thing.” Since the task, product, result (ergon) of the two powers differs, their effects differ and their objects must also e different: “The knowable and the opinable: are they to be the same thing or is that impossible? – It is impossible.” Consequently “the object of opinion is something other than what is.” But opinion cannot apply to what is not, for then it would be a non-knowledge and it would be identified with ignorance (agnoia); since it is a power, it cannot be identified with that which has no power. It is impossible to have an opinion that opines nothing and is about nothing; but neither can opinion apply to tha which is, since that which is is the domain of knowledge. Given that what fully is is fully knowable, and that what in no way is is absolutely unknowable, there remains only one possibility:
• SOCRATES: If there is something (ti) that is capable of being and not being, it would occupy the middle (metaxu) between the purely existent and the absolutely non-existent. – GLAUCON: The middle. – SOCRATES: Thus if it is to what is that the act of knowing applies, and ignorance necessarily to what is not, one must seek this middle thing in between knowledge and ignorance, supposing there is such a thing. (R. V 477a6–b1)
• This “middle between knowledge and ignorance” can only exist if something “participates in each of the two, in what is and in what is not” and “if that should show up we would legitimately call it ‘opined,’ keeping the extremes related to the extremes and the middle to what is in the middle.” So this is what being in the middle means: to participate in being and in non-being. What are we to say about all these things that are, without truly being? Or rather, what do they say to us?
• They have an ambiguous language. All the things opinions are about present a different manner of being than that of the beings that are always what they are; being different from them they are not, but their way of not being differs from that of what absolutely is not. What meaning are we to give to “being” here, and to “not being”? These terms also say two things at the same time. In an “existential” sense they say that the objects of opinion exist without existing, and do not exist even though existing. The opinable therefore holds a middle place between the fully existent and the absolutely non-existent. But when the notion o participation intervenes, two infinitives come in along with it: einai and mē einai, and the existential sense is complemented by another: the middle is situated between a thing’s own “way of being (ousia)” and a “not being” any determinable thing. This double participation means that the objects of opinion are never firmly and univocally determinable and that consequently they can always contradict the knowledge one claims to have of them, and therefore can deny the definition one claims to be giving hem. As a power to capture what “rolls around” and “wanders in an intermediate place,” opinion is neither both knowledge and non-knowledge, nor is it any more the one or the other: it really is a way of knowing that does not really know. Since its object is in the middle between “the purely existent and the absolutely non-existent,” opinion is the intermediary power being sought in the middle. Those who have opinions “know none (or nothing: ouden) of the things about which they opine.” Anyway, they wouldn’t be able to even if they wanted to, since opinion applies to that of which there is no possible knowledge. In its double character opinion asserts a truth that is never truly true since it can cease to be so, nor absolutely false since an event in the world will or always may arise to transform its falsity into truth. In the case of opinion truth and falsity are extrinsic determinations: they signify an adequation, and a lack of adequation, to that which becomes and happens. But since they are entirely subject to the variations of becoming, and since they depend upon the power of persuasion to make them happen, adequation and inadequation are provisional and relative. It is from his ability to juggle with this that the sophist gets his magic. Not content to deceive, to make people take his words for things and his word-plays for arguments, the sophist incites our souls to deceive themselves, to make errors, to believe things contrary to those that are, to prefer what seems to be over what is.
• False opinion believes that things that absolutely are not in some way are, and thinks that those that fully are, absolutely a e not. “Do we understand, Theaetetus, what the sophist is saying?” In fact it’s better to understand the efficaciousness of his counter-holds (antilēpseis) and the validity of the impasses in which he traps his adversaries if one hopes to be able to cap ure him. The crux of the argumentation of Euthydemus is that “speaking is acting and producing”: thus, nobody can enunciate what is not, for then he would be producing something, and since nobody can make something be that is not, nobody can speak the false. Socrates yesterday arrived at the same conclusion: “Therefore it is not possible to opine what is not, neither about things that are, nor itself according to itself.” But when it is being conceived of from the point of view of the subject, false opinion is an error, it is explainable as a mistake, as the act of taking one thing to be another. The alterity is enough. The question of the non-existent is only brought up if one is considering opinion from the point of view of the object, but it is from this point of view that the sophist is considering it: for him the problem is not psychic, but ontological. This is why it is necessary to understand what he has to say to us. Plato-Stranger understands that as long as they have not refuted the paternal discourse and agreed to affirm that “what is not is, in a certain way, and what is in a certain way is not,” it will be difficult to “speak about false discourse and false opinions, or about images, semblances, imitations, or even illusory appearances.” “Therefore now is the time has come for us to deliberate about what must be done with the sophist,” for to attribute to him the art of producing false semblances will only enable him to set up counterattack against counterattack as long as he can be protected behind the majestic and profound utterances of Parmenides.
• About what kind of being and non-being has the Stranger just asserted that their conjunction is “the most impossible thing of all”? The adverb “in no way” (mēdamōs) leaves no doubt: it has to do with being and non-being as conceived by Parmenides. It is by virtue of the Eleatic hypothesis that the Stranger passes without warning from “the other (heteron) similar thing” Theaete us speaks of – that is, from a thing similar to the veritable thing but different from it – to equations that identify “the non-veritable with the contrary of the true” – that is, with the false –– and “the things that are not” with “things contrary to those that are.” In this, Plato the Stranger agrees not only with his father Parmenides, but with the one he wants to smoke out, the sophist – who cleverly plays a double game, for though he derives the force of his discourse from a speech Parmenides made divine, it is to the inferences derived from it by Gorgias that he owes his conception of a logos that can say everything about being and non-being, but cannot say what is. The sophist speaks well, he puts questions well, so that there remains only one possible way to answer: to pass from a perspective that is exclusively onto-logical to a semantic approach. To inscribe logos into being will lead to him who alone is able to define non-being without taking up the way forbidden by Parmenides: to the philosopher, to Plato.
• Before continuing the Stranger addresses a first request to Theaetetus: to be content “if by some means or other we might free ourselves only a little from a speech endowed with such force;” and then a second one, even more pressing: not to consider him a sort of parricide. Finally a third, which is only a small thing (smikron ti): since the second one presupposes that he thinks himself capable of refuting a speech as irrefutable as that of his father Parmenides, he asks Theaetetus not to think he has gone mad. The interpretation of all that follows depends upon the meaning one accords to this way of announcing the enterprise – as if it were to put to torture a strong, paternal, and sacred speech – and upon the importance one attaches or does not attach to this way of introducing it. These three requests in fact open the “ontological” section of the Sophist: is this to be understood as the “nut” and the “kernel” of the dialogue, of which the shell – all that precedes it – would be a superficial part to be cracked open and removed, in order to savor the essential thing that lies within? It is true that in the Politicus the Stranger assimilates the “macrology” of his discourse on non-being’s manner of being to that of his myth on the rotation of the universe, and calls them both digressions (parerga). But in Plato digressions are not useless strolls but absolutely necessary detours. In this case it is this digression that will make the capture of the sophist possible, a capture that is the veritable core of the entire dialogue.
• Theaetetus reassures him on these points: the Stranger can be certain that he will not judge him guilty of speaking out of tune; but as to that one can hardly think of anything exceeding parricide. To “please” Theaetetus the Stranger then points out to him “the most necessary way (hodos) which we must take” – a version, though less poetic, of the words addressed by Parmenides’s Goddess of Justice to the young man who has entered her precinct. And continuing his secularized paraphrase, he declares that one must first submit to examination all the points that now seem to them clear (ta dokounta): they must therefore first examine “the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true conviction.”
• It turns out that these opinions will include those of Parmenides despite the persuasive splendor of his speech. For all those who before had set about deciding “how many beings there are and of what sorts” seem to the Stranger to have taken up the question with great insouciance. With this his inquiry is placed within the regime of opinion, both as to the doctrines criticized a d his criticism of them.
• “It is a story each of them seems to be telling us, as if we were children.” If there is nothing serious to be expected from these fairy tales, why bring them up? The doxography the Stranger outlines might provide scholars with a few geographic and chronological details that are not negligible, but should one go so far as to see in this “a veritable history of ancient philosophy – even the first known history of philosophy at all”? Besides the fact that one would then have to explain away the priority of a passage in the Theaetetus, would it not be appropriate first to wonder whether what Plato calls philosophia could at all be he object of a history? In all the dialogues, as in the Seventh Letter, philosophia is thought of by Plato in terms of a desire and an occupation and never as a discipline to be defined by its objects and its methods. This would come down to making the philosopher a laborer – an expert certainly, but “always progressing in the same direction.” If this is not how Plato conceives of him, and certainly not of himself, because this is not how he conceives of philosophy. Besides would it be of philosophy that the Stranger would be recounting the beginnings of metaphysics – as Heidegger thinks? Whether philosophy or metaphysics, its history should develop in a more or less coherent and continuous and progressive way, whereas what we are going to witness is a series of random jumps said to be muthoi, “stories,” and disqualified as such. The Stranger will tell us a story about the stories about being, and to tell a story is not to do history.
• An introductory paragraph sets the tone. The visitor from Elea obviously takes pleasure dumping on us doctrines pell-mell, whose authors he does not name, with one exception, according to a chronology as capricious as the Muses who inspire it.
• It hardly matters who is talking, and it hardly matters whether he is speaking of three, two, or one single being: the “beings” of which each of these venerable Ancients is speaking are either generative forces (Zeus, Ge and Cronos) or pairs of contrary qualities (wet and dry, hot and cold), one or the other arbitrarily endowed with priority. By “totalizing” them in “one single being,” the Eleatic tribe accomplishes what despite everything is a step forward (which is why Xenophanes’s name is mentioned). It continues with the Muses of Ionia and of Sicily judging it is “safer” to interweave plurality and unity and to affirm tha “being can equally be many as one,” and this is just limping along. The Ionian muses are the more severe: they maintain that any accord between two contraries is at the same a perpetual discord (they are, we may say, “heracliteans”). The Sicilian are gentler, for they prefer to imagine a cyclical alternation, according to which Philia – Love, Attraction – maintains the unity of the all, and then Neikos – Hatred – disperses it into a warring multiplicity (and these are manifestly Empedocleans). These Muses sing in modes that are really quite different: no sort of accord can reign among them. Their recourse to biological metaphors (marriages, child-births, nourishment) and psychic metaphors (hate and love) in describing the relations among cosmic and meteorological forces succeeds at making them ridiculous.
• What was supposed to introduce a series of critical examinations focuses on almost none of these illustrious ancients nor expounding any of their doctrines. Thus it is better to refrain from wondering “which are speaking truth and which falsity.” In contrast with Isocrates he does not advise young men to devote any time to that, nor like him does he classify their theories according to the number of beings they propose: “one of them claimed that beings were infinite in number, whereas Empedocles saw but four with discord and love operating between them; Ion no more than three, Alcmaeon only two, Parmenides and Melissus one, and Gorgias absolutely none.” What Plato hopes to show by proceeding in this way is exactly that their “stories” cannot constitute a history, because each of these distinguished meteorologists pursued a solitary speculation, without bothering to explain himself or to be understood. Moreover as they proved themselves equally unable to ask the only question to be asked, that of the meaning of this word “is,” they have only offered us “myths” or legends about what is. Counting how many is not enough to be intelligible, and on this point Plato is in agreement with Isocrates: the questions they asked about beings – “how many” and “which” – could only engender fantastic cosmogonies or else “ontologies” as dogmatic as they are arbitrary.
• The reminder of these doctrines comes just after the Stranger has declared that “Now is the time to deliberate about what we must do with the sophist.” For this is exactly what the sophists understood, and that is why we must understand what they are saying to us. Particularly, Gorgias:
• That Persuasion, when it permeates speech, can also make any impression it wishes on the soul, you can learn, first, from the discourses of the meteorologists, who by removing one opinion and implanting another, cause what is incredible and invisible to appear in the eyes of opinion. (Gorgias, Praise of Helen, §13)
• The disillusionment of Socrates when he heard “the discourses of the meteorologists” led him to formulate that special questio of his: “What is it, really?” Theaetetus and the Stranger must likewise justify their decision (krisis) to break off from these “incredible and invisible” opinions – in other words, what they must say about being is a logos, not a mythos, which in fact requires them to commit a parricide.
• Can Socrates, who is listening in silence, have forgotten what he said yesterday to Theodorus? Plato doesn’t. The battle between the partisans of a universal mobilism and those who maintain that the all is one and at rest, had led his Socrates to wonder if instead of taking sides they oughtn’t hold that neither the ones nor the others are telling the truth. But he adds right away that “it is we who would be ridiculous if we were to believe, worthless as we are, that we are saying something of consequence after denying dokimasia to personages so very august and wise in everything (passophoi).” False humility or true respect? Whe it is a matter of irony Socrates is second to none. Is he being ironic when he says to Phaedrus, “as to the truth, it is the ancients that know that: if it were something we could find out on our own, would we still care about human beliefs?” These beliefs do not deserve to be believed, and even less to be taken for knowledges but, as “symbols of a lost wisdom” they deserve to be interpreted.
• As for those who raise their voices to affirm that all things (ta panta) are two things, the hot and the cold, what do they mean by this term “to be” (einai)? If it is applied to both it works as a third term added to the two others, and so there are three, not two. But if it is applied to the one and to the other of the two, one would have two beings – that is, two ways of afirming being and consequently one too many, for if one affirms of this couple that it is “what is,” one will be saying that the two are one.
• How are we to extract from these venerable myths their intelligence of reality, or of an aspect of reality? “I mean the path our search must follow and about the way it should take place: by questioning them as if they were standing here with us.” This is what Plato most often does with most of his interlocutors – he calls them up from the realm of the dead – and just yesterday Socrates defended his method by questions and answers and set down its rules. But when he is about to criticize Protagoras, Socrates asks Theodorus please to stand in for Theaetetus since some people might question whether his criticism is serious. Since “Protagoras is not himself present (autos parōn),” he says to Theodorus, “it devolves upon you and me to exchange questions and answers in order to examine his reasoning (logos),” and “it is from his own discussion that we will have to draw what we need to reach agreement quickly.” Protagoras wrote up this discussion in his On Truth, and when the Stranger comes to the one being Parmenides talks about, he cites some lines from his Poem. Whether he questions the authors of these writings by supposing them fictionally present, or submits their writings to a discussion between two interlocutors equally fictive, the relation remains fundamentally the same: it is not historical but dialogical. To dare to submit the ancient doctrines on being to a dialectical examination that like all examinations of this nature is carried out in an atemporal present in actu, will have the foreseeable consequence of revealing the opaqueness of these majestic and inspired affirmations, an opaqueness that makes for calling them muthoi, stories, legends. The opaqueness comes from the fact that none of them has asked “what on earth could they mean by the term ‘being’.”
• The same question must be put to those who affirm that the all (to pan) is only one (hen monon einai): do these two names, “one” and “being” refer to one and the same thing? They need not all be treated in the same way, for this time it is no longer the sense that is a problem, but the reference: the relation between the name and the thing. And it is not the most ancient belies that are involved, but the paternal logos, the logos of Parmenides: It is thus not on a battlefield opposing partisans of the multiplicity of beings against the affirmation of the one-being that Plato comes to confront Parmenides, because on that battlefield myth follows myth without our being able to tell which are true and which are false. When he states the thesis of those who claim that all things are one, the Stranger does not utter the name of Parmenides, and their “stories” (muthoi) are attribu ed to the Eleatic tribe descended from Xenophanes “and even earlier.” Even if in the Theaetetus are mentioned “the Melissuses and Parmenideses,” in both the Theaetetus and the Sophist the “great Parmenides” deserves an examination of his own, different f om that imposed on those who claim that “the all is one and at rest.” When the unity of being is affirmed quantitatively, Parmenides is included in the group, his very name is put into the plural and his speech is just as much a mythos as that of his adversaries. “Whenever one of them prophesies and utters that it is, has become, or is becoming multiple, two, or one...,” in all three cases it is a matter of “pluralistic doctrines,” for the difference between the pluralists and the monists is not a matter of number: the “pluralists,” too, also affirm a “one,” but it is the manner of conceiving it that distinguishes them. For the “pluralists” it is a unifying unity, but for the monists it is a “complete” (holon) unicity, and therefore a total (pan) and fundamental unity. But in the first stage of the examination Parmenides is not only not supposed to be “present in person,” he is said to number among “those who say the all is one.” Starting from 244e, he is targeted directly but without being put into the position of interlocutor: he is questioned through a writing, a citation of verses 43–45 of fr. VIII of the Poem. The approach the Stranger now adopts is not clear-cut: does he take this citation as the starting point for his refutation – in which case he whole thing would be about Parmenides – or merely as an example of “monistic” doctrines?
• If the “method” is less obvious than it appears, the purpose at least is clearly stated: the Stranger will ask questions in order to refute. Are we to deduce from this that he is not really trying to understand what he is refuting? The preceding doctrines were dismissed firmly but “without insolence,” as being nothing more than tall tales, and the Stranger seems to interpret their inability to answer as an inability to ask such questions. But Parmenides is approached in a very different manner: one must “defend oneself” against him, and one can only do so by attacking him. This is Plato’s way of telling us that between his own thought and the thought of Parmenides the relation could not simply be a critique. “True, I would be ashamed,” Socrates said, yesterday, “to inflict a brutal examination on Melissus and those who say the All is one and motionless, but less ashamed than to reat this unique being Parmenides that way. It is because Parmenides seems to me, if I may quote Homer, to be ‘as venerable as he is redoubtable’.” The logos of Parmenides has something impregnable and inviolable about it. There may then be reason for fearing that Plato, being too aware of the force of this thought whose “profundity seems to him absolutely stunning,” distorts it in order to triumph over it? In that case the refutation will be deficient and nothing will truly be gained regarding Parmenides.
• As he himself admits, the Stranger is questioning in order to refute, but to refute what? On this question the commentators as a group show no hesitation at all: it is a matter of refuting “the true and original principle of Parmenidean thought” – that “being is and non-being is not.” And yet when he defined his goal the Stranger had said this:
• It will be necessary, in order to defend ourselves, to put to torture (basanizein) the logos of our father Parmenides and use violence (biazesthai) to establish that non-being in some way is, and in turn that being in some way is not. (241d5–7)
• “It will be necessary” governs not one but two steps: putting a logos to torture, and applying violence to bear on being and not-being. To bring the two steps together into one, one must translate logos as “thesis” in the three requests of the Stranger. But a thesis, as such, must be recalled, developed, and reformulated intact in order to be analyzed, ameliorated, or criticized: the translation “thesis” or “theory” prejudges that the logos of Parmenides will be examined for its content not for the way it is expressed. “To put the paternal logos to torture” would thus mean “to refute his opinion, his doctrine” after having reduced it to this brief formula: “being is and non-being is not.” But that is not only absent from the Poem: Plato never attributes it to Parmenides in that form. Let us admit that he presupposes it: one cannot without absurdity believe that the violence Plato inflicts on being and non-being will leave intact the Parmenidean meaning. If the refutation had for its only object to inflict an ontological coup, it would have to begin by undertaking a redefinition but this is not undertaken until the problem of the three great kinds is raised, and thus long after the “parricide.” Besides, at the end of the passage devoted to Parmenides and the outcome of the complete review of the doctrines about being, it is said that the difficulty about being and non-being has not decreased and that they have only “run through some aporias” (250d–e). But since being and non-being participate equally in these aporias, it is at least possible to hope that if one term comes to be more clear the other will follow suit:
• But if we are able to see neither of them, let us at least be able to guide our reasoning along the path, whatever it may be, hat will be most appropriate for both of them at the same time. (251a1–3)
• It could not be stated more clearly that the “thesis” of Parmenides on being was not “refuted,” that no argument has demonstra ed that what is is not (even in some respect) and that what is not is (even in some way). For at this point in the dialogue neither the Stranger nor Theaetetus know anything about being, except that it seems just as difficult to grasp and just as obscu e as non-being. That it remains obscure implies nothing about being, in respect to whether it is or is not, but only proves that the opposition between what cannot be thought and what can be thought does not have the incontrovertible obviousness Parmenides lent it.
• An ontological coup is neither the sole nor the primary object of the parricide. It is necessary, for it is only at this price that the possibility of a deceptive discourse, of false opinion, and of image and illusory appearance can be established, but the preliminary condition for this is bringing the Parmenidean logos to the torture. If one pays some attention to the way the refutation is introduced, is concluded, and is prolonged, it seems arguable to read it as a stand-alone criticism independent of the context and as opposing true thesis against false thesis, and ontology against ontology. It would therefore be best to read it in a different way.
• “Other” (heteron) occurs for the first time during this attempt at refutation, in connection with the possible otherness of thing and name. For the Stranger the entire question – the very question Parmenides did not pose – is right there: if speech is not different from the being it speaks of, how can the being be different from the utterance? And what status are we to accord to such an utterance? Is it on the way “toward the very thinning down of being” (a being that threatens the “counter-possibility of nothing”), an “essential speech,” the “guardian” of the unheard, which protects the silence “in the gift of the Poem”? Or, as merely a demonstration which applies “the principle of the excluded middle rigorously,” does it conclude “that what is can have no other character than being”? The way Plato will manage his refutation will not allow us to decide between these two ways of reading. And the reason is that according to Plato Parmenides handled the logos in such a way that for him all this can in truth only be one. So it is the “tutelary and founding hero” (archēgos) that one must examine first. Parmenides or being? Both.
• If the object of the refutation is not first of all ontological, and if it can be carried out whatever what is is, this is because it deals – as Plato never ceases saying – with the logos of Parmenides. What then does logos mean? That in order to think what is, in truth, it should be necessary not to consider the testimony of the senses but reason (logos) as the only criterion, is not unique to Parmenides. But what makes the Parmenidean speech a logos, an entirely rational discourse, is that when saying what is, it denies this “what is” to have any sort of coming to be and passing away. It is in this sense that the logos of Parmenides counts as a logos for the Stranger: it truly constitutes the first discourse on being, the first onto-logia. And yet, the “way” that is imposed upon us with “the greatest necessity” is not the one he has taken and has prescribed as being the only way. Why? Because Parmenides proceeded on his way “without any difficulty” (eukolōs). This adverb describes for example how Socrates drank the hemlock – without difficulty, even nonchalantly:
• It was easily, calmly (eukolōs), it seems, that Parmenides made his argument for us – himself, and anyone who has set about making a decision concerning beings as to their number and nature. (242c4–6)
• Just like the ancient meteorologists, Parmenides has told us a “story” about being. In successively qualifying Parmenides’s Poem as logos and as muthos, the Stranger is doing no more than repeating the very words of the Poem. But although the goddess herself refers to her speech indifferently as muthos and logos, Plato for his part treats these as different. How then to explain hat he uses the one term as well as the other about the cosmogonies he judges mere fantasy as well as about the speech of Parmenides? In fact, the passage brings in a two-fold play of oppositions:
• – Between the physical principles of the cosmologies of the ancient physicists which are muthoi, and the logical criterion employed in the ontology of Parmenides, which is a logos.
• – Between the cosmogony of the Timaeus, which is the image of an intelligible model and is qualified as eikōs muthos and his dialectical ontology which is a logos, and between cosmogonies that are neither true nor false but are muthoi, and the verisimilar cosmogony of the Timaeus, which is an eikōs logos.
• – And between the “easy ontology: of Parmenides, which as such deserves to be placed among the muthoi, and the difficult ontology of Plato, which because a product of the science of dialectic is a logos.
• Though the discourses set at the extremes (the cosmogonies of the ancient physicists and the difficult ontology of Plato) do ot exchange their qualifications, the discourses in the middle position (the cosmology of the Timaeus and the ontology of Parmenides) can be called both logos or mythos. Parmenides is the “Father” in the exact measure that for the sake of talking about eing he has broken with a type of thinking whose principles are physical and whose mode of explanation is genealogical. The ancient thinkers on nature told stories – “that is, they moved naively in the dimension of beings and did not at all enter into the dimension of the Being of beings,” writes Heidegger. To the dissociations and associations (diakriseis kai sugkriseis) of these ancient thinkers, the inaugural decision (krisis) of Parmenides stands in contrast the moment he affirms not that “all things are one,” but that “there is only one.”
• The myths of the ancient cosmogonies did not warrant much more than a casual “adios” but they did lead the Stranger to discove that being is a concept as vague and as obscure as non-being. Yet he believed he understood it, and when one said to him that being is, he did not understand it as a tautology but as something obvious. But isn’t it more obvious that when this word, being, is pronounced, language is projected outside itself in a movement of auto-transcendence, which at the same time is a discovery of language’s limit, since an extra-discursive being is indicated, a being being? This pre-comprehension is necessary for admitting that those who tell stories did not mean anything at all: it would be necessary to interrogate them, even if only to prove that being is a term that loses its deceptive clarity once one asks about it.
• The impulse that carried Parmenides “as far as his ardor could reach” has led him to assert two ways, “one that being is and that there is not non-being” thus bringing to an end the problem of the number and nature of beings, a problem the ancient cosmogonies had believed they could answer. The importance of a thinking that is as unique as the being it speaks of should therefore preclude assimilating it to fables that are neither true nor untrue impossible. The term muthos cannot have exactly the same sense when it is used of Parmenides as when used of all the others. What is it however that makes it legitimate to call his discourse by this name? The text, on this point, provides the answer: an insouciance, an inability to “have difficulties” and in particular the fact that he did not raise it:
• “So whenever we find ourselves at an impasse, it is your job to make us see with sufficient clarity what you can mean whenever you utter this word ‘be.’” (244a4–6)
• “By this word, ‘be,’ what must we understand you have in mind?” the Stranger had asked (243e2), and he will ask the same ques ion to the presocratic philosophers at 244b7: “What can they be saying when they say ‘being’ of it?” On this point Parmenides is no different from the others. It is not the ontology of the Poem that Plato is targeting, but what it implies as to the very ature of discourse. If Parmenides cannot be accused for not knowing what he is saying, he can be for not being aware that he is speaking. This is why in saying this word, logos, unbeknownst to itself, he believes it is saying the thing itself without bothering about what that would mean. The reproach is all the stronger when it is addressed to Parmenides for whom the “thing” in question is being, and which is posited as unique (and not simply as one). One cannot then say the thing without blocking from he get-go any possibility for language to signify anything but the same thing. All terms therewith take on the function of “indices” or signs (sēmata) – or to use Plato’s terms they are names deprived of and not provided with logos, meaning.
• Reviewing the “stories” told by his predecessors about being has led Plato to reiterate the question of its meaning. It is the contradictory opinions of the “meteorologists” about beings (peri tōn ontōn) that provide the starting point for Gorgias’s treatise On Nature or On Being. Here are the two versions of his first argument as found in the sources:
• Version of the Anonymous:
• “For if non-being is not being, non-being is no less than being. For the non-being is not being, so that the things are no more than are not.” (MXG, 979a25–28)
• Version of Sextus Empiricus:
• “Now non-being in itself is not. For if non-being is, then it will be and at the same time not be: in fact to the extent that on the one hand it is thought as not being, it will not be; but to the extent that it is not being, it will conversely be.” (Adv. Math VII, 67.1–4)
• What about being? It is not, if non-being is, since it is its contrary.
• The Anonymous begins by showing that if being must and can be self-identical (it is being), non-being must be able to be so, also. For if one says of non-being that it is being, it is necessary to say also that non-being is what it is, namely non-being. But then, predicated of itself, non-being is. In this version the contradiction appears to be sufficiently obvious, whereas Sextus explains that it is because it is thought as not being that non-being is not, and it is because it is said to be not being that it is.
• For what it’s worth, one cannot say of non-being either that it is or that it is not; one can only say: neither it is nor it is not (Gorgias); it is, even though not being, it is not, even though being (Plato). Being like non-being can in fact both be subjects of “is” and “is not”: “Is,” no more than “is not,” cannot serve to distinguish them. Gorgias and Plato thus contradict the Parmenidean krisis, for “is” is a term without reference – one knows no more what to refer this word to than what to refer non-being to. Being is not a word belonging to a particular discourse, namely that of Parmenides, it is the great word belonging to all discourse. When discourse says to be, says is, says being, it is pointing beyond itself: the primary ambiguity of being is to be and to not be only a word, and nevertheless to imply its own being, its extra-discursive being. To say that to be is eing, that what is is, is not however only to posit its necessary being, its exteriority in relation to discourse, it is also to posit its identity in relation to itself. But because discourse includes negations, because it can say “is not,” it destroys hat illusion. The true problem is that in discourse “to be” has all its meanings, and that even if one distinguishes them, they remain in play. The equivocity of the word “being” is not merely a “treatable” accident: rather, it is constitutive.
• In affirming about being that before asking oneself if it is and what it is (how many and what sorts) one must ask oneself what it signifies, the Stranger is recalling that “to be” is also a word in the language and a term within discourse. In neglecting this, the logos of the Father is in Plato’s view a myth, a logos too close to what it is saying to be able to be answer what it means: it is reified and transfixed, as it were, by its own message. Insofar as it has left behind the semantic function of logos but recognizes in it only its ontological function, the speech of the Poem does assert and refer, but its very rigor makes it waver. It is not enough to object to Parmenides that he is obliged to say what must not be said just because that it is impossible to say it: condemned as he is to circle around his own unique reference, his logos immobilizes itself, and closes itself off from any possible sense. The conclusion of the examination comes to confirm that this is, in fact, the veritable gamble of the parricide – to break away from a solitary and oracular kind of speech and to open up what the paternal discourse has closed off, to give logos space to deploy itself and to move, and not to transgress what Parmenides has forbidden. Because the logos of the Father is a myth, it will like all the others meet with “myriads of impasses whose end cannot be seen.” Still, Parmenides has made an argument, has dialectized (diēlexthai). But the logic of the excluded middle is a logic too strong and too simple, and opens a path too “unique” and too obvious. It will pay the price for its “ease,” its univocity, its too-immediate conviction. Thanks to its lack of questioning his inviolable discourse ended in a cascade of contradictions. The only possible way, that of “is,” thus turns out to be as impossible as the forbidden way:
• STRANGER: And at the same time surely countless other things show up, boundless aporias, raised against anyone who argues that being is somehow two-fold or only one. – THEAETETUS: The ones we have just seen arising give enough evidence for that! One follows upon the other, bearing off (pheron) all that has been said into ever greater and more difficult paths of error (planē). (245d12–e5)
• The first verb of the Poem of Parmenides (pherō) is thus the last verb of the passage devoted to it in the Sophist. Parmenides carried off by aporias is, as it were, the negative correlate to the young man carried off by his eagerness. Moreover, the examination ends with a word that is certainly not there by accident: error (planē). After all, aporia, even multiplied, does not in itself constitute a refutation, but in the case of Parmenides the aporias bring on a wandering and this term represents everything the Father in his argumentation claimed to be ruling out. That the way prescribed by Parmenides does not prevent error a d that it, itself, begins to wander, reveals the insufficiency not of a thesis but of a method.
• To the saying of the Poem, a saying with conviction in service to truth, Plato opposes his own way of managing logos, a use that is difficult since logos “is exposed to dangers.” The refutation began by opposing path to path and method to method. So we must analyze what is concentrated into this term “error” to understand why Plato thinks it suffices to turn it back against Parmenides and to refute him. In the Poem those who “err” are the two-headed mortals: impotence in their heart directs their errant thinking (plakton noon) and their path, returning upon itself, forward and backward” (VI, 5–9); they are in error (VIII, 54) because they have chosen to name two forms; finally, if birth and death are “banished” to error (VIII, 27) it is because true persuasion has chased them far away. The way of error is the way followed by mortals, their error is the consequence of their impotence to discern with logos, to obey the Saying. To err does not mean taking a bad route (since there is only one possible) but to misconceive the terminus toward which the route leads, to wander errantly out of an ignorance of purpose. In this, wande ing is assimilated univocally with erring.
• In the dialogues there is a more complex treatment, in that it plays a part in a strategy Socrates uses when faced with the positive image of knowledge – that is, the wisdom of the learned: wandering is the best way to avoid error and leave the state of ignorance, the non-desire to learn, amathia. It can also designate the bewilderment the soul undergoes in the worlds of sense, of change, of disorder: when the soul has recourse to the body to examine things in perpetual becoming, it can happen that it finds itself “erring, troubled, dizzy as if dreaming.” But even then it is not identical to error since the sensible is not always misleading and there can be true opinions about it. Finally, when it takes place within the intelligible, wandering does not mean being deceived so much as exploring: so it is not equivalent to taking the path that turns back upon itself out of indecision, the “way of the mortals” according to Parmenides. It means taking every possible path, and taking the time to do so. Diachronic and dioptic, logos according to Plato can only discern and understand the truth if in its very movement it bumps into it. The certainty of intelligent discernment is the fruit of wandering, for it does not choose the right path in advance, but only judges paths after having taken them to their end. The economy of the straight way is not the surest way to err, but it does cons itute the surest way never to acquire intelligence, even if one comes upon the truth by accident. In the perspective of the dialogues, getting out of the forest is not an adequate representation of thinking, neither in its way of proceeding nor in its goal. For although I am able to take the best road to Larissa, whether by right opinion or by inspiration, the goal of thinking is not to arrive by the shortest road to Larissa, to truth, or to being. Right opinion can go straight to the goal, but this goal can only have opinion as its content. Intelligibility is accessible to intelligence only, and without the “gymnastic exercise” of wandering, intelligence cannot emerge.
• There is another dialogue in which wandering is connected directly with the name of Parmenides. In the one that bears his name, the great Parmenides, questioned by Socrates on the nature of the “exercise” that seems to him to be his method, answers him by advising him to use the dialectic of Zeno as his model, but with this reservation, reformulated by Socrates in a way that delighted Parmenides:
• “I admired you when you said, and said to him [Zeno], that you no longer allow wandering [to mislead you] in the midst of things that are visible, nor let this examine them, but examine rather the objects that more than any others can be seized by logos, which one can take to be Ideas.” (Prm.135e1–4)
• Besides the strangeness of the expression that makes “wandering” the subject of the verb “examine,” it is this that turns towa d “what one can take to be Ideas.” Plato entrusts to his Parmenides the concern to articulate clearly the distinction between two wanderings, the one tied to the visible multiplicity and the other to the intelligible multiplicity and the aporias that it engenders, which are at least as many as the former if not more. Plus, when Zeno accedes to Parmenides the honor of carrying out the examination of the hypotheses, he states:
• The crowd in fact is unaware that without this exploration in all directions and without this wandering, it is impossible even upon encountering the truth to acquire intelligence of it. (Prm. 136e1–3)
• Surely, there is some irony in making Parmenides divide wandering into two species and in putting into the mouth of his disciple a praise of divagation. But irony plays, here again, upon the ambiguity of the heritage and the parricide. In the Parmenides, wandering becomes the prerequisite for the apprehension of the beings that can be seized by logos, as also for intellecting the truth: in this sense, it is method itself. The paradox is no lesser one since wandering seems to be a notion most incompatible with the very idea of method, an image that recalls par excellence the absence of making any decision as to which path to take (and that indeed is how Parmenides conceives of it). Tied in Plato to the grasping of multiple differences and similarities, never given and never assured of success from the get-go, wandering enlists logos onto an interminable course; for the goal, eve when attained, never implies the end or terminus for the exercising of intelligent logos. In contrast with the saying of Parmenides – “where I begin matters not to me, for I will return to that point again” (fr. V) – the Platonic logos is neither conti uously linear nor so straight that it might become circular: it cannot be kept from repeating itself. Once one stops identifying wandering with bewilderment or with error, wandering becomes another name for liberty and for dialectical science. In order to have intelligence of what one discovers, one must already have gone in every direction, both possible and impossible: examination not only has a negative function, it not only serves to eliminate everything that might obscure the evidence or divert us f om it, it is also the precondition of a veritable intellection of what one encounters – which is not a moment of illumination or a one-off certainty, but the moment where everything becomes fully articulated, deepened, and charged with meaning. One surely cannot want to wander just for itself, but it is only because one consents to, because one is at liberty to multiply the means of access and the hypotheses without barring any, that in the light of truth one can acquire intelligence of a being that no sign points one to, but rather that one must, with the help of all the resources of logos, hunt, sort, question, learn, teach oneself.
• Far from opposing thesis against thesis it is a matter of first showing that the most venerable of theses can when called into question be swept into aporia and find itself in error. For the Stranger, for Theaetetus, and especially for Plato, wandering is not a failure – but it is for Parmenides. Neither exploration in every direction nor even aporia can be interpreted as errors of the power of dialectic: rather, they are part of it. If dialectic must surmount the difficulties it encounters it is not by excluding certain hypotheses from the start but by submitting them to examination, one after the other. The traitorous conclusion of this passage shows us the logos of Parmenides driven by examination into an errancy that Parmenides did not want but condemned and excluded, and into aporias that he did not foresee. Wandering, as an objection against Parmenides, is only an objectio because he did not recognize wandering as a way. The paternal logos will fall into error from aporia to aporia exactly because it did not err and wander enough.
• Starting from there the Stranger will examine the compatibility of the signs (sēmata) announced at the beginning of fr. VIII: unique (v.4), entire of members (v.4), all-together (v.5), and one (v.6).
• SOCRATES: What then? Will they say the whole (to holon) is different from the one-that-is, or the same as it? – THEAETETUS: How will they say anything else? How can they? – SOCRATES: If, accordingly, it is whole, and as Parmenides says:
• fully similar to the mass of a well-rounded sphere, equally extended in every direction; for stronger or weaker it must not be, here rather than there,
• such a being has a middle and extremities, and since it has these it has parts by all necessity, hasn’t it? (244d14–e7, citing fr. VIII, 43–45)
• Why, here again, did Plato choose to cite this comparison among all the possible citations? Rather than to take some “dialectical” verses from fr. VIII, to take the one and only image of being found in it? If one remembers that it is the problem of the image that had led to the “ontological digression,” the choice of the citation takes on singular importance. Is the image of the sphere a “good” image? And even if it is, how is this image articulated in the whole fragment?
• Before we get to the Stranger’s commentary, how are we to understand these verses in the Poem? If seems at first quite useless to discuss whether we know if the image of a sphere, of a globe, of a mass, is meant with purely geometrical connotations, or rather physical, or even cosmological ones. First, because there could only be a contamination of these fields by each other at he time of Parmenides, but especially because all the connotations accumulate, and it is neither true nor false to put the accent upon the abstract and geometrical properties of a spherical volume any more than on the physical properties of mass and equilibrium, or on the special aptness of this form (which Plato plays upon in the Timaeus) as a figure to represent the world. The image of the sphere brings in all these connotations, allows all these interpretations and a good many others. While placing the accent on plenitude, the “material” imagery of a well-made ball, of a full bulb, the comparison also alludes to the mathematical image of an equilibrium of vectors (isopales), which brings in an image of two forces, two armies of equal force in battle, immobilized by the tension between them. The sphere is the same from every angle, equally resistant, and unified. It offers no purchase of itself, nor any declivity, any roughness; the perfection of spherical curvature is specified with “no stronger in any respect,” “no weaker in any respect,” and by the negation of all difference as to its plenitude and intensity of being, for any such difference in the manifestation of being would confirm the illusions of mortals.
• The being of Parmenides thus does not give itself forth any more than it withdraws, does not open itself any more than it excludes: always there, at rest in itself by itself for those who know how to see it, it englobes, is englobed, as it englobes the thought that thinks it and the word that says it. It does not resist more weakly here and more strongly there: there is no way o access partial or progressive, no other path than the one that consists in affirming “is” in a single go, in its constancy, its plenitude, and its totality. It is never more being or less being, here as opposed to there: being is based only on itself, i is not the principle of any ontological hierarchy. A being in the world (a sphere) thus serves as a metaphor for being, and this metaphor (according to the rule of poetic language) is also a metonymy. The image is a good image, and it has had a posterity we know very well. But it is not for this reason that Plato has chosen to cite it.
• When one sees to what extent the image becomes in the dialogues tied up with a problematic of resemblance and difference, and is inseparable from a reflection on its legitimacy and its use, and if one takes into account the fact that the first line of Parmenides cited at exactly this moment in the Sophist includes the term “full of semblance,” one tells oneself the choice is more strategic than pertinent. The Stranger takes the image literally, as being identical with and not similar to the thing itself, but it is not that he feigns to believe that for Parmenides being really is a sphere and that it has a center and outer limits: it is for us to understand that Parmenides cannot do otherwise if he is to be coherent. What status is to be given to this image, if being cannot be different from itself? The image of the sphere is not an image produced by the ignorance of mortals, it is the Goddess herself who “compares” being to a sphere in order to confirm its completeness and to assert that it cannot suffer any lack. How can we not add faith to the discourse of Truth uttered by a Goddess, and on what basis establish within this discourse any difference between what is said and the saying of it, or between the ways of speaking? The two critiques put forward by the Stranger – the one regarding the name and the one regarding the image – come together to bring to light the ambiguity of the Parmenidean way of using logos. One could thus go so far as to say that in the Poem, being has as a unique status in being the referent of the speech of Parmenides. Far from including the speech that says it, being is entirely included within this speech.
• Within the speech of Parmenides, or within that of the Goddess? Who in fact is speaking in the Poem? And who is listening? The young man, the kouros? Parmenides? the reader? To this ambiguous message with its double sense – a speech that moves toward being and a being that makes its way as a speech – there corresponds a two-fold speaker whose speech speaks in the speech he speaks, and a double audience, listening to him who has heard. The ambiguity is everywhere, but there is no reflection about it, it is only used to reinforce the authority of speaking and bring about persuasion. This speech that cannot answer when it is questioned since it did not question itself therefore constitutes a writing, in the Platonic sense of the term, that needs to be commented upon and taken at the letter, not in order to corner it into self-contradiction eristically but because it does not allow itself to be taken up in any other way. The image of the sphere only confirms the double game of a saying that claims to deny itself for the sake of the being it speaks of, and a being whose sole support is this saying. If one wants to understand the func ion of an image it is always its goal that is most instructive: that of the Sphere is not to allow being to be represented spatially but to make visible the way according to Parmenides that being subsists in its pure equality with itself. It is only when the Sphere covers up its intention that it succeeds in being identified with that of which it is the image: it is being, and not the Sphere, that the Goddess says is “equally extended” (isopales, neuter, not feminine) from its center. The slip is obvious, undeniable, and when Plato concludes from this that being must have a center and extremities it is not because he has read Parmenides poorly but because he has read him too well. Well enough in any case to verify that dialectic is the science that must do without images, since resemblance is a slippery thing. Thus the contradiction between the speech and what is said is here brought to light: Parmenides says being is continuous, indivisible, but he says it through an image that represents it to us as extended, and therefore divisible.
• If one reasons from the image one must conclude that “the being which is such, has a middle and extremities, and having these, by all necessity has parts” (244e6–7). Whole (holon) must thus mean “total” (pan) and “all” becomes a relative term that gets what meaning it has from being distinguished from the parts of which it is the sum. But divisibility excludes neither unity nor totality nor wholeness:
• Now surely nothing prevents that a unity should come to be superimposed upon what is divided in this way and should affect all its parts so that it be at the same time one and whole. (245a1-3)
• In Plato’s Parmenides, when Parmenides presents his first hypothesis, “If the One is one,” he is saying that this One cannot have parts, and thus can neither be straight nor circular, “for that which is one and without parts does not in any way participate in the circle”: it cannot be circularly enveloped without having a multiplicity of contacts with this circle. The one being of Parmenides can no more have a circular shape, and therefore parts, any more than the One of the Plato’s Parmenides can, but the latter Parmenides is more consistent than the former. For the real Parmenides cannot even answer that his image is only an image: from what and in what could it be different? The perfidious Plato doesn’t take what the real Parmenides would have said figuratively in its literal sense. He just shows that such a difference would have no standing or meaning in the discourse of Parmenides, and he repeats in the Sophist the refusal he lent to his Parmenides in the Parmenides.
• If being must be unified by the one, it is because it is divisible into parts: its unity is a superimposed unity, imposed on a being that is therefore composed of parts. So on the one hand one has a being that is unified and therefore affected by the one, and on the other hand the one that unifies, affecting a being that could not be “the one itself,” for according to “correct speech” (orthos logos) “the veritable one” is said to be “absolutely without parts.” The One in itself, the veritable One, is therefore distinct from the being that it unifies, which itself is composed of parts, memerismenon. The sphere represents it this way, which does not prevent it from being said to be one. But its unity is the result of a unification. The unity brought on by the veritable One is therefore not of the same nature as the unity that belongs to the One.
• If to be one = being + one,
• the (unifying) one ≠ the (unified) one, and
• being ≠ being one
• The partless and veritable One unifies the divided being, but it does not make it “truly” one – that is, partless. Whence thei sum is necessarily more than one.
• The “correct speech” that is here opposed to the image is not that of Plato but that of Parmenides. For it is Parmenides who i his argument says being is “indivisible, continuous, and holding together” (fr. VIII, 22-25), and who requires that “one” (as a sign of the truth of this being) is without parts. Logos should have served as the sole criterion and have excluded image: correctly defined, that which is veritably one must probably be said to be absolutely without parts. But this one, as it is now constituted of multiple parts, will not be consonant with this definition (logos). This one is the one-being for which the sphere is an image, but it is not truly the one. In order to be in accord with the logos, both being and the one must therefore be without parts.
• Unfortunately, the logos is no longer in accord with itself:
• STRANGER: Will wholeness, affected by this kind of unity, be one and whole; or shall we absolutely refuse to say that being is whole? – THEAETETUS: You’ve presented a difficult choice. – STRANGER: Very true. For if that which is (to on) is only one (he ) because it is affected in this way, it clearly can only be the same (tauton) as the one – and thus their sum (ta panta) will be more than one. (245b4–9)
• The choice cannot but be difficult, since in linking being to the one, and to the non-same, it transforms “the whole” and puts it into the plural: being, as being “all things” (panta), can only be their sum. This second version of the parricide needs to be justified step by step.
• 2a) Since the being-one cannot be the veritable one, as has just been shown, let us suppose that it is the whole in itself that is. “The whole” passes from the position of a predicate (of being) to the position of a subject (of the verb to be). With this it acquires an independent reality, it becomes “the whole in itself.” So it comes about that “being lacks itself” since the whole has taken a part of its being, taken a being that thus lacks being, which turns out, again, to not be one.
• If that which is whole = being + whole
• whole ≠ being
• thus: being whole ≠ being one
• 2b)
• STRANGER: And according to this line of argument, being deprived of itself being will be non-being. – THEAETETUS: Correct! – STRANGER: And again their sum becomes more than one, since both being and the whole have each taken on their own nature, separate from the other. (245c5–9)
• The expression “being will be not being” does not mean that it will be absolutely non-being and thus will absolutely not be, but that it will be so relatively, since it will lack the part of itself that the whole has extracted from it.
• If being = being + being whole
• being = being – being whole
• 2c) If to avoid this aporia one denies being to wholeness and thus supposes that the whole, “absolutely is not, then the same is the case for being, which in addition to not being can never become being (genesthai … on)” (245c11–d2). Not only will it his time wholly lack wholeness, if one can say this, and in this sense will not be; but also even if one claims to compensate for this lack in being by saying that being, which is not wholly, can become, and at the end of this becoming end up being wholly being, this will not resolve the difficulty: for it is “always” wholly “that what becomes (to genomenon) has become (gegonen).” Becoming can make an existence develop and grow, but it cannot add being to what it had caused to occur. In this sense Parmenides is right: Being is; it can neither come to be nor become. For if one says that being “comes to be,” one supposes already that it was not and wasn’t even one: [it was] nothing. The being that does not tolerate becoming (genesis) is necessarily the eing to which being whole is not lacking. Only such a being can have a determinate quantity, whatever it is, for having a quantity is necessarily having it wholly. If being is not whole, it cannot be said to be one, two, or many.
• In the course of this reasoning the Stranger has used whole (holon) in three different meanings, in order to see which could agree with a being that is said to be sole and unique:
• – as a sum of parts. Being will then be not absolutely but relatively one. For the one is distinguished from the one-being without however being separated from it or posited as being; it simply inflicts a pathos, a quality, a state upon being, which, since it must undergo the one in order to be one, is not the veritable one (the one without parts Parmenides is talking about). Being is totalized but it is not the all since it lacks the veritable one. The sum of one-being + one is greater than one, and greater than the being-one;
• – as whole. The whole separates from being and acquires its own nature, its being, a being that will thus lack being, as the whole will lack wholeness since it will be smaller than the sum “whole + being;”
• – as completeness opposed to incompleteness. The hypothesis excludes not only the existence of a complete being but the possibility that it should become so, since what a being becomes, it necessarily wholly becomes.
• While examining these three meanings Plato does not cease to side with the hypothesis of Parmenides and tries to see how it ca resist the dialectical torture. The first meaning is only envisaged for underlining the contradiction between the image and the logos. For it is the image Parmenides uses that imposes the distinction between the veritable one – indivisible and continuous and without parts – and a unity inflicted upon a multiplicity of parts. The sphere, with its englobing curvature, can well constitute the best image of a complete world – sufficient, centered, bound up, and equal in every direction – but it cannot be the image of being, or rather, the whole-being now only exists in image. It must be stressed that in the passage of the Sophist, Plato does not give, does not presuppose, nor even attempts to define what he himself means by all. It is within the hypothesis of Parmenides that the being which is unique but pictured, represented, and imagined as a sum of parts, cannot be the absolutely one and whole being.
• Since to say about being that it is whole comes down to giving an image of it, is it necessary to stick with a logos that says that being is one and absolutely whole? In that case a multitude of aporias arise. The one absolutely one, cannot be said since saying anything implies the alterity of the thing and the name, and it cannot unify anything since that implies the duality of the unifying one and a one that is unified. Perhaps then we must affirm that the whole is. To holon then takes the place of the subject that is missing in the first verses of fr. VIII: it becomes what is (to eon) only after powerful Necessity has encircled it within its bonds, and all its predicates have been listed off. The being, which is absolutely “without lack, for then it would lack everything” seems identifiable with the whole, since lacking any little bit of being is identical to lacking any lit le bit of wholeness. Since the signs (sēmata) of wholeness are surely the most insistent signs in the ontological fragment, Plato may not quite be wrong in making the “whole” a possible subject of “is.” This subject would even be the most compatible subject for all the predicates since, englobing all of them, it would not run the risk of being divided by them. But “englobe” brings the vocabulary of images back in. The whole does not here totalize its determinations any more than the one, in the Parmenides, unifies them: either, in the first hypothesis it unifies them to the point of no longer having any, and thus they become unknowable, informulable, and indeterminable; or, in the second, the one-that-is divides itself and multiplies itself indefinitely, to the point of no longer excluding any of them. The whole, if it is, must split up in the same way: into all that is (in itself) and all (as a sum) of being plus of all-that-is. Thus it becomes alternately a part of itself and all of itself, on into infinity. It can no more be and stay whole than the one could be and stay one.
• If however one imagines he can overcome the preceding aporias by positing the non-being of any wholeness and by thinking being without positing it as whole, one reintroduces becoming (genesis) by dint of this lack of wholeness and denies thereby what for Parmenides is the principal sign (sēma): unengendered (agenēton, VIII, 3). In this point again Parmenides is right: nothing cannot be, nor be one, and thus there is nothing that can become. As in the Parmenides, it is the negative hypothesis that justifies the necessity to posit what Parmenides has posited. However, contrary to what he has too easily thought, what follows from this necessity is not the “only possible way” but an innumerable series of difficulties.
• No matter how Parmenides determines the subject of “is” (being) – whether as one, as whole, or even worse as one and whole – he very signs that ought to demonstrate its consistency and prevent it from dispersing and scattering, can according to Plato only make it multiply or empty it of itself.
• Putting the logos of Parmenides to a test does focus on the logos of Parmenides. The examination Plato makes of it does not abusively favor, for reasons of symmetry (the pluralistic theories, the monistic theories), only one of the signs of the Poem: namely, the one (as has so often been said). Thinking of the being as one, but especially of the unicity of this one, are the hypotheses starting with which the Stranger examines the consequences of positing a unique one, and then asks what its completeness means for being. The term he dialectizes is “whole” (holon), and he only differentiates among its meanings to see which would be compatible, not with the Idea of the One but with its unicity. From start to finish the one is taken as the unique one of Parmenides, never as an Idea.
• But, Parmenides can no more answer these questions than can the meteorologists; like theirs his speech is a “myth,” a myth tha is logical, ontological, but a myth no less. In fact, and to take up again the argumentation of the Stranger, Parmenides resorts to an image that ends up identifying itself with what it is the image of, and uses names that all have the same reference – a reference of a sort that bars them from being signs. And in making his argument he does not question the possible equivocity of these terms: he doesn’t even suspect it. For the only discourse he can legitimately deliver is: is. But this is not a logos, it is an oracle that has only itself for a content and that must somehow be deciphered and obeyed.
• While it is certain that this parricide is not accomplished for the sake of another ontology, it is equally certain that it leads to one:
• so that one must neither speak of a “way of being” (ousia) nor of a “coming to be” as being, if one does not count the one and the whole among the things that are. (245d4–6)
• The way of being that belongs to being – its ousia – requires that one posit it as really one and really whole, but then it is necessary to posit that unity and wholeness are, which implies a plurality of beings. This plurality is the condition for the being of logos. Since the question is finally that of the meaning of the word “to be,” what should be examined is the relationship that logos can and cannot have with it. But “it is obvious, Theaetetus, that for him who posits this hypothesis [that of a being that is absolutely one], it is not at all easy to answer the question that is now arising, nor any other question one might ask.” What a being is in truth (its ousia) can neither be uttered nor immediately affirmed or denied.
• Yet, before becoming a parricide the son is an heir, and in the present case the legacy is considerable, for this is what has made the rapid dismissal of all the “legends of being” possible. He commits his parricide only insofar as he philosophizes, and his delirium (mania) consists much more in his subordinating being to “knowledge, thinking, and intelligence” and to the discourse that expresses them, than in trying to force non-being to be, and vice-versa. That this crazy impulse, this bold stroke, should be interpreted a superficial thinking oblivious of being, or a lazy topology of the here-below and the there-above (which the last of the philosophers now knows one must abandon) is a curious reversal of the accusation of taking it easy. Plato never stopped attacking the sophists, the ancient physicists and Parmenides in the text of the Sophist for their nonchalant use of logos, insufficiently thought through and insufficiently interrogative.
• However, when one reads his commentary on the Sphere, this “well rounded mass” and next Heidegger’s on the same passage in Holzwege, one can see why it has never really been accepted that Plato at this stage in the Sophist was actually speaking of Parmenides (some say that when he says “Parmenides” we are to understand Melissus, Zeno, Antisthenes or who knows who). The gap in tone seems quite indecent. The elevation and the profundity of the Poem’s speech are in fact stripped away from the start, as if unnoticeable, and Plato indulges in a jerky and dry dialectic, each answer soon turning into a new question. Nothing is meditated upon, or to use the words of Heidegger (who is not thinking directly of Plato but nevertheless includes him in his “always”): “the sphericity of being is thought too negligently and always superficially.” The impression of superficiality is not false. One could even say that the parricide has but one goal: open up a space for logos. For that, one has to desacralize speech, decenter it, and must accept wandering and divagations. Plato is never more a dialectician than when he makes Parmenides himself speak in his Parmenides, or when he speaks about him – never more a dialectician and seemingly never less inspired. However, “all great things perish only by their own devices,” and Parmenides is only killed by Plato thanks to the dialectic that he himself has passed down. Besides it is not certain that the solemn urge that goes in a straight line and the sign that points without signifying are more profound than the courage and joy of a language that only interrupts itself in order to deploy itself better, and make all its terms both precise and meaningful.
• Once his parricide is accomplished the Stranger has no further business with the solitary and grand speeches of his predecesso s, but finds himself before a group of anonymous interlocutors whose answers to one and the same question contradict each other. The Sons of the Earth and the Friends of the Ideas no longer wonder “what is being,” but “what exists”? Are they then guilty of the slip Socrates is always denouncing, from the Hippias Major to the Theaetetus? To define beauty does not consist in enumerating beautiful things, nor to define knowledge in enumerating sciences – nor can furnishing species of images answer the question, “what is an image?”
• The definitions advanced by the Sons of the Earth and the Friends of the Ideas are not the result of an involuntary slip but a radical decision: according to them, the question of being is identical to that of the being of what exists, and thus of the sort of ousia the existent must have in order to be said to be existent, on. By determining it by exclusion, each group at the same time determines the way of being of its contrary, that which is not. Since the way of being of the ones condemns the way of being of the others, the implicit principle of the “gigantomachy” is that non-being is the contrary of being. What Plato now stages is not a controversy, but a battle “that has always gone on,” whose stake is the essence (ousia) of that which is, and which sets the “Sons of the Earth” against “Friends of the Ideas.”
• Similar to the giants Otos and Ephialtes who piled Pelion onto Ossa in order to climb on top of the sky and seize Zeus and all the gods and bring them down to Earth, the Sons of the Earth acknowledge as existent only what is corporeal, tangible, and which can be grabbed one way or another. “With their hands they pull everything out of the sky and the invisible down to Earth” (Ge, of which they are the sons). As to their adversaries, “it is from on high and the invisible that they conduct their defense,” as the gods of Olympus have done. Yesterday Theaetetus had heard Socrates talking about “those who believe there is nothing other than what they can get a solid grip on with their hands”: actions, becomings, and everything that cannot be seen they deny to be part of that which is (ousia) [...] they are, so to say my boy, completely incapable of refined culture (amousoi). He judges that “from this point of view,” the “secret doctrine” of Protagoras is a “story” (muthos) one can range among the doctrines about being. This is probably why Theaetetus today says to the Stranger that he has already encountered many men of this sort. They despise language, reasoning, and argumentation and they affirm as if incontestably obvious that “body and the manner of being (ousia) are the same thing.” Aristophanes says in the Symposium that “their strength and their vigor were extraordinary, and great was their pride”: in the face of such “fearsome men” better be careful and prudent. Thus it is “from on high” that their adversaries oppose them, saying that the only veritable manner of being belongs to certain intelligible and incorporeal Ideas, and object that far from being as solid as their adversaries claim, all body is destined to be dissolved and dispersed by the action of becoming.
• These two theses paradoxically have a common character: they are mutually exclusive and equally dogmatic. The way the Stranger has just presented them, the combat of such belligerents is not likely to come to an end. So he will ask each party to justify their thesis and will question them “as if they were present in person.” But what follows has two peculiarities that make it dificult to consider that they are engaged in a dialogue. The first is that the Stranger entrusts the role of speaking for the Sons of the Earth (who themselves refuse to engage in dialogue) to Theaetetus – the interlocutor chosen by the Stranger. For the prosecutor to cast his collaborator in the role of advocate for the accused is a novelty, to say the least.
• In contrast with the first group, the Friends of the Ideas are not deaf to all contradiction, but in their case there is another difficulty: Plato (through his own Socrates or his own Timaeus) never refutes an interlocutor who is still alive. Would then the friends of the Ideas all be dead? But it is true that when the Stranger attacks them, Plato is only dialoguing with himsel.
• The only possibility of getting an answer from the Sons of the Earth is to make them “better” – that is, by attributing to them a less brutally naïve version of their thesis, “for we do not care about them, but are seeking what is true.” The Stranger does not feel bound to do the impossible. When he says that the agreement of the better ones has more force than that of the “worse,” “better” means those who are able to listen to an objection, to ask themselves the question he asks them and to make the effort to answer it. Moreover he must assume they are quite tractable since their refutation comes quickly. They are first of all constrained to recognize that, since they admit the existence of a mortal animal (zōon), they must admit that of a living animal. To understand this starting point, we must refer to the original meaning of the term sōma in Greek. In Homer sōma always mea s cadaver, carrion, whether of an animal or of a man, and the general sense of “body” will end up overriding this original sense without making it disappear, for it is exactly this meaning that the materialists give it: to render them more “tractable” will consist in making them accept the evolution of their language.
• But the Stranger goes further when he objects to them that since they admit the existence of a living mortal, they cannot deny that of an animate body. For both expressions, “living mortal” and “animate body” assume the same sort of becoming, but going in the opposite direction:
• zōon (living) thnēton (mortal)
• sōma (inanimate body) empsuchon (animate)
• The first expression, “living mortal,” is the reversal of the second, “animate body,” which is being supposed to be its equivalent. Their having accepted this is what makes the Giants “better” so much so that they cease being Sons of the Earth. The identification of the living (zōon) with the animate body (empsuchon) compels them to recognize the existence of the soul (psuchē). A materialist finds nothing to say in rebuttal: the soul can indeed be called corporeal as soon as one conceives of it as a “puff of smoke” that once it is separated from the body would disperse and “would then be absolutely nothing.” The real trap set by the Stranger lies in an implicit argument: if there are animate bodies, those that are not must be called “inanimate” and therefore dead. But according to the Giants to be a body is the only real way of being (ousia) and the only acceptable criterion of existence, but bodies for them are neither living nor mortal: they cannot “die” since they are not alive: they can only aggregate and disaggregate. Pushing it still further the Stranger supposes that these materialists are able to acknowledge the existence of just and unjust souls. Wouldn’t they rather speak of just and unjust men, whose justice and injustice would be shown in some tangible or visible (horaton) effect? Let us go on to admire the way the Stranger will turn these Giants into Friends of the Ideas: “Is it not,” he asks them, “by the possession and presence (parousia) of justice that each of them [of these souls] become such?” Eidos, horaton, ahoraton, parousia: the vocabulary hearkens back to the Phaedo:
• SOCRATES: Let us posit, if you will, two species (eidē) of the things that are (tōn ontōn), the one visible (horaton) and the other invisible (aides) [...] With which of our two species can we affirm that the body has the greater resemblance and kinship? – CEBES: That at least is clear to everyone: with the visible. – SOCRATES: And the soul? Is it a thing one can see or cannot see (ahoraton)? – CEBES: Visible? Not for men, in any case. – SOCRATES: But surely when we speak of visible and invisible things it is from the vantage point of the human nature we are speaking, the rest of us? Unless you have some other nature i mind – CEBES: No, human nature. – SOCRATES: So as for the soul what do we say? That it is visible (horaton) or that one cannot see it (ahoraton)? – CEBES: That one cannot see it. – SOCRATES: Invisible (aides) therefore? – CEBES: Yes. – SOCRATES: Therefore a soul, more than a body, resembles the invisible, whereas the latter, on the contrary, more resembles what one can see? – CEBES: By all necessity, Socrates. (Phd. 79a7–8, b4–c1)
• What is surprising in this passage is its use of the comparatives “more resemblant” and “more akin.” Two species of realities are affirmed and antinomically determined as visible or invisible, and it remains to place the soul and the body into one or the other species. This will be done not according to the nature of the soul but to that of “the nature of men,” for it is in rela ion to them that “we have spoken of what one can or cannot see.” For a soul united to its body the non-visible (ahoraton) is that which it “cannot see” with its eyes, while for a soul that is separated from it, to the extent that is possible, the “invisible (aides)” is a manner of being, that of incorporeal beings. Each soul will have a degree of similarity to what is “invisible” proportional to its effort think it and make itself akin to it. Κinship is not a logical relation, it implies a connaturality that can be overlooked or denied. Resemblance and kinship involve degrees in this sense, and resemblance only becomes kinship for those who are desirous of learning, that is, of undergoing intelligible realities. These intelligible, invisible, and immutable realities are the true causes of the properties of things, and the soul itself only acquires these properties by participating in those realities. Socrates refuses, then, “to complicate things” and sticks to this formula: it is by the beautiful and nothing else that beautiful things are beautiful, “whether by its presence (parousia) or by communication (koinōnia), or by some other means or manner.” He is not even sure that the presence of the Idea to the thing or that its communication with it are he only possible modes of participation.
• In his encounter with the Sons of the Earth the Stranger opts for presence: a soul becomes just when justice comes to be prese t to it, and unjust when it is absent. The Sons of the Earth agree to this much, but what sort of existence do they grant to virtues, vices, etc.? They can say of “almost none” of these things that it is visible, but can it be both invisible and corporeal? The soul seems to them to be so, but as to its virtues and vices, they would be ashamed to say they are incorporeal and thus deny them existence, but neither would they dare to say they are bodies. This at least is what Theaetetus thinks, but the Stranger in the end doubts the possibility of such a radical conversion, and it is difficult not to think he is right. For his part, he thinks that the truly autochthonous types “would on the contrary obstinately maintain that anything they cannot hold in thei hands absolutely does not exist.” They believe not in what they see or what they hear but only in what they can touch, for although the soul can see the invisible by thinking and can hear meanings through words, it cannot touch bodies if its body doesn’ do the touching. The soul then seems to play no role at all, or a role so minimal that there is no need to admit its being and so make a body of it. Though all men possess by right a power to undergo the intelligible, a capacity of which the name is “thinking” (phronēsis), not all men exercise it, since some of them can only accord to their soul the power to make them alive, and content themselves with being no more than a particular species of animal. It suffices nevertheless that some Sons of the Ear h concede the reality of anything that is incorporeal, in order that the question about what is can be rephrased as follows: “they must tell us what they have in view that could be common to things by nature incorporeal and things that are corporeal, and what allows them to say that both exist.” So we must ask them once again, and if they have no answer we must offer them one.
• Theaetetus thinks the materialists have been questioned quite enough, and so the Stranger offers this definition:
• I say that whatever possesses a power of any sort, either to act on another thing, of whatever nature, or to be acted on even in the smallest way and by the meanest of things, and even if it is just once – I say all such things truly exist. For I propose as a definition for defining (horizein) beings that they are nothing other than power (dunamis). (247e1–4)
• This statement raises problems as to its form, its content, and its value all at once – not to mention the syntactical construction, and therefore the translation, and therefore the understanding of its second part.
• What does the verb horizein mean? In the active it means to fix a limit (horos), whether spatial as in determining the bounda y of territories or temporal as in having for instance to set down the period of validity of a law: it is only in the middle voice that this verb must be translated “define.” The middle voice indicates that the subject is implicated in the action – verbs like “can, believe, wish” exist only in the middle (dunamai, oiomai, boulomai). Used in the context of a definitional assertion such verbs indicate that this assertion is inseparable from the asserting subject. Thus in the Phaedo Socrates asks Cebes, “Shall we then, if we can, define (horisōmetha, middle) which are the Ideas in question?” The “we” immediately breaks down to a “me”: “What I was calling ‘define,’” and a “you”: “but look and see if this is how you define.” The act of defining depends on o e or several subjects who are self-defining as being capable of defining, and it is they who decide that the definition is valid. Horos means “definition” only when the word is associated with the middle verb, horizomai, and it can then also mean a crite ion that enables one to recognize an object and set it apart by drawing a line of demarcation between it and other objects or notions that might appear identical or similar. In the dialogues it is most often a matter of wrong criteria proposed by the Soc ates’s interlocutors. According to Hippias in the Hippias Major, for example, the most expert (sophos) is known by the price one is ready to pay for his knowledge; for Cephalus in the Republic being “just” means being faithful and returning what one has deposited with you, and so forth. Sons of the Earth and Friends of the Ideas are among these: each group draws a boundary line that excludes either the invisible or the visible from the sphere of beings, but both will prove equally unable to maintain that boundary (resemblance is a decidedly slippery kind). Wrong criteria are bound to lead to bad definitions. But are we here dealing with what a good criterion is? In addition to the fact that the definitional activity is always related to the nature of its agent, the definitional criterion – that is, the limit to be drawn – is in accordance with the object to be defined. An Idea, a power, or an unlimited process cannot be defined the same way: a mere unknown “x” cannot stand for any object to be defined.
• Is the sole merit of the definition of being as power that it ensures a double refutation of the Sons of the Earth and the Friends of the Ideas, and will the Stranger then abandon afterwards?
• Why define being as a power (dunamis) to act or be acted upon? The question arises all the more since Timaeus proceeds in a completely different way when he sets about refuting a position identical to that of the Sons of the Earth. According to him, the question of knowing whether the Ideas “are nothing but words” would call for a long argument, and yet it is not possible to leave it “without deciding.” So in defining a boundary between two sorts of beings we must “make many things clear with few words.” Timaeus then is not proposing a distinguishing mark for the realities he is “voting” for, he “posits” that their being depends on the difference between intellection and opinion, even true opinion. If this difference does not exist then the Ideas don’t either. Once he has set out the three criteria that show how intellection and true opinion are distinct, he infers that their ojects are necessarily different, and that two kinds of reality do indeed exist. Conversely, at the end of Book V of the Republic it was the difference between beings that truly exist and beings that become that served as the basis for distinguishing knowledge from opinion, which kept us from confusing the philodoxer for whom the changing diversity of becoming is a beautiful spectacle, with the philosopher who looks only to the beings that truly are. Opinion and knowledge, Socrates then says, are two distinct powers: what does he mean by “power” (dunamis)?
• We will assert that powers are a certain kind of beings (genos ti tōn ontōn) thanks to which we can what we can, and to which every thing can whatever it can [...]. According to me, a power has neither color nor shape nor any of the qualities of the sort such as I see in many other things to which I look when I distinguish one thing from another for myself. But in a power I look only to this: on what it applies and what it accomplishes. And it is on this basis that I call each of the powers a “power;” one that applies to the same thing and accomplishes the same thing I name the same power, and a different name to that which applies to something different and accomplishes something different. (R. V 477c1–d4)
• If this is a definition of power, it sounds like something of a tautology: to place a power at the basis of an ability is not particularly illuminating. Nevertheless one must remember that this seemingly empty formula is neither saying that a power is what makes us “able to do what we want,” as Hippias claims, nor again that “we can do what we can do,” which would amount to denying the existence of a power to be acted upon. And secondly, that it affirms that “we can what we can” because we possess a power. In the Theaetetus (the only other dialogue besides the Phaedrus in which the entire formula “a power to act and to be acted upon” occurs), the “refined” think that everything is moving but they recognize two kinds of motion, one that has “a power to act, and the other to be acted upon,” each of them of unlimited quantity. The difference between agent and patient varies according to them with the circumstances, but since they are differentiated only relatively, instantaneously, and momentarily, nothing they do or undergo can be related to the presence of a power in them. This is what the “empty” formula enables to refute: it is not their actions or their passions that determine and distinguish agent from patient, but the presence within them of a power that is defined by the object or the range of objects on which it applies, and by what it accomplishes. The verb “accomplish” (apergazetai) might indicate that it points only to active powers, yet among those listed by Socrates there are two, vision and hearing, that seem to refer to mere receptivity: in the case of sensations it seems power must rather be attributed to external actions and excitations. But the possibility for a living body to be affected while not feeling it enables Plato to show that only an animate body possesses the power to be affected that is called “sensation,” and to give meaning to this seeming oxymoro . Moreover, in the verb apergazetai there is the word ergon: activity, function, task, result. In the Sophist as in the Politicus one must distinguish the kinds reached through division by their capacity to accomplish the function or functions appropriate to their nature. The principle that governs the divisions is thus the necessary relation that exists between dunamis, power, force, aptness, and competence – and physis, nature, as for example when the dialectical power must be accorded only to the natu e of the philosopher; and the criteria adopted for performing the successive divisions must follow the rule enunciated by Socrates: “to the one that applies to the same thing and accomplishes the same thing I give the same name, and a different name to o e that applies to a different thing and accomplishes a different thing.”
• The Gorgias states two rules that determine the relation between acting and undergoing. The first is that of their necessary correlation, and the second asserts that the modality of the action is transmitted: “the agent’s power of acting is of the same sort as the patient’s power to undergo.” The transmission only takes place automatically in the case of inanimate bodies; when i passes through the mediation of a human soul it is conditioned on the power that this soul possesses or does not possess to recognize the true modality of what it undergoes (the one that suffers a punishment that is objectively just rarely feels it to be such). Not every action transmits its modality, nor does it necessarily produce an effect. It meets its limit in the nature of the thing on which it tries to act. The power that belongs to them to act and to undergo tells us therefore about the nature of the agent and that of the patient. This gnoseological dimension of power is explicitly affirmed in the Phaedrus, where the connection is made between essence and power. A citation from Hippocrates gives Socrates an opportunity to explain the way one must proceed in order to seize the nature of anything. One must (a) see if it is simple or multiform; (b) if it is simple, examine what power it possesses by its nature in relation to what, as actor, and what power in relation to what as a patient; (c) i it is multiform, to do the same for each of its parts. This method enables one to show with precision “the essence of the thing’s nature,” and the Theaetetus provides an example: to wonder about what a man might be, what differentiates his nature, comes down to wondering – if one is at least a philosopher – what it is appropriate for a man to do or to undergo.
• The same method should therefore be able to define the nature of being. In the first part of his definition, “I say that whatever possesses by its nature a power … really is,” the Stranger makes power the most general criterion for the existence of a being. The second part claims to infer an entailment:
• a) I posit as a definition (horon) for defining (horizein) beings that they are nothing other than power (dunamis).
• Without warning the Stranger passes from “possessing” a power to “being a power.” To avoid this scandalous leap, some commenta ors have proposed the following translations:
• b1) “for I posit as a criterion (horon) for defining beings, to the degree that they are, nothing other than a “power;”
• or
• b2) “for what I posit as a criterion (horon) for defining beings is nothing but power.”
• It is the criterion then that is nothing but power. Unfortunately, though these two translations are more in agreement with what we might wish – because the second part of the definition would only be repeating the first with a little more strength and would not be passing from possessing to being – these translations are hardly defensible given the syntax. If however they are p eferred to translation (a), it remains that passing from the singular (in the first part of the sentence) to the plural (in he second part) requires us to understand that each being is defined as possessing a power. But then what is it that possesses it? What would be underlying? The nature of the being? The nature of a being does not make it be, exist, but it makes it be what it is, so that the powers it possesses are multiple, and are particular and proper to it. If one thinks of a being only as much as it is, “bracketing” (epochē) what it is, one can no longer see what substrate could be given for its power. Neither can it be specified: to act and to undergo are words that disappear from the second part of the definition of being.
• Is it then possible to accept the first translation: “beings are nothing other than power,” and its entirely Nietzschean radicalization? What can it mean? Perhaps very simply that existence is entirely exhausted in its power to exist, not be nothing, and that each being, no matter how minimal, trivial, and fugitive it may be, participates in that power since it exists and as long as it exists. That which possesses the power to speak is not only this power; conversely, that which possesses the power to live is a living being, and inasmuch as it is living it is nothing other than a power to live. The transition from possessing to eing is justified as long as it is not a matter of possessing a quality but possessing existence. In other words, existence is not a predicate: what possesses the power to be is, insofar as it is, nothing but this power. This way of passing from possessi g to being is focused and commemorated in the very term ousia: “goods, fortune, wealth,” in the common language, it becomes “essence, way of being” in Plato, and “substance” in Aristotle.
• The examination of the Sons of the Earth has led to defining being by power, and now, as he turns to the Friends of the Ideas, the Stranger recalls an abridged version of his definition: “we set down, I think, as a sufficient boundary-mark of the things which are” when we said it is “whenever (hotan) the power of being acted on or of acting is present (parēi), even to the slightest degree.” The power of a being is relative to what is offered it each time as an occasion for acting or being acted upon, and previously the Stranger had added (at 247e) “and even if this only occurs once.” These temporal notations will for the Frie ds of the Ideas justify their denial of this definition. If the power is thus inscribed within the time of becoming, it cannot be valid in the sphere of being, the domain of essences only, of atemporal and immutable Ideas. According to their very dogmatic Friends, the Ideas must be eternally at rest, motionless, in order to be immutably the same as themselves. Through the body, they say, we can communicate with becoming by means of sensation, and through the soul with a manner of being that really is (ontōs ousia) by means of reasoning. The Stranger has just reached an agreement with the Giants on a definition of being as power because he constrained the better among them to accept not one but two ways of “communicating” with what is. The body comes into relation with what is corporeal through sensation; the soul with the incorporeal realities they have willingly accepted through reasoning. In both cases this communication (koinōnia) points to “a passion (pathēma) or an action (poiēma) resulting from a certain power arising out of their encounter with each other.” Would the Friends of the Ideas prove less accommodating?
• The Stranger next says that to himself, in contrast with Theaetetus, this enigmatic formula is familiar. And yet Theaetetus did hear it yesterday, and even heard several versions of it. One of them involved all the wise men who, from Homer to Protagoras with the exception of Parmenides, adopted the thesis of a “universal mobility,” whence, if one listens to them, the word “being,” and any other stabilizing term, would be proscribed. The Friends of the Ideas would then seem to be somewhat justified in objecting that neither of these two powers, to act and to undergo, can be compatible with the essential way of being (ousia) of the Ideas, since to give them a power comes down to setting them into motion. The way of being, the ousia, is at stake in their quarrel with the Giants, for whom there is only one single way of being, that of being a body, to which the Friends of the Ideas reply that the only true way of being belongs to intelligible and incorporeal Ideas. While the better among the Giants could at most accept the definition of being as power, the Friends of the Ideas see it as a threat to the radical cleavage they insist upon between being and becoming.
• Yet, in the dialogue where the kind of causality exercised by the Ideas on things in the realm of becoming is most precisely a alyzed – the Phaedo – Socrates uses a “dynamic” vocabulary that should finally exclude the possibility of lending Plato this sort of dualism. The action of the Idea on the thing and the thing’s reaction to this causal action call up terms of war: the Ideas “advance,” “march upon,” “seize” the thing, which can either accept receiving them or refuse to be taken over. The Idea confers upon the thing its name (it is eponymous), its essence (ousia), and its properties; but if the thing is confronted with aggression from Ideas directly or indirectly contrary to it, it will “refuse” to receive and will “perish or flee.” For instance, that which is three would “sooner perish or suffer anything rather than stay three and, while remaining three, become even.” In this passage of the Phaedo it is the verb “receive” (dechomai) that denotes participation and speaks of it as consenting to the action of an Idea. When the action is that of an Idea – that is to say, the action of an intelligible cause, of a cause that makes intelligible, which for Plato is the model of all true causality – it only affects things that “consent” to undergo it. The Friends of the Ideas might however judge that the military vocabulary of this last argument of the Phaedo is nothing but a st ing of metaphors and that Socrates is only babbling, in an inadequate language, about what should be expressed logico-ontologically.
• The problem is that by depriving the Ideas of their causal power their Friends condemn becoming to be totally unintelligible, and thus not to truly “be.” Parmenides had raised this difficulty in the Parmenides, when he put it to Socrates that if the Ideas can communicate with Ideas only, then knowledge of them, the Idea of knowledge, will be a knowledge of the Idea of “Truth” bu will know nothing about the things of our world, since it transcends them absolutely. There will then be a knowledge of things on high and a knowledge of things here below, with no possible any relation of the one to the other. The knowledge of the here below would ignore everything that the knowledge of the above knows, but one will also have to admit that the knowledge of the above, lacking the power to enter into relation with the things below, will be ignorant of them and unable to know them. Unlike the too-young Socrates, the Stranger-Plato has just reached a definition of being that implies that positing Ideas does not mean positing things endowed with a being exempt from every kind of becoming, but positing intelligible realities endowed with the power to render intelligible the things to which they are present. He will answer the Friends of the Ideas with the reply Socrates should have given to the objections made by Plato’s Parmenides. But if one is not a sophist, to answer doesn’t mean to cont adict or to refute, but to question in order to understand, to pose the question that will lead back to the source of the disagreement. Before putting it to them, the Stranger recalls what the Friends are friends of – of Ideas, to be sure, but Ideas that imply an opposition between becoming and being (ousia): an Idea cannot become, “it remains always itself according to itself,” whereas becoming never ceases to be other. Action and undergoing are thus, according to them, categories applicable to becoming but not to being. What makes us aware of this – since we need to be made aware – is that according to them our body communicates with becoming through sensation, while it is by reasoning that our soul communicates with what essentially is. How do they represent this “communication” to themselves?
• If they consent to answer, they will be forced to abandon their rigid Eleaticism. For what one calls “communicating” is “knowi g.” So the question to ask them is this: what about knowing (gignōskein) and being known (gignōskesthai)? Both the objects and the subject of this verb have been stripped away from the verb since we are dealing with infinitives: the question is about a verb, “to know,” in the active and the passive infinitive. Gignōskein does not mean “to possess a knowledge” but “to learn to know”: we must therefore understand it as an action, and if it is, it “affects” its object. This grammatical argument is not absolutely convincing, since it is possible for verbs in the “active” voice to designate a “passive” state, the verb “to suffer” (paskhein) being an immediate case in point. If the Friends of the Ideas indignantly oppose the possibility of applying the rela ion of action and passion (poiēma – pathēma) to knowing the Ideas, it is first because it implies becoming. The Stranger then recalls his definition of beings (in the plural) as possessing a power to act and to be acted upon, and he gives the Friends the choice between two hypotheses. To “know (gignōskein) or to be-known (gignōskesthai): do these two terms both refer to an action? Or both to a being acted upon?” These two hypotheses sound absurd, and yet:
• 1) if “to know” is surely an action since it is an activity of the soul, since the mode of knowledge is determined by the nature of the object searched for, knowing is for the soul an undergoing of the nature of the object.
• 2) if for an object “to be-known” means to be “discovered,” “revealed” by knowledge and therefore to be undergoing it, since it is this that guides and orients the soul in its search, for this object to be known is also to act.
• Each of these terms, to know and to be-known, is thus at the same time action and passion, depending upon whether one adopts the point of view of the subject – the soul – or of the object. Knowing is therefore both action and passion, and the same applies to what is known. What grammar seems to tell us is deceptive for it deprives the soul of its power to undergo, to become akin to intelligible realities and to assimilate itself to the divine; and it deprives these realities of their power to act, to awaken the intelligence in the human soul and give it an orientation.
• The Friends of the Ideas should therefore, on pain of contradicting themselves, deny a third hypothesis, to wit:
• 3) to know is an action and to be-known is a being acted upon.
• And they are compelled to opt for the fourth:
• 4) neither of the two terms, to know and to be-known, can participate (metalambanein) in either action or being acted upon.
• Theaetetus acquiesces in this: “Neither the one nor the other, with neither the one nor the other.”
• The Stranger then takes up again his third hypothesis: to suppose that knowing should “do something,” it will necessarily be the case that what is being-known is being affected. Thus, the manner of being that is opposed to becoming, ousia, will by dint of being affected be moved (kineisthai). But according to the Friends, “that will never happen to what is as rest.” The “jump” rom being-known to being-moved has to do with the paradoxical nature of the power of being acted upon. The conclusion of the first argument – every ousia is acted on by being known – becomes the minor premise of a second argument whose major premise arises utterly unexpectedly: to be acted upon means to be moved, being known is to be acted upon: thus to be known is to be moved. If needed, Plato can resort to syllogism when the adversary commits an error in logic: the conclusion (cf. 4, above) is that in denying to the Ideas the outrageous possibility of being-moved, their Friends have given them being at rest as an essential aspect (since according to them, movement belongs to becoming); they consign them to an immobility “solemn and sacred” that bars hem from being known.
• But they are not wrong to fear the intrusion of becoming into being, for the effort expended on knowing an idea is indeed a movement that might affect it. Granted that in being participated in by things in the realm of becoming or even by other Ideas the Ideas are not affected, must we conclude that in order to remain true to their nature, they must refrain from any relation with the kind of being that belongs to powers? In refusing that acting and being acted upon can fit into (harmottein) the way of being that belongs to Ideas, it is their relation with thinking that their Friends are denying. For intelligent thinking does no behave toward an Idea the way it behaves when facing a statue of a god: it does not contemplate it, and it’s not by walking all around it that it will learn to know it. To think an Idea is to question it, to divide it, to gather it together with others, to link it with or oppose it to other Ideas. When an Idea is questioned differently it answers differently; when one links it with other Ideas it is becomes clearer, richer, or deeper. Thus it becomes less, more, or differently intelligible, but it is always the same ousia that it gives to be thought about – and “same” does not mean motionless. Every Idea must stay the same as itself, there is a need to grant it this manner of being in order to be able to think it, but several ways can lead to intellecti g it. It will thus appear under different aspects, and in this sense, and this sense only, it will be moved: not by a physical movement but an intelligent movement that entails neither translation nor alteration. The Stranger will give a very illuminating definitional description of this kind of movement when he says, about being and non-being, that one may hope from now on “that if one of the two comes to light (anaphainētai), the other will come to light (anaphainesthai) in the same way.” It is the perspective that will change and that can be more or less illuminating – not the Idea. It will remain immutable, but for that it does not need to be motionless. To deny this in the name of a transcendent, petrified, and absolute conception of being, is to endow the Ideas with an unintelligible being.
• Now it is the Stranger’s turn to be indignant:
• But, by Zeus, what of this? Shall we easily be persuaded that motion and life and soul and thought (phronēsis) are not presen to what completely is (pantelōs on), and that it does not live or think, but august and holy, bereft of intelligence, it stands fixed and motionless? (248e6–249a2)
• In this question thinking appears with a triad: motion, life, soul. But to begin with, what is the being that “completely is” rom which all three would be absent? Again a delicious subject for controversy, and yet all we need do is consider the context of the other two passages in the dialogues where this expression occurs, for there are only three in total. One refers incontes ably to intelligible being, which is “completely knowable” (pantelōs gnōston) because it completely is (pantelōs on); it must then be distinguished from what “is not at all” and is completely unknowable, as well as from that which is, but not “completely”: this intermediate way of being (between absolutely being and absolutely non-being) is only knowable “in an intermediate way”: by opinion.
• The other passage, from the Laws, equally indubitably refers to the totality “of beings” that cannot be “totally inanimate” – hat is, to a universe that cannot be the result of a nature operating at random. Since the Stranger is here thinking about knowledge, thinking, and intelligence and not about the earth, the moon, and the sun, it is the meaning this expression has in the Republic, not in the Laws, that it has here, the meaning of “being absolutely and totally being.” The Friends of the Ideas having nothing to do with the stars either, and caring only about the kind of beings they call “Ideas,” it is to their way of being hat they deny life, the life breathed into them by thought and intelligence. How, indeed, could their intelligible and motionless Ideas then be known if not by intelligence? Intelligence existing only in a soul, and if the soul exists then life and motio exist. The existence of the soul plays the same role in refuting them as it played in refuting the Sons of the Earth, but the Friends of the Ideas prove more intractable than they. Perhaps they are not wrong, for this first triad – motion, life, soul – inscribes thinking within a psychic becoming, which has access only to the realm of becoming, a becoming that is according to them the contrary of being, even if it consists in becoming more, or differently, intelligible.
• It is against these that the final exhortation is directed:
• And so, if there is one who must be fought with all the resources of logos, it is he who, in any possible way on any possible subject, struggles in order to eliminate knowledge (epistēmē) and thought (phronēsis) and intelligence (nous). (249c6–8)
• Thinking (phronēsis) is not here added to a triad, it becomes a member of a different one. Is it the thinking of a soul, which in thinking breathes movement and life into itself, or an intelligent thinking required by any knowledge? What meaning must we here give to this word, phronēsis?
• In the etymological section of the Cratylus, phronēsis is listed among the “beautiful names” of virtues, which are beautiful because they name beautiful things, for example “justice;” and in the Philebus, intelligence and thought (nous and phronēsis) are the names one should “honor above all else.” However, in his Apology Socrates says most men care only about glory and wealth, whereas “when it comes to thought, truth, and the betterment of their soul, they neither care nor worry.” This last sentence again inscribes phronēsis within a triad of values: thinking, truth, virtue. Plato never varies on this point: this name phronēsis is the name of one of the highest values, and every time he mentions it he disobeys his own dialectical imperative that a value must not be conferred onto a thing until the thing has been defined. For we read in the myth of the Phaedrus that unlike beau y thought (phronēsis) does not possess the strength of shining through in its images, for if it did it would arouse “unimaginable eros in many souls.” But even though they do not see it, it is with thought the philosophers claim to be in love, and in the Laws it is the highest of the divine goods. But it is absent from the Line in the Republic Book VI, as also from its commentary in Book VII: it is neither a state of the soul nor a kind of knowledge. The term seems not to have a meaning of its own; it is caught up in a varying play of associations that can be found in its many translations: prudence, sagacity, wisdom, good sense, conscience, thought, reflection. Phronēsis is not primarily allied with science and intelligence and becomes “thinking” in ce tain contexts only.
• By relating the soul to the nature of the beings toward which it turns, phronēsis confers upon those beings the only motion of which they are capable: to be known. An intelligible being is immutable, exempt from all change, it is only moved insofar as it lends itself to the motions of intelligence, to dialectical motions of a sort that will be specified some pages later. When thought dialectizes and articulates similarities and differences its name is not phronēsis: it is intelligent and is nothing but intelligence (nous). It only takes on the beautiful name of phronēsis when one is dealing with the effect intelligence has within the soul, for this effect is phronēsis. It is only when the soul must be reminded that it is capable of being affected by beings that remain always the same as themselves, that one comes upon something like a definition of phronēsis: it designates the state of the soul when it undergoes beings that truly are and strives to have intelligence to acquire knowledge of them.
• If phronēsis were absent from soul, the being that truly is would be unknowable and the immutable realities would forever be separated from the motion of the soul that seeks and learns to grasp them. Without it, we would be at the mercy of opinion and its masters, the sophists. At the other extreme, so to speak, if phronēsis were absent from soul, the motion that is life would be radically alien to thinking: life would not feel itself feeling, it would not be able to enjoy what it feels and would not enjoy itself. Our impulses would also be alien to it and the love of truth would be but an empty word. When, instead of probing them by thinking, thought speaks of itself and of its own action and value, its action and its value are available to be grasped and measured by referring to the consequences of its absence:
• For the philosopher, then – he who honors these things above all – there is, it seems, every necessity for their sake both to efuse to accept that the all is at rest, whether from those who assert that everything is one or from those who say it is a plurality of Ideas, and no less, in turn, to remain completely deaf to those who set in motion in every way “that which is;” but, imitating the children’s wish, he must choose “both” and say of that which is and of the all that they both are motionless and in motion. (249c10–d4)
• The Stranger is invoking the philosopher as he conceives of him, and he here defines him by his hierarchy of values. He is summoned to proclaim that being must be that which is suitable for thought and for intelligence, and that it is these that a philosopher must care about before all else. The way he is literally reversing the goal of his parricide is something so audacious that it has not often been noticed, most interpreters focusing instead upon its implication: namely, if Parmenides then Protagoras, Gorgias, and all the sophists. And then it is also appropriate to add to these all those who posit Ideas that they do not thi k, out of fear they might so alter their being, a being so full of itself that it absorbs even thought. The parricide of a Parmenides who, without being named, is included among “those who affirm the one,” can thus be extended to the Friends of the Ideas, who have done nothing more than multiply his one Being, which can be connected with nothing but itself. For the being that is suitable to intelligent thinking is a being in which intelligence can recognize itself, and not a “thing in itself” conceived as a stronger and more resistant object. If it is thinking that one wants to do, he surely must turn himself toward beings that truly are, but which before all else are entirely intelligible. Far from making being the transcendent referent before which all thought should humble itself, all language can only repeat itself, and all knowledge limit itself to affirming it, the philosopher is the one who gives “being” such a meaning that thought, intelligence, and knowledge are possible, and who places these above all else. Above all, no matter “what is” may be? But the correct determination of what might be the being of being belongs to intelligent thinking, able as it is to learn and to question. To subordinate being to thinking is not to confer upon it a bei g of lesser rank in dignity, it is on the contrary to confer upon it the only dignity that makes being something more than the object of an obstinate reiteration. The so-called “ontological” part of the Sophist must therefore be integrated into the overall purpose of the Dialogue and be understood according to it, for if being were such that having intelligence of it were impossible or useless, then the sophist would be the only one who “philosophizes,” as Gorgias puts it:
• Third, let us consider philosophical discussions: it is a kind of talk in which the liveliness of thinking shows itself capable of turning what opinion believes upside down. (Praise of Helen, §13)
• He alone would philosophize since he is the only one who knows that an opinion can always be “flipped,” and the only one who k ows how to flip it no matter what it is. But two symmetrical opinions – “all that is is in motion” and “all that is remains at rest” – make knowledge, thought, and intelligence impossible as well. The Sons of the Earth have opted for the former, and the Friends of the Ideas the latter. But the Stranger himself answers as little children do when given a choice: “being and the all are both all the motionless things and all the things in motion.”
• It would seem that being is now well circumscribed within a definition. Theaetetus is convinced, but not the Stranger, who will now (as at 238a2) show him that he has spoken too confidently and too quickly. The definition of being by power in fact gives as much being to motion as to rest, for if all that is must be either at rest or in motion, one or the other, then it would be the case that in adding the things in motion or the things at rest that the word “being” would have a reference – a reference, but still no sense. For if contraries truly are contraries, they exclude each other: how are we to integrate them into a single totality, as the Stranger hopes?
• It is possible to do so, and there are many examples of this, as long as each of the two contraries remain distinct from its contrary and at the same time from the pair:
• Then is it as some third term in addition to those two that you are setting “being” in the soul, as enveloping together (sullabōn) both rest and motion, and is it in taking them together and fixing your attention on their communication with being that you have come to say that both are? (250b7–10)
• Thus the aporia you’ve pointed at would be manageable, and it is even what would allow dividing one and the same kind into two kinds not only different but contrary. For it has led to laying down a rule that is valid for any pair of contraries: it suffices that the pair has a kind of being distinct from that of each of the two contraries, and this can be accepted by them since each contrary must possess this kind of being in addition to its own. Being would then be the universal point of view that one can always adopt on anything and everything, without our knowing what we mean when we say it is. Being possesses the peculiar power that it must be universally acceptable in order for there be a “something,” however small or fleeting, which one can perceive and about which one can think and speak. Yet as to the meaning we give to this word, ‘being,’ when one is considering it as this third term that “envelops from without” all things, one is always “at the height of ignorance” about it – so that all that has been established is that “according to its own nature, being is neither at rest nor in motion” (250c6–7).
• The Stranger then decides to abandon his erstwhile interlocutors, and in order to get answers to the same questions he had asked them, he will now ask them of Theaetetus, “so that we can progress a little, together.” Theaetetus affirms with conviction the being of motion, of rest, and of the two taken as a pair. Motion and rest are contraries, and the Stranger thinks it useful to specify that Theaetetus is not “granting,” and “meaning,” that either the two are in motion or the two are at rest, and that it is indeed as a third term “that you posit being, in the soul.” When did Theaetetus say so? Explicitly, never; but when it comes to “granting” and “meaning” only a soul can do that. The activities being denoted by these verbs provide the Stranger the grounds he needs to re-introduce the soul into questions that without it would be “metaphysical.” That the Ideas are “in the soul” is what Socrates said in answer to Parmenides when he objected that it is absurd to believe it possible to participate in a thing from which one is distinct, and therefore separated. And Socrates had been right to judge that yes, it would be absurd, if “participate” means to take a share of a thing situated in a place separated by an uncrossable boundary from another place where beings of a totally different nature reside. In order to escape this reification of the Ideas, itself bringing on board the conception of participation as a presence of the Idea within things, Socrates had de-spatialized the region where Ideas reside: “Unless [he replied] each of the Ideas be a thought (noēma) and may be nowhere else than in souls.” “Nowhere else” – that is to say, nowhere. But Parmenides had no difficulty in reintroducing “spatial” terms: since every thought is thinking something, the object of the thought will then be a certain unique aspect (idea) “extended over” all the things (epi pasin) that possess it. For “that which in this way is thought to be always the same while extending itself over a multiplicity, is that not a single Idea (eidos)?” In thus splitting the Idea as a thinking form and a thought content, to participate in it would consist either in taking part in its thinking form, and everything would think, or in being identified with a content being thought, and nothing will think. idea or eidos would thus have the same power and the same function: to be extended over a multiplicity and to unify it “from above,” and thus “from without,” based on a common aspect. Parmenides’s legerdemain was then patently skipping a “little something”: it is not the thought (noēma) that is thinking, it is the soul; and for a thought to be “within” the soul is to be thought by it. The soul is not the place of the Ideas, it is the power capable of thinking them, and thus of seeing them as intelligible beings and as what provides intelligibility. It is not only the Parmenides of Plato, by the way, but also Parmenides himself that is culpable for evicting the thinking soul, and the Friends of the Ideas followed him in this.
• Theaetetus however thinks they have merely “divined” that being was a third term superadded over motion and rest. He has just ow learned only that “non-being” can neither be attributed to being nor to “something,” and in turn that being is neither motion nor rest, nor any pair of contraries. The Stranger for his part now wonders “what he should turn his thought to” and he relies upon his memory. Since they still don’t know what this name “non-being” refers to, and know even less about what to report this word “being,” he judges that from now on it is possible to hope that if the one should become less obscure the other will become more clear. He has two reasons to hold hope. The first is that his dialogue with all those who have attempted and who now attempt to answer the question of being has shown him that they have merely postulated it: to question being without postulating it, mustn’t one stop asking about what it is and about what is, but ask what “is” might mean? The second reason to hope is that he didn’t just say that non-being was not, he said it was “other” (heteron) than being. Would “not to be” and “to be different” thus be the same thing?
• On these two questions the philosopher will definitely make his entrance, for in order to save philosophy and save himself, he must save logos, and in order to rescue the logos he must demonstrate the possibility of a communication between kinds.
• The swift devastating run-through of a story whose protagonists remain anonymous, and therefore expelled, is meant to show tha all the possibilities of talking about being have been exhausted. From his dialogues with the ancient sages and their disciples the Stranger up until now has drawn only one conclusion, that dealing with what is and dealing with what is not present an equal impasse. It is nevertheless possible to acknowledge certain theses some grandeur, but it was necessary for the recall to add that some deserved only derision, since it is they that will send the examination off in a different direction: toward examini g not only how to speak about being, but under what conditions it is possible to root discourse, logos, in what is.
• So being is a “third” term whose nature differs from that of motion and that of rest. But does it follow that it is impossible to talk about motion or about rest, or conversely to affirm that motion and rest exist? Certain persons, neophytes and late-learners, do in fact take pleasure in toying with this double impossibility, and accuse the logos of being unable to furnish a way of access (methodos) to the unity of the thing one is speaking of: its unity, once it is posited “by hypothesis,” should prohibit its being called by many names. Who are these “late-learners”? It is worth identifying them if one wants to understand the problem they set for the Stranger.
• At the beginning of his Physics, Aristotle uses a similar expression: he asks what those who claim “that the all is one” mean, and quickly arrives at the “latest of the Ancients” who were also (like Melissus, Parmenides, and Heraclitus) “greatly disturbed” by the fear that they would seem to be saying that “the one and the many are the same.” But what disturbs their successors is to admit that one and the same thing is one and many, for it would come down to “admitting that it is two contrary things.” If we can trust Aristocles, Aristotle was thinking of the doctrine of Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno, Melissus, and – later – “tha of the school of Stilpo and the Megarians.” It would thus be these throwback Eleatics, the philosophers of Megara, that Aristotle would be criticizing for their excessive rationalism, which leads them not to understand “that it is not as being separate hat the white differs from what it belongs to as an attribute, but for the fact that it is other.” For them, as for Socrates and Plato and unlike Aristotle, it is a matter of participation, and thus of the communication between kinds, and not of predication. Their radical conception of the “separation” (khōrismos) of the Ideas makes impossible not only that the sensible participates in the intelligible, but also a mutual participation between Ideas: since an Idea is only thinkable in its absolute identi y with itself, its way of being (ousia) prohibits any relation and communication.
• With this radical separation the Megarians bring front and center the problem of the one and the many, and solve it with a doule prohibition. The first – never to attribute one and the same name to different objects – is meant to safeguard the purity of the Idea, its perfect identity with itself being endangered by its relation to sensible things. The second, a prohibition to a tribute different names to the same object, tries to preserve unity, for such attribution separates the object from itself, since in their view any alterity indicates separation. Thus the only acceptable judgments are statements of identity, tautologies such as “man is man” and “good is good.” These theses are “dangerous and harmful,” Plutarch will say, for they separate not only “man” from “good” but also Zeus from “protector of the family” and Demeter from “lawgiver,” etc. They would have the unexpected consequence of undermining the respect due to divine attributes, and the divinities themselves. It is not this consequence the Stranger judges “dangerous and harmful,” but the fact that their effort at translating the two ways of Parmenides into linguis ics leaves for intelligence objects about which it is prohibited to say anything, condemning it to reiterating over and over their inalterable unity and their absolute separation. In making the other not the other than the same but rather its contrary, they make non-being the contrary of being and they atomize reason and speech. The Megarians therefore have a lot in common with the Friends of the Ideas, and like them they deprive logos of its semantic power.
• If then there is no doubt that the philosophers of Megara belong to the “late-learners,” might Antisthenes be another possible target, all the more since he was a student of Gorgias and was involved in rhetoric before coming to philosophy? It is true that contrary to the Megarians he denied from the start the existence of separate Ideas and cannot therefore be counted among thei Friends. But he too subscribed to the Eleatic equations, to say = to say one thing = to say one thing that is. Aware of the difference between the onoma and the logos, Antisthenes seeks a way to move from the simple unity of the first to the complexity of the second. His solution is that one must start from an “examination of the name (onoma)” in the Socratic manner of a rapid alternation of question-and-answer, with as its goal a definitional enunciation (logos) of the characteristic trait. The definition must somehow be absorbed and distilled into the name which the reasoning (logos) has come to. According to Heidegger, Antisthenes and the Megarians had it in common to conceive “saying” as “naming,” and for Antisthenes there would be nothing but “pure and simple phasis: reporting the same of the same, ‘man, of man,’” and thus no logos, no possible “immediately discursive” definition of the thing that is (Heidegger). This normative requirement is affirmed in the abridged formulation of the thesis: “to say one about one” (hen ep’henos), to say only one thing about that which is one. Antisthenes thus does not need the tautological solution that Stilpo of Megara thinks inevitable, but he poses the same problem in his way, that of the one and the many. Though he has a different conception of logos, Antisthenes’s positing of the absolute “one,” excluding any kind of multiplicity, can in Plato’s eyes make him an Eleatic throwback for the same reason as the philosophers of Megara.
• These late-learners start from hypotheses about being to justify their conceptions of discourse: it is the latter that must be examined.
• “We talk about man, I think, by attaching many denominations to him,” says the Stranger, and it is “one and the same kind of discourse we practice in regard to all the other things: we begin by positing that each of them is one we then say it is many and call it by many names.” Parmenides, the Parmenides of Plato, closed by warning that one who would not grant that each of the beings remains always the same as itself would not know “what he should direct his thought (dianoia) toward.” This sort of thinking, dianoia, is defined in the Republic by its “inability to go toward a principle, since it is unable to go up above its hypo heses.” The two sections of the intelligible laid out in the division of the Line are distinguished from each other by the fact that the soul proceeds in two movements that are opposite each other. In the upper part of the intelligible the power to dialectize goes from a hypothesis to a principle, whereas in the lower dianoetic part it starts from hypotheses and goes toward a conclusion. This sort of rational thinking (dianoia) belongs “to specialists in geometry and their like.” The dialectician and the mathematician both hypothesize the intelligible and invariant existence of the object they are examining, but the mathematicians take as their principle something about which they have no knowledge, as Socrates does in the Meno in connection with virtue, and as the Stranger has just said we do “regarding man and all the other things.”
• To begin by positing something that one knows he does not know in order to determine what it leads to, and thereby be able to choose between a positive and a negative hypothesis or to see that one must posit another, is exactly what the Stranger is about to do regarding the mutual communication of kinds.
• So in order to include in our discussion all who have ever in their conversation had anything whatever to say about the manner of being (ousia) of what is, let what we’re about to say be stated before these, as well as the others we have dialogued with before, in the form of questions. – THEAETETUS: Just what are we about to say? (251c8–d4)
• The Stranger explains that he will ask them to choose between three possible hypotheses concerning the communication of the ki ds: none with none, all with all, or some with some. Theaetetus then decides to quit playing the role of interpreter, declaring himself unable to “answer in their name”: to be the defender of those who have upheld or uphold certain doctrines. The Strange judges, in response, as the good mathematician he is, that Theaetetus is quite capable of taking up the hypotheses he has just laid out, “the one after the other,” to deduce their consequences, and to question their validity. By thus accepting that his interlocutor should change his role, the Stranger breaks from the perspective he had held since 242c: his perspective ceases being historical and doxographic and becomes critical and refutative. Out of this double shift in the interlocutor’s role and in perspective, a third follows: a change in method, for what must now be brought against the sophist is a conception of discourse able to defend its own possibility which itself depends upon an hypothesis concerning the communication of the kinds. To examine the kind of discourse par excellence of dialectic, thus takes a dangerous turn since it is its very possibility that is now put into question.
• The Stranger begins by lending a negative hypothesis about the mutual communication between kinds to three of the doctrines he has just gone through.
• His first question is addressed to those to assert of the all (to pan) that it is in motion – let’s call them the Heracliteans – as well as to those who assimilate the all to a single and immobile “one” – the Parmenideans, to whom we might add the Friends of the Ideas with their Eleatic pluralism. All of these make being a “third” term in addition to their “all in motion” or “all at rest” – a being that would then communicate with either the one or the other. It comes down either to affirming the existence of motion and denying that of rest, or asserting the existence of rest and denying that of motion. What these late-learners thus attribute, to their “all,” is not a “predicate,” it is its essence, its own way of being (wholly in motion or wholly at rest), and this essence presupposes a communication that despite being so exaggeratedly exclusive (either between being and motion, or being and rest) is communication nevertheless. Though positing a unique all makes it possible to integrate all its predicates, its manner of being (ousia) is not a predicate: whether their being be motion entirely or entirely rest, they must necessarily add being to their “all.”
• The Stranger next turns toward those for whom the “all” is a totality (panta) understood as the sum of infinitely many determinate and homogeneous elements, which they reduce to a unity or whose unity they divide up by extracting from it the infinity of its constituents, whether this unifying and this dividing up are, besides, eternal or alternate. Whether it goes from the many to the one or from the one to the many, this motion inscribes this sort of totality within a realm of becoming in which it can only come into being by communicating with being, which is to be again counted as the third term their totality had lacked.
• Finally, after the refutation inflicted on the first and the second doctrines that required them to admit a supplementary communication with being, and thus implicitly to deny that their all is total, there remain the most ridiculous doctrines of all, those that admit no communication, and yet in order to establish their thesis will be required to talk: that is, to make words communicate (koinōnein) with each other. To speak about non-being had underhandedly obliged those who categorically deny its being to affirm its unity, but the case of these Eleatic late-learners is even worse: a discourse accompanies, and duplicates, and efutes all they say cannot be said: they are all ventriloquists.
• The Stranger now moves on to an hypothesis just as radical as the opposite one: an hypothesis according to which all the kinds communicate with all. This calls for only a few lines, and Theaetetus declares himself able to answer, so obvious it is that contraries such as motion and rest would not be able to communicate without each of them ceasing to be what it is.
• Only the third hypothesis now remains, a selective communication. “Since some things consent and others do not, what happens to them is the same as what happens to letters.” This formula re-introduces the vocabulary used in the Phaedo about the selective participation of sensible things in Ideas, as well as the power to act and be acted upon that it implies.
• Each hypothesis has consequences for the truth of speeches. That of the first hypothesis, the negative one, has been described during the history of the doctrines about being: from this hypothesis it follows that only a tautological assertion is true; this is the thesis of the Megarian philosophers and it pulverizes logos. Under the second, according to which all the kinds commu icate with all, even a self-contradictory assertion is true (for example, “motion is at rest and rest is moving”). This time it is the power of logos that this sophistic thesis perverts by affirming that it is all-powerful, since it grants it the power o support as well as to refute any opinion. So what remains is the third, the one that posits a selective communication and non-communication, which “anyone who hopes to answer correctly” is forced to adopt, since it guarantees a distinction between true discourse and false discourse, by measuring their terms against one another according to their power to affect and be affected – and for that it appeals to two paradigms.
• The analogy with the letters of the alphabet provides examples of these selective accords and disaccords. There must be some letters running through all the others as a sort of bond, for “it is impossible that without some one of them, none of the others could fit even another.” It is also this analogy that leads to this question: “Does everyone know what sort of letters are capable to communicate with what sort, or does one need some art if one is to do (dran) it adequately?” In the grammatistical art as in the musical and in fact anywhere one encounters the problem of accords and disaccords between elements, there is need for a tekhnē, an expertise, an art. Music and grammatical science are two arts that apply to monoeidetic and indivisible elements – tones and letters – and for each of them it is not a matter of predication but of combination, or mixture. The difference however is that in music one can measure the tones relatively to each other and measure the intervals between them, which makes it possible to distribute them on a down going basis on the same scale. Low and high tones are only approximately contrary as far as the ear is concerned, but the transition from the first to the second is in reality uninterrupted, just like the transition from darkness to light. It is therefore possible at the same time to calculate which are consonant and which are dissonant, as the mathematical science of harmony does, and to preserve “the distinct quality of the intervals, their kind and their nuances, their being closer together or further apart, and the ‘weaving’ of the harmonies, i.e., modulation.” In this way the musical art provides a paradigm intermediate between an art arising from an experience, that of the state of a peculiar language, which is consigned to the grammatistic art, and a science that is universally and atemporally valid, namely dialectic.
• Just as in the case of letters the vowels circulate among all others as a link, and at least one vowel is needed so that other letters, the consonants, can combine, so is it possible that some kinds “connect” all the kinds, “so as to make them able to mix.” Obviously this does not mean that in moving across all the kinds these vowel-kinds will permit all to communicate with all. The analogy between vowel and a kind universally shared by all the others is only an analogy in function: the formation of syllables and thus of words requires that certain letters have a linking function, just as the mixing of the kinds requires that ce tain kinds have this same function. And just as it is impossible for a single vowel to link all the consonants, it is not possible for a single kind to make all the others communicate (that is one of the hypotheses that has just been rejected). Thus whe he takes up the points on which an agreement has been reached, the Stranger says: “nothing even prevents some of them from communicating with all by moving across them all.” The option, either to receive or to exclude each other, it not in itself enough to exhaust the possibility or impossibility of the mixtures between kinds.
• In addition to their being analogous, the paradigms of the grammatistic and musical arts also have an heuristic function: they reveal the existence of relations between kinds that are looser than essential participations, and of sorts of non-communication less drastic than that of the exclusion of contraries. It is clear that these kinds are the ones that are participated in universally. They communicate with all the other kinds without however causing all of them to mix with all. Certain kinds have the function of making all the kinds capable of communicating, but this communication only obtains between certain kinds. The kinds that run through all the others are the general conditions for the possibility of communication between kinds, but they are not a sufficient condition for any communication in particular.
• Thus the Stranger moves from the general function taken on by every vowel to the particular vowel “without which it is impossile that others [sc. the consonants] fit one to the other.” But one must not force the analogy and infer that all communications between kinds require that a vowel-kind comes to be inserted between them. Rather, it is the vowels-kinds that justify dialectical research, since their existence makes a combination between two or several different kinds possible, or at least not a priori impossible.
• Which are the vowel-kinds? Which are the kinds that hold all the others together and enable them to mix? And likewise to those responsible for division: are there several, or just one, and which ones or which one? It is tempting to think “there is only one Idea that is obviously a vowel-Idea: being; and only one that is responsible for divisions: the Other.” The trouble is that he question about the kinds pluralizes them – not the singular, but not the dual either: there must be more than two.
• The possibility of a selective communication between kinds having been established, a knowledge of kinds, of genera, poses fou problems:
• – which kinds harmonize (sumphōnei) with which?
• – and which kinds do not mutually admit (dekhetai) each other)?
• – and in particular, are there any among them that link them by moving through them all so as to make them able to mix with each other (summeignusthai)?
• – and conversely, in the case of divisions, are there any others that because they move through wholes (di’ holōn) are causes of their division (dihairesis)?
• The first two questions (which kinds communicate and which do not) associate a musical metaphor – calling an accord a “consonance” (sumphōnia) – with the vocabulary of war from the last argument of the Phaedo: certain kinds refuse to “admit” (dekhetai) certain others. It is thus a matter of dynamic accords and disaccords, which must be thought of in terms of power, as Socrates shows when he brings on his “first wave” in Book V of the Republic. It can seem unquestionable – so unquestionable that it doesn’t even need to be asked – that the difference between the feminine gender and the masculine must play a part in the choice o rulers. Yet Socrates replies to those who maintain that it must there play a role, that in that case “it seems possible to ask ourselves” whether the profession of the shoemaker must be prohibited “to those who have hair, or to the bald.” It is just as absurd to ask whether women should be prohibited from ruling – and thus to grant that the sexual difference is pertinent to politics – as it is to suppose that having or not having hair has to do with the ability to make shoes. The only type of “dissimila ity and similarity” that is pertinent is “only that which is related to the occupations.” The pertinence of the generic difference must be evaluated in connection with the nature of the task to be done, and it alone must serve as criterion. No accord or disaccord is to be posited a priori: the principles that serve for division must always be chosen according to the kind being divided, for they must belong to the same kind as the kind they are dividing. When one forgets that division has the function of answering a question, one turns it into a technical procedure that is claimed to supersede the Socratic dialegesthai in the late Plato. Although one certainly divides in order to define, one only seeks to define what had first been the object of a questio . Division is thus not a logical procedure universally valid or applicable: it is and will remain to be, for Plato, a dialectical motion understood essentially in terms of questioning and answering. If one leaves out this interrogative mediation one deprives division of its Platonic purpose and gives it instead the purpose of reaching a definition. From that point forward, the only possible way to oppose antilogic is logic, but nothing is more logical than an antilogical procedure: to claim that a division of kinds is a dialectical and not a logical one is a necessary precaution “given the harm presently being inflicted upon dialegesthai.” There are two ways to hold a rational discourse (logos): one seeks to define what truly is, and comes under the dialectical power, the other cares only to demonstrate the power of logical or an antilogical reasoning. The latter pair, the one just as formal as the other, enable one to dispense with searching and with desiring to think “what is, in truth.”
• The same principle comes into play both in choosing which kinds can be linked and in choosing which kind to introduce for maki g a division. The kind that is able to link is the kind in which all the kinds set out by division participate (for example hu t, joust, commercial exchange all participate in the art of acquisition); all, as Aristotle would put it, are species of the same genus. As to the fourth question, “Are there certain others that, because they move through wholes, are the cause of their division”, this question bears on the kinds that are causes of divisions within one and the same kind: they divide “according to the kind (kata genos).” Whether operating through a pair of contrary kinds or a pair of different kinds, these kinds must belong to the same kind as the kind they are dividing: so it is also necessary to divide “according to kinds (kata genē).”
• The transition from logos in the sense of definition to logos in the sense of reasoning or discourse has been indicated (at 253b11) by the reappearance of the term “kinds” (genē). It appeared in the opening question of the dialogue: “Philosopher, sophist, and statesman – are they three distinct kinds?” The Stranger had then judged that to answer this question, it was necessary to define each of them, but the first kind to be examined, that of the sophist, has such a nature that he could be found in all the arts successively divided. Unlike an Idea, the name “kind” implies the multiplicity of a family, a community (koinōnia) whose (sensible or intelligible) elements are naturally akin. But a kinship must not only exist: it must be recognized and accepted. For a genus is not, like a class, a conventional grouping that can be defined by the systematic table of its elements, it is based on the nature of the beings, beings “that need not to be identified but authenticated.” Surely in the Sophist it is not a matter of eliminating claimants (as it is in the Politicus) but of unmasking them. Thus, if the first divisions have indeed captured “simulacra” of the sophist, it is not with a view to separate out the authentic claimant but to demonstrate that their object was protean. The irony of them was, in this sense, irony squared: whereas an Idea (eidos) can be simple and therefore e defined without being divided, “the nature of kinds implies a mutual community.”
• In the Sophist (and in the Politicus) the Stranger uses a method that requires him to ask first about the possibility of a communication between kinds, and then about the species of communication involved. Clearly it is sometimes spoken of as a “participation” (methexis), and is sometimes assimilated by metaphor to a consonance or a mixture. But the Platonic meaning of the ver “participate” (metekhein) is just as metaphorical, and not only risks introducing the image of the part and the whole (and thus to bring οn the aporia about the “sail” in the Parmenides) but also its original use by Plato, the participation of sensible things in an Idea. The “metaphors” of mixture and consonance correct the ontological stratification between participants and participated that is implicit in that sort of participation: to “be consonant” and to “mix” require elements of one and the same nature that do not act on other things and do not undergo them in the same way. The terms most frequent in the passage on the communication of kinds are those that point to a mixture. So one can then object that the participation of a sensible thing in a Idea is asymmetrical whereas a mixture is inherently to be symmetrical; but this is to forget that every kind operates on the kinds into which it is divided, such that each subordinate kind “is affected” by all the kinds that preceded it. One can also oject that every mixture corrupts the purity of its elements, but Socrates answers that in the Philebus: it is only if it “happens to lack measure (metron) and natural proportion (summetron) that a mixture necessarily corrupts its components, and itself first of all; but in that case it is not a mixture, but a sort of ‘confusion beyond confusion’.”
• The simplest way to decide the matter is to refer to the “casual digression” in the Phaedo (100d3–7). There are two possible ways to participate: by presence (parousia) or by communication (koinōnia), each causing two different effects: to make the sensible intelligible, and to guarantee the possibility of logos.
• Theaetetus’s answer – that just like the expert in the science of letters or of sounds they clearly need a science to answer these questions and “perhaps pretty clearly the greatest” – then stirs up a flight of oratory in the Stranger:
• What shall we name this science, then, Theaetetus? By Zeus! Did we stumble unawares upon the science of free men? And although we are on a quest for the sophist, have we happened upon the philosopher first? (253c7–9)
• His excitement was without a doubt sprang from the expression “the greatest science,” but also (as we shall soon see) by a question that not asked. Plato, like his Socrates, does not set down the kind of methodological rules many wish he would state: introducing the kinds that are able to link and the kinds able to divide had been left to the discretion of the one who was collecting and dividing. No rigorous science could include a factor so subjective and random, and it would indeed be subjective if it was “personal” – and that is why the philosopher must once again enter the scene, and enter in the role of a free man. Why “free”? Plato the Stranger here remembers the expression Socrates used to introduce the digression in the Theaetetus during an interview at which he is supposed not to have been present. Why would dialectic be a science reserved to “free” men, and what kind of freedom is meant?
• “I always err and puzzle,” declares the dialectician Socrates, and he grants Zeno that in order to have intelligence of what o e discovers, one must have examined all the paths, in every possible and impossible direction. The examination has not only a negative function, it does not serve only to eliminate everything that might cover up the obvious or turn us away from it, it is the pre-condition for having intelligence of what we encounter. Erring, wandering, is not being bewildered and being in error, it is exploration; intelligence of the truth is not concentrated into some flash of illumination or final certitude, it unfolds all along, up to the time where everything ends up articulated, deepened, and fraught with meaning. One certainly would not want wandering for its own sake, and yet it is only because one consents to it and because one freely multiplies the roads to follow and the hypotheses without excluding any, that one can acquire intelligence of a being the light of truth flashes upon, though no sign marks it out, and that one must, given all the resources and expedients of intelligent discourse, hunt, sort, questio , learn, teach oneself. Yesterday, Socrates sketched a portrait of this free man, that is, a man for whom leisure and liberty are not empirical conditions, but the conditions of what is called “thinking.” While he is free with respect to the others, to their verdict, to all that could stand before him “like a master,” the one who has spent his time in philosophia is also free with respect to himself, whereas others almost always frame what they say as a plea on behalf of themselves. With all its deadlines the time of the city never grants time to understand; by turning his attention away from the clepsydra, the philosopher gives himself the leisure to wander in every direction, and by doing so liberates himself from time, its flow and the punctuations demanded by society, and at the same time frees up time, for his thought moves in “the time of always,” which one can call eternity if he wants, though it is no less a time.
• Free to wander all the time it takes, the dialectician is also free to establish kinships, resemblances, differences without relying upon the testimony of the senses and the opinions that stem therefrom and without putting any trust in the meanings and the distinctions proper to the words of his language. On the contrary he wants to find out how far thinking is able to break free from language. One must “grasp beings without their names,” Socrates says in the Cratylus, which means and only means to learn “if these realities are akin and how,” as also to determine “what is somehow different from them,” one must not take as the starting point their names (as Prodicus and Antisthenes do, among others), but “the things themselves.” If one asked us, for example, whether a philosopher is closer to a mantic or to a lover than to a musician or a painter, we would probably reply that he is not. And we would be wrong. A sophist certainly claims to resemble a wise man more than a merchant, a mathematician claims to resemble a dialectician more than a quail hunter, a general would be indignant to find himself in the same kind as an extermi ator of lice – and they would be wrong, too. The dialectician has the courage to be paradoxical: the dialectic he practices is unpredictable because it is inventive and it is paradoxical because it is radically interrogative. And it is in this that its liberty essentially resides.
• But it has an even more profound significance. The Athenian says:
• No law or ordinance is more powerful than science, nor is it permissible to subject intelligence to anything, nor to make it a slave, since it governs all things, on this condition that it be a truly free intelligence as it is, in accordance with its nature. (Lg. IX 875c6–d3)
• Intelligence is as free to invent the procedures it implements as to modify them and dismiss the results it reaches. When dealing with kinds the highest science surely undergoes a metamorphosis, but this does not change at all the fact that it has to do with beings that really are, and that the one who possesses this science must have with them an affinity which only a philosopher can have, because only he is capable of being affected by them and of positing them. Whatever limit his freedom encounters, it is a limit that arises from within, not from without: what an intelligence is not at liberty to do is to renounce turning toward what is intelligible. But in Plato’s sense, is only intelligible a term in which intelligence recognizes itself. Whatever words intelligence seizes upon (and to seize upon them means for intelligence to dialectize), it modifies them since it connects them to their intelligible reality, which one can call Idea or Kind provided that intelligence can also recognize itself in those terms. Just as a good doctor or a good statesman must not be a slave to rules codified once and for all, the dialectician must not surrender himself to rules definitively prescribed. Understanding the necessary difference the dialectical power introduces into the instruments it uses to make the beings it studies intelligible, and itself intelligible to itself, ought to bar us rom looking through the dialogues for a methodology separable from the movement of a thinking that invents its rules, reinvents them, and applies them. Just as the knowledge of a good doctor or a good statesman must not submit itself to rules codified o ce and for all, the science of kinds must not submit to methodological rules.
• What is unique in Platonic division is that it operates without mediation, without a middle term, and apparently without a rationale; it makes judgments on the spot, concerned only with understanding – or making itself understood – the nature of what it is seeking, and not with removing the equivocity of the concept to be defined. Aristotle is thus not wrong in seeing in it a capricious movement that jumps from one singularity to the next, from one bright flash to the next. But isn’t that precisely its strength? Far from being one logical process among others, isn’t it division, at the moment it happens, that gathers together and brings to bear all the dialectical power of other procedures for the benefit of a “true philosophy of difference”? This true philosophy entrusts the philosopher with the choice of the kinds to be introduced in order to collect and divide, for in questio ing he measures himself against something higher than himself, something he calls “truth.”
• Dialectic’s claim to be a science seems however to be seriously undermined in two dialogues which are part of the quartet to which the Sophist belongs: the Parmenides and the Theaetetus. What sort of power is to be granted to dialectic the moment the existence of its objects is called into question in the Parmenides, and after the Ideas will be conspicuously absent in the Theaetetus?
• The objections advanced by Parmenides in the first part of the Parmenides had however culminated in this conclusion:
• Conversely, Socrates, if one truly denies that Ideas of things exist, because one has seen all the difficulties that have just been revealed and others of the same sort, and if one does not assign an Idea (eidos) to each of them, one will no longer have anything to turn his thought toward since he denies that the essential aspect (idea) of each being is always the same, and therefore the power of dialectizing will be abolished in its entirety [...] What then will you do about philosophy?
• Socrates and Theaetetus have proved unable to define knowledge, but they have shown that it is not an Idea but a power; and also that while its difference depends essentially on the nature of what it chooses as its objects, it also depends essentially on the nature of its knowing subject:
• But our aim in starting our discussion was not at all to discover what knowledge could not be, but to discover what it is. Still, at least we have advanced far enough to know not at all to look for it in perception, but rather in the state of the soul, whatever its name, when it is dealing with beings that are. (Tht. 187a1–7)
• The knowing subject is the soul, and when it is dealing with beings that truly are, the state they produce in it is called “in elligence.” To have knowledge is to have intelligence of the thing one is speaking about, which only happens when the soul is exercising its power to dialectize. It is necessary to say that in this the philosopher differs from the one whose antithetical portrait Socrates had drawn yesterday: his shadow, his doppelganger, his other – the sophist.
• The Stranger now gives to the science of free men the name Socrates gives it in the Republic, a name that was absent in Plato’s language but which he invented: it is the “dialectical science” (dialektikē epistēmē). It is found under a different name in the last section of the Line in Book VI: “Understand, then, that by the second section of the intelligible, I want to designate what discourse is attached to by the power of dialoguing,” a power that it exercises when “without any use of the sensible element, it is by Ideas themselves, passing through them, that it finds its conclusion in Ideas.” Dialectic undergoes metamorphoses because it doesn’t always pose the same questions and doesn’t always give the same answers, but it always makes its way by the same means, by questioning and answering. Theaetetus dares then to say it is “the greatest” science, corroborating what Socrates was saying in the central books of the Republic.
• What meaning are we to give to “the greatest”? Is it an absolute or a relative superlative? In Book VI of the Republic Socrates explains why he places dialectic on the top part of a Line on which all species of knowledge are located. Though it is possible to assert that the paths it follows have all of them the truth as their goal, one cannot say what it is, for a power cannot exercise its own power upon itself: There cannot be a dialectical definition of dialectic. Socrates can nevertheless explain why he places it “at the peak” and holds it to be the only veritable science: it is because it “makes one most competent at questio ing and answering.” So it is not only the highest but is also the most extended, since it bears upon all the kinds of intelligible being, in opposition to the mathematical sciences which are based on a narrowing before they begin. And being placed “at the peak” of the studies the guardians of the city must go through, it is also the most important. In Book VII, the power of dialectic becomes the prerogative of the philosopher as he was described at length in Book VI, for only a philosophical nature is free of the danger of regressing to eristic and antilogy.
• Once it is provided with its own proper name by the Stranger, the dialectical science of kinds consists in knowing how to divide them; he who is capable of it must in addition be able “not to take an eidos that is other as being the same and that is the same as being other.” What does eidos mean in this sentence? Up to this point the word meant “species,” and the Stranger has just defined a science that deals with kinds (genē). Are genos and eidos synonymous? In philosophy synonymy has a bad reputation, especially when this philosophy is dialectical. Isn’t the Stranger rather trying to reintroduce the Idea, and thereby tie a knot between a dialectic of Ideas and a dialectic of kinds? Maybe, but we can’t answer this question yet: we must move on.
• The Stranger will now talk about the one who is able to “do that” – namely the dialectician – and the passage devoted to him is famous for its difficulty and its obscurity. Ritter already (after Bonitz) admits in all honesty that he has been unable to find an explanation that could both give an account of Plato’s words and shed light on them. Being too pithy to be plain, the co nection of this exposition with what came before (the science of kinds) and with what follows (the choice of the five greates kinds) seems so tenuous that Cornford suggests it constitutes “almost a digression.” To the perplexity attaching to its objec is added a maximally reduced syntax as well as a lexicography dominated by the omnipresence of the term idea, about which the least that can be said is that its meaning is debatable.
• What is the Stranger saying? “But he who is at least capable of doing that”: of doing what? On this point there can be no doub : dialectic has just been defined as the science that enables one to “divide according to kinds,” and the capacity to distinguish what is the same and what is other from what has been added to it. It is this that a good dialectician must be able to do. But what else must he do? Nothing!
• This is the first of many disconcerting aspects of the passage. If the dialectician is able to divide, one would expect him to be able to collect as well, but all he does is “perceive, adequately.” Even though it “discerns” (the verb is di-aisthanetai, ot aisthanetai), his perception is no less a perception, and the other occurrences of this verb in the Platonic corpus conceive of it as proceeding from knowledge and issuing in an action. But in the sentence about the expert in dialectical science this verb takes four nouns in the accusative but no verb, whether in the active or middle voice. The dialectician – if this indeed is about him – must, strictly speaking, do (dran) nothing.
• What then must he perceive adequately? An idea or some ideai. Before attempting a detailed explanation of this passage, it is appropriate to clarify the meaning given here to the term idea, for the few precisions to be found in this text are brought in by verbs in the form of present passive participles in the feminine, that qualify the idea or ideai belonging to the nature of each multiplicity. Thus the unique or unifying idea is only determined by its manner of showing its presence, a presence expressed by passive participles.
• The various translations of this word idea are enough to show the difficulty into which the interpreters have been thrown, or should have been, but for the most of them eidos and idea are synonyms. Yet some passages in the dialogues make that doubtful. First, the Sophist: at 235d the Stranger thinks he sees two species (eidē) of the mimetic art – eikastic and phantastic – but “into which of these the idea we are looking for is possibly to be found” he is not yet able to discover. Whether species or Idea, eidos is not here synonymous with idea.
• Let us read on: Socrates corrects Euthyphro as follows:
• Remember, it is not about this I was inviting you to enlighten me, about one or two of the many pious things, but about the Idea (eidos) which makes all pious things pious; for you were saying, I think, that there was one idea which made the impious things impious and the pious pious? (Euthphr. 6d9-e1 )
• To a hasty reader the two terms seem here interchangeable, but if one takes a little more time one sees that Socrates is pointing out and exposing two errors the priest Euthyphro has made, before explaining to him where he went wrong: he did not seek to define the Idea (eidos) that makes pious all the things that participate in it, he has only presented a property (pathos) of it, which he was moreover wrong to take as being essential, namely, “being loved by the gods.” By giving the idea a causal power, the priest has confused it with eidos, the Ιdea of the pious, and has in addition taken as essential an aspect that Socrates shows is only accidental.
• The possibility of a double essential participation leads Socrates to specify, in the Phaedo, the difference between eidos and idea. Some Ideas, such as that of whole numbers or of snow, “compel each of the realities they seize upon to possess not only its own idea, but always to have in addition that of another contrary.” For example: “Will the essential character (idea) of the even ever come upon what is three? – Surely not. – Thus, in what is even the three has no part? – None. – Therefore, the triad (trias) is odd. – Yes.” That which participates in the Idea (eidos) of the triad has “being three” as an essential aspect, but as the triad necessarily participates in the odd, what is three possesses, in addition to the name and the idea the triad confers upon it, the idea of being essentially contrary to the even. What is three is essentially three, odd, and contrary to even. Cases of this kind show that the idea designates not a mere quality but a state (pathos), a capacity to undergo that is essential to the thing. In all these cases the idea, neither Idea nor thing, is what links things to their Ideas.
• In the passage from the Phaedrus that is taken as canonical when it comes to dialectic, Socrates reflects retrospectively upon the speeches he had delivered about eros; “by a lucky chance” they have led him to discover “two species (eidoin) of procedures whose power it would not be unprofitable to acquire.” The first species consists in “seizing by one glance elements that are scattered about and leading them toward a single idea.” The idea is not mentioned later on, and eidos will indisputably continue to signify “species”: conversely “the other species (eidos)” of the process is able to “divide into species (kat’eidē) according to the natural joints.” The idea is thus the common character that makes it possible to unify a dispersed multiplicity, but since one is uneasy about accepting the absence of eidos in that passage one gives to idea the sense that eidos obviously does not have here.
• When the problem of the transitivity of properties from the elements to the whole is raised in the Theaetetus, the Greek language provides a way to treat at once the general problem of the one and the many and the special case of syllables and letters: stoikheion means both element in general and audible element or letter, and sullabē means both “that which holds together” and “syllable.” “Come on then: do we say the syllable is a sum of letters (or if there are more than two, of all of them), or a certain unique idea that comes into being once the elements are assembled?” When Socrates wonders a bit later, eidos takes the place of idea in the second alternative: “Maybe one should have posited that the syllable is not the letters, but a certain single Idea (eidos) that has come into being from them, possessing in itself a single idea belonging to it alone and thus different from that of its elements.” Indeed, one must distinguish the unique idea that results from summing the elements from the idea that belongs to the Idea of the whole. If one considers for example the addition of two elements, 2+3, from this addition the sum (5) comes into being, and also its idea, “being five.” This idea belongs neither to the 2 nor to the 3, nor to the sum that adds them up without suppressing their separation (2+3), and thus without unifying them by one single idea differing from that of each of its elements. Socrates next feels the need to correct this: what comes into being from these two elements is the Idea (eidos), in this case the Idea of five, the pentad, which itself possesses an idea different from that of each of its elements a d from their sum – an idea that the pentad can communicate without involving them. A quintet exists “in itself” without it being necessary that five musicians play it: it is a musical structure with its own norms, possibilities, and its own limits, and thereby is capable of harmonizing five instruments, no more no less, and imposing upon them a unity that is somehow sublimated. However, Socrates wonders, if one gives an idea to the ensemble in this way, an essential and undecomposable aspect, is there no cause to fear that the ensemble might participate “in the same eidos as [the element], since it has no parts and there is thus only a single idea,” the same one for the element and for the ensemble considered as indivisible? Whether it participates in the same Idea (eidos) as the element or belongs to the same species (eidos), the ensemble will thus have the same essential character, the same idea, as the element: indivisibility. The link between these two senses of eidos could not be plainer: in order to belong to the same species it is necessary to participate in the same Idea – and the difference between eidos and idea could not be plainer as well.
• Finally, the quotation that should appear to be decisive, though some prefer to confine it to an earlier “period” in the Plato ic corpus:
• And we also assert that there is a beautiful itself, a good itself, and so on for all that we then set down as many; now, we again refer them to the one idea of each, as though it were one, and we call it “that which really is.” (R. VI, 507b5–7)
• All the realities, the Ideas, of course do not participate in the same Idea, but they all possess the same essential character: each is unique and is only one Idea.
• All these passages say the same thing: eidos and idea are not synonyms because it is to the Idea, to what it is, to the eidos, that one must attribute a causal and eponymizing power, the idea conversely referring both to the action and the consequence of the action of this power on the objects that are able to undergo it. It is the dynamic link between the Idea and that which pa ticipates in it, dynamic in the sense that it points to the effect the Idea produces on what participates in it, and in which idea is the visible sign that points in its direction. It is moreover necessary to remember that in the Republic, the idea is said to be a yoke (zugon) that submits objects to the faculty of knowledge corresponding to them. Thus the idea is neither a mere synonym of the Idea (eidos, a meaning this term only takes on in the last pages of the Phaedo, just before the myth), nor the property F that the Form (F) would impose upon a particular x: Its function is to make graspable the essence (eidos) of that of which it is the idea.
• In the Sophist it is the unifying power of the idea that the dialectician must “perceive adequately,” since it varies. But varies according to what?
• And whoever is at least able to do that, perceives adequately one essential aspect (idea) spread all through many, each of whose elements remain separate; or many mutually different essential characters (ideai) enveloped from the outside by one (idea); or again a single essential trait (idea) that, stretched through many wholes, is bound together; and finally many essential characters (ideai) set apart in every way [because] completely discriminated. This – being able to know in which way each one of them can communicate and which way not – is knowing how to distinguish kind by kind (kata genos). (253d5–e2)
• These few lines deal with the one and the many. Thinking cannot be satisfied with the one, and the parricide of Parmenides like the critique of the Eleatic late-learners meant nothing more than this. To divide, or split, or distinguish are so many ways of refusing that the one could constrain thinking from thinking any more, but the way of dividing must fit what it divides: whether an Idea, a kind, a power ... Ontologically, these terms are synonyms, since they all point to real beings; but they are dialectically different.
• If thinking cannot be satisfied with the one, it cannot any more be satisfied with the many: such is the meaning of this strange sentence. Any multiplicity whether of sensible or intelligible realities, appears as a proliferation of differences and dissimilarities that can blur the dialectician’s view and become an obstacle to his ability to discern. He must despite everything succeed in recognizing the same – same name, same essential character, or same essence. Must one speak of collecting? For the Ideas, the problem of their division was treated in the Republic and in the Phaedrus; and as to the division of kinds, it has just been dealt with here. In both cases a knowledge was necessary, the supreme knowledge, dialectic, a knowledge that consists in knowing how to ask and to answer.
• The problem or the question doesn’t come in only when the knowing subject becomes aware of his own insufficiencies. Questioning or problematizing is an essential aspect of dialectical knowledge, as is shown by the necessity to understand, learn, and examine objects that are in themselves problematic. Who is responsible for this necessary relation between being and the question? Socrates and the question his name brings with it: “Just what is that, really?” It is aimed at the being of what is being brought into question, whatever it is. It is thus a “what it is,” a way of being, an essence (ousia), that must “answer” every question that is posed dialectically. The interrogative nature of dialectical thinking turns being into a question that dialectic alone can answer, and thus denies its putatively immediate obviousness.
• Leaving out the interrogative dimension would leave only this narrow choice: is the meaning of the following lines either logical or metaphysical? The dialectician knows which questions he must ask himself, it is in this that his knowledge of kinds consists, and he must also know how to distinguish the same from the other – a question to add to the previous ones. The difference etween the species of multiplicity is not for him a problem, it is the principle whose consequences he must perceive. This only calls for a “generative decision” from him, since he must not do anything. It is granted a priori that since he knows how to divide in accordance with kinds (kata genē) he is also capable of discerning “kind by kind” (kata genos), which of them correspond to the different ways of unification that belong to the various species of multiplicity. Each of these four species is defi ed by its own verb, each a passive participle: the relation between the many and the one is a dynamic relation, a relation consisting in the action of the idea – that is, the aspect, the essential character, the trait – upon the multiplicity able to be afected by it.
• Thus it is a meta-division of the kinds that we are being given to read, and it would be better to rule out from the start a sort of reading that would look for “rules to direct the mind” of the dialectician, in this passage. But it would also be better to rule out a second way of reading: the differences between kinds imply no ontological difference, and if there is any progression among the items in this passage it could only be dialectical.
• The four propositions that make the Stranger’s elliptical sentence will be examined one after the other, taking as our rule that in Plato dialectical method and procedures only become clear when they are applied. So four kinds of kinds will be distinguished, labeled for convenience as G1, G2, G3, and G4.
• G1. The dialectician first perceives “one essential aspect spread all through many (pollōn), each remaining separate (khōris)”: mian idean dia pollōn, henos hekastou keimenou khōris.
• The elements are perceived as standing apart, stabilized somehow in their function as elements, and their separation persists despite the single idea that extends through them. The Other here has only its function of non-identity, it is the condition for the existence of a numerical multiplicity. These elements, all possessing a common aspect and set down as the parts or pieces of one and the same kind, do not communicate. The use of the neuter (henos hekastou) makes the problem of reference inevitable: since the Stranger uses the feminine when he means a multiplicity of ideai, one could infer that if he uses the neuter it is because he is referring to a multiplicity of sensible things. But if one looks at the Meno, one sees that the difference between the sensible and the intelligible plays no role in the species of kind that is in question in G1. After Meno has presented him a “swarm” of virtues, Socrates wishes that despite the multiplicity of bees, Meno would tell him how he would answer this question: “Just what is the essence (ousia) of a bee?” But since Meno still cannot grasp “this single virtue that goes through all the others,” he will choose an example. The term idea is absent from the Meno, but we do there find the difficulty Socrates runs into in almost all the dialogues and by the Stranger in the Sophist: to make his interlocutor understand that his question is looking for the common character that allows giving the same name to a multiplicity of distinct elements. The mode of unification is the same if a multiplicity is made up of numerically distinct individuals: whether sensible or intelligible they can only be “little pieces,” pulverized and scattered. The opposition between the sensible and the intelligible is no more pertinent than that between piece and part once it is a matter of elements belonging to the same kind: the essential aspect is present to each and to their sum, and it is coextensive with them, since it is “extended all the way across” them all no matter their nature, but on the condition that they “consent” to being unified by a common aspect. The extension of a kind can be indefinite or even infinite, but it is countable (“potentially,” Aristotle would say) as is that of beds, bees, or virtues, and as is more obviously the case with even or odd numbers. It would be of no use to try to encompass its extension for it is its power of inclusion hat defines this kind of kind. Being the last term in a division, it is not divisible into species, it is the last because its parts or its pieces are not species but separate elements, each of them one and indivisible.
• Bees and virtues, colors and sciences, audible sounds and numbers, as well as images past present and future constitute “swarms” as long as they are only objects of enumeration and “the unique aspect” that extends through them all has not been grasped. But this single aspect is nothing other than the common character conferred by an Idea onto everything that participates in it a d is thus entitled to the same name: such is the “customary method” Socrates speaks of in the Republic. It consists in “positing a certain Idea (eidos), one for each of the many things (hekasta ta polla) we give the same name.” Socrates explains what he means with this example: “Are we not in the habit of saying that the craftsman who makes beds or tables” makes them “by directing his eyes toward the essential character (idea) of beds or of tables?” The artisan is not a dialectician, he has no access o the Idea but only to that by which the Idea makes itself seen.
• When the multiplicity is made up of separated unities, he who is able perceives that it can only be unified by a single essential aspect that extends through all while preserving their separateness. This minimal type of unification defines a species of genos that is at once the last step of a dialectic that makes its way from Ideas to Ideas, and the first step in a division of genera into their species.
• G2. The dialectician next perceives “many mutually different essential characters (ideai) enveloped (periekhomenas) from the outside (exōthen) by one (sc. idea)”: pollas heteras allēlōn hupo mias exōthen periekhomenas.
• The elements that make up this multiplicity are not set “apart” as in G1: they are mutually “others.” So they are ideai that a e enveloped by single idea, a single essential characters that are enveloped from the outside by a unique character. The verb “to envelop” (periekhein), has just been used in the form of a present passive participle, when being was said to “envelop” motion and rest while staying outside them: “because rest is enveloped by being, as is motion also,” one can say “that they both are.” As the Stranger abundantly explains, to affirm that motion and rest are doesn’t mean that either of the two is identical to being, nor that being is the group of the two minus itself. Being thus remains “exterior (ektos) to the two others.” There is little doubt that the “from the outside” (exōthen) employed in G2 echoes this sort of exteriority. To envelop, by means of an essential aspect (that of being), essential characters that are mutually different or even contrary (those of motion and rest), implies not at all that they lose their own essential characters. A single generic character, that of being, comes to be added to their mutually opposed characters, which become subordinate to it without being altered thereby. What, in G2, are the essential characters that a single essential one must unify by enveloping them? Very probably those that issue from the crossings of a multiplicity by a single aspect. It is no longer enough that the elements to be unified should be distinct: they must be mutually different. In Hegelian terms, between them there is not an “indifferent difference” – a mere non-identity – but a “differe t difference” which differentiates them positively. Thus many arts are enveloped by the art of acquisition: one can acquire by exchange or by capture, exchange and capture themselves including many kinds mutually differentiated; and if one focusses for example upon the art of capturing, this art is divided into contest and hunting, but the hunting of ensouled beings can target walking animals and also animals other than walking; walking or not, all these are the sensible realities that the first type of kind (G1) was able to unify. All the kinds of capture are enveloped from without by one kind, the art of acquisition, which imposes its own and the same essential character upon the essential characters belonging to each of the kinds that it envelops.
• By enveloping from without by means of a generic character the essential characters resulting from the division of the same ki d, which are thereby mutually differentiated, this species of kind includes them: its extension is the sum of all the extensions that belong to the kinds it envelops.
• G3. The dialectician adequately perceives “or again, a single essential trait (idea) that, stretched through many wholes (di’holōn), is bound together (sunēmmenēn) in one”: mian au di’holōn pollōn en heni sunēmmenēn.
• Unlike the three other ideai, which are connected by “and,” the enunciation of this third type of kind includes the particle (au), “in turn.” Its presence has led many commentators to separate G1 and G2 (supposing them to correspond to collecting) from G3 and G4 (which would correspond to division or its results). Others take it conversely to connect G3 with G2, such as Robin, who translates “of such wholes” – meaning all wholes constituted by the preceding operation, or Rosen who also sees in G3 a combining of the multiplicities described in G2. But G2 was also related to the kinds unified by G1, which authorizes to speak of a continuous progression rather than a break between kinds intended to collect and kinds intended to divide. Whether “on the other hand” or “on the contrary,” or “in turn,” it is a multiplicity made up of wholes (holōn) and no longer of elements that must be unified. Since a whole is by definition complete, and therefore closed upon itself, it can have no essential aspect in common with another whole: it cannot be affected by any essential aspect that it does not itself contain. It must, moreover, be fi mly connected: even if all its parts are not necessarily consonant, all must nevertheless hold together. Why should an essential unique character need to unify what is already so well unified? If it extends through a whole it extends through all its parts: it is necessarily immanent in both the parts and the whole. Are we then to suppose that the kinds that are enveloped are thereby subordinated to the kind that envelops them? When it attaches together the wholes, the single aspect must circulate across all (as in G1) in order to connect them, but some wholes could monopolize it along the way to the point of preventing the perception that there is another, or to the extent that though it has been seen it is forgotten, as happens to the mimetic part of the art of production, “forgotten” or neglected in the first six definitions of the sophist. The single aspect can thus no longer go through all the wholes and return to itself. Yet this essential trait’s going through must be circular: the essential trait must make a return to itself if it is the essential trait of a single whole (of tekhnē for example, of which all the wholes that are enveloped are tekhnai). The essential unique trait is connected, joined into a unity (sunhaptō: to link, attach all together, to connect by contact): thus it is not an englobing totality, it does not include but brings into relation, connects, it is the synapse of that which it goes through. To use a political metaphor, a kind that envelops wholes is not analogous to a state that envelops a plurality of different communities that are different and sometimes hostile to each other, it is a confederation: a coordination, not a subordination. No confederation of cities, in ancient Greece, succeeded in resolving this problem since hegemony was inevitably claimed by one among them; mutatis mutandis, it is also the problem that the European confederation or the federal government of the United States must keep facing. The extension of the essential trait must coincide with that of the totality of wholes that it ties together, and in contrast with that of G1, its extension is as in G2 totally determined: it is exactly the result of the addition of the extensions that belong to each of the enveloped wholes. In G3, the bond that co nects wholes is not itself a whole, nor does it include them, it ties together wholes that accept to undergo it providing they remain closed, self-sufficient, and independent.
• A preposition used as a verbal prefix specifies the respective nature of these three kinds of kind: dia-, across (G1), peri-, around (G2), sun-, with, by assembling (G3). So it is in these that the three functions of the idea are thus successively indicated: it unifies by going across, it is a “single aspect;” it envelops under the one and the same name: this name is the “essential character” they have in common; it brings together thanks to one and the same “essential trait,” that of the eidos of which it is the idea.
• G4. There remain four Greek words: pollas khōris pantēi dihōrismenas (πολλὰς χωρὶς πάντῃ διωρισμένας), of which the following are two possible translations:
• “apart, many [sc. ideai?] completely discriminated.”
• or
• “many separate [sc. ideai?] scattered everywhere”
• The situation seems rather hopeless: what to do with these four words, each of which poses its own problem, problems completely separate from each other, whose syntax is left to the good will of the reader or listener to resolve, and in which no essential aspect, character, or trait is present for unifying them in any way whatsoever? Since the multiplicity is put into the femini e (pollas), and idea is the only feminine noun in the whole passage, it is probable that the passage has to do with multiple ideai. Conversely, the adverb pantēi, “in all respects, everywhere” or “totally,” can go either with the other adverb, khōris, o with the verb “discriminated” (dihōrismenas), which seems more natural but does not give a better sense. Finally, what does the verb dihorizō mean, put in the form of a perfect passive participle as are all the others? The prefix dia- here imports “an idea of completion” and a “reinforcement of the uncompounded verb” (horizō), which denotes to “delimit,” to “define.”
• To answer this last question cautiously, it is necessary to refer once again to the use of this verb in Plato’s dialogues, fas idious as that might seem. They present six instances of the verb in the same tense and mood. When we consider three fingers of our hand, Socrates says in the Republic, looking at them tells us that they are at the same time long and short. In what we see, the long and the short are not separate but mixed together, whereas the intelligence sees a long and a short which, intelligently conceived as being relative, can coexist even though they are discriminated. In the Politicus the Stranger addresses a war ing to the Young Socrates: he must never claim to have heard him make a “clear distinction” between species and part; for if every part is a not species, each species conversely is a part: species and part cannot therefore be “totally discriminated.” A bit further on the Stranger declares that to say that weaving “is the most important and most noble art of all those that deal with the manufacture of woolen cloth” is not enough for it to be discriminated: sufficiently distinguished from the auxiliary arts. And in the Philebus Socrates decides it would be worthwhile to recapitulate the four kinds (limit, unlimited, mixture, and cause of the mixture), now that all four of them are “discriminated.” In the first passage the operation is performed by the intelligence, and in the following three by a dialectician. Two other Dialogues attribute the operation to the gods: judging that the front is more honorable than the back, the subaltern gods of the Timaeus stick the face onto the front of the head, for in o der to move more honorably it would be necessary that “what is in front of a man be discriminate and dissimilar.” In the Laws we are puppets in the hands of the gods and the strings they manage “drag us in opposite directions toward contrary actions: tha ’s how vice and virtue come to be discriminated.”
• So to what operation does this verb, discriminate, correspond? Whether its agents be men or gods it always has for its goal to recognize and make recognizable the distinct existence of one or several realities worth being separated out, but that can or could be confused one with the other, or simply overlooked. It is now high time to discriminate the greatest of the kinds, for i is in having ignored them that the ancient doctrines of being have identified being and motion (Heraclitus) or being and rest (Parmenides); as to the Friends of the Ideas they have confused being and same, and the sophists being and other. To “discriminate” is thus a dialectical process that must be identified, distinguished, and defined, a procedure that must discriminate itself.
• “Well – being able to perceive how each of them (hekasta) can communicate and how they cannot is knowing how to distinguish kind by kind (diakrinein kata genos).” The question was to discern how each sort of kind can communicate with other sorts, and not to discover which kinds can or cannot communicate with which: this problem is different from those facing the science of the kinds. For to determine a priori which are the kinds that communicate and which are those that do not would come down to submitting the science of free men to the inflexibility of a logic that assimilates the kinds to categories or to classes. This is why the description of the science of kinds was only presented in an interrogative form: though the questions to pose are always the same, the answers will obviously vary according to the nature of the kind to be divided. And nothing other can answer the question posed by the action that belongs to the nature of each kind, than the power of a soul naturally oriented toward the essential aspect of each being, and whose momentum does not go astray. The dialectician must perceive “how each can and cannot commu icate” for “that is what knowing how to distinguish kind by kind is”: his discernment must come into play, more than elsewhere and more than ever. In diakrinein, discerning, we hear krisis, choosing out, and it is indeed a krisis between the kinds that the Stranger has now carried out. This noun krisis and this verb krinō acquired a metaphorical sense from Parmenides – ontological since this krisis decides between “is and is not” – and it is its power to discriminate that the goddess Justice (Dikē) calls upon when she exhorts the young man to choose between the two ways. In the Parmenides, Socrates says to Zeno, who has just demonstrated that “sticks and stones and such things” are both one and many:
• … but if someone were to distinguish what I was just saying, namely, “begin by dividing and setting apart the Ideas themselves, such as resemblance, dissemblance, multiplicity, unity, rest and motion, and then shows them to be able to mix and to distinguish between themselves,” I would marvel and be delighted, Zeno. (Prm.129d6–e4)
• To distinguish and to communicate, to separate and to mix, are the two basic tasks of the dialectical science. Zeno nevertheless had the merit of recognizing that dialectical discernment supposes taking paths more or less rugged, proceeding in stages, meeting with stepping backwards, impasses that must be overcome, and conclusions that can always be questioned: he recognized the value of wandering, and understood that this kind of temporality is the condition of his freedom. To distinguish does not mean deciding, issuing pronouncements, nor making snap judgments: the dialectical science is the science of free men, and so it is for Zeno of Elea, who like any dialectician knows that taking one’s time in this way is the essential condition of his liberty.
• But diakrinein is not only distinguishing, it is choosing, and it is not only judging but arbitrating between the possibilities that are available. As to judging well, the one who is capable of this is not the expert, the sage (sophos), but the philosopher, for the three instruments of sound judgment are experience, thinking, and reason (logos). He who philosophizes has acquired his experience through thinking, through reasoning about true realities, not about words, and he is able to give an account of the judgment he pronounces: in his case these three dimensions become but one. If in the Cratylus the name is “an instrument hat serves to teach and to discriminate what something is (the ousia), just as the shuttle does to make fabrics,” this diacritical function presupposes that the name was correctly instituted – and there, too, the philosopher must intervene since he is the only one who knows how to use language well. When he chooses, he uses a name he distinguishes, and makes exist a thing that perception or sensory experience could have ignored or confused, just as the weaver does when he disentangles threads of the warp from those of the weft. This philosopher-dialectician has first divided the kinds of kinds, and ascending as it were from the bottom to the top, from G1 to G4, he has arrived at the gates of being and non being, and at decisions (kriseis) that enable him to overcome, in respect to the kinds, the difficulties raised by Parmenides in respect to the Ideas: immanence or separation (in G1), symmetry or asymmetry (in G2), part or whole (in G3). Once he has reached the kinds that are neatly separated he will then proceed horizontally, and it is to the greatest kinds, Being and Other, that he will ask why they should be counted among the greatest.
• “But the dialectical ability,” the Stranger then concludes, “you will not grant to anybody else, I think, except to whoever philosophizes purely and justly” (253e4–6). It is not enough to be a philosopher, one must be so “purely”: the adverb occurs often in the Phaedo, it signifies the need to know by the soul alone and to dialectize without recourse to anything sensible; to discuss “purely” means to discuss without introducing terms whose meaning one does not know. One must also philosophize “justly (dikaiōs),” but this adverb brings up justice and justification (accuracy, correctness), the necessary conditions of all true justice. The soul of a philosopher is a soul that is purely thinking and that only thinks on its own and he must choose the right words and be able to give an account of what is speaking of. The philosopher is capable of this because he is akin to the thing he searches for: sniffing out what is akin, struck by what is different, he always has enough momentum to start over and to see differently, which means to interrogate differently, to become more inventive and to discover another way to ask the same question or another way to answer it, as Plato keeps doing in the Sophist. However, if the dialectician must be a philosopher, and if the philosopher must be a dialectician, which of the two is the condition of the other? The dialectician-philosopher? That’s Socrates, the dialectician who is so “purely” a dialectician he cannot admit of any other determination. The philosopher-dialectician? That is Plato, who knows that the philosopher is a philosopher by his nature, that “philosopher” is not a predicate one must acquire and earn by exercising dialectic, but a nature one must not pervert. One must then emerge “pure” from all the tests that life, the ignorance of others, and the difficulty of the questions he asks himself inflict upon him, and emerge “like the gold one puts to the test of fire.” His trials are for him so many “purifications” (katharmoi). But in carrying out this reversal the Stranger-Plato preserves what he reverses, since with him dialectic remains Socratic, a way of asking and answering; he has only defined it, redefined it, perfected it and shown its diversity all through his dialogues. In the Sophist, it is in his way of dialectizing and in the objects toward which his love of the truth carries him that one must seek out his difference f om the sophist. For it is not upon the philosopher that the light of truth casts its striking clarity upon, but the beings, and as to him, it makes him just as difficult to see as the gods (254a8–b1) – something that is not at all a gift since it allows having any and every opinion about him. The image the Stranger uses is only an image, it serves less to locate the philosopher in a light that renders him perpetually invisible than to push more strongly into the shadows – which are no more the contrary of light than non-being is the contrary of being – the one who is no more his contrary than the philosopher is his, who is not even his semblance like the wise author of maxims regulating human conduct, but his simulacrum: the sophist.
• The Stranger thus closes the open window against this brilliant clarity and the philosopher, by delaying, or excluding, a search to define him – in this joining up with what another philosopher says to us: “what a philosopher is is hard to learn because it cannot be taught: one must “know” it, from experience, or have enough pride to ignore it.”
• However elliptical and controversial, in opening onto the last type of kinds this meta-division of them has handled differently the question of being and non-being. With the greatest kinds the dialectic undergoes its final metamorphosis and becomes a science able to address the problem of the one and the many from the perspective of the same and the other. Once the hypothesis of a selective communication of kinds was adopted, it was demonstrated that this communication included degrees: certain kinds communicate with few (the G3 kinds), others with many (the G2 kinds), and others with all (in all probability some of the G4 kinds). The Stranger next announces, in a way unusual for him that could found scholarly, the plan he will follow. Scholarly or not, what the Stranger hopes for from this examination is decisive: “to succeed somehow to affirm that non-being really is,” and hus to get out of the impasse in which he found himself vis-à-vis the sophist. As a preliminary he will extract the Ideas (eidē) that one says are “the greatest” because of their extension and “the most important” by virtue of their power, in order to not “allow himself to be overwhelmed by their being so many.” After which, he will say “which ones they are.”
• “The ones we have just reviewed are clearly the most important kinds,” says the Stranger. The term “kinds” (genē) replaces the term “Ideas” (eidē): the continuity between a dialectic of Ideas and a dialectic of kinds is thus assured and justified thanks to the essential nature and the way of being (ousia) of the entities to which it is being applied. But if Ideas and kinds are ontologically similar, an Idea has only one meaning, that which the dialectic must define, and only one function, to make intelligible what participates in it, whereas a kind can be ambiguous as evidenced by the eunuch and the bat, and ambivalent as shown by the tekhne: art of artifice? The science of kinds is therefore more complex and its dialectic can give rise to more controversies than the dialectical science, which only goes from Ideas to Ideas.
• The kinds “we have just passed in review” are first of all those that were mentioned when the legends about being were reviewed and the thesis of the Friends of the Ideas was refuted, namely, Being, Rest, and Motion. Motion and Rest form a pair of contraries and cannot mix, but as Being mixes with both, both are. In order for this to make three it is necessary that each be other than the two others, and in order for them to be distinct each must remain the same as itself.
• “What in turn can we mean by this ‘same’ and this ‘other’?” The irruption of this new pair is indeed unexpected, literally upsetting, and it will be justified by an argument a contrario: if Same and Other differ from the three first kinds while Being “always necessarily mixes with them,” we must think there are five kinds, unless “same” and “other” are only supplementary names given to one of those two, that is, to one of the three kinds already distinguished. But Motion and Rest are certainly neither “other” nor “same.” Let us suppose in fact that they had in common that each was the same as itself: this “same” could neither be another name for motion, since then Rest would need to move in order to be “the same as itself,” nor another name for Rest, since in that case it is Motion that would need to stay at rest in order to be “the same as itself.”
• As for hypothesizing that “other” could be another name for Motion, an analogous argument yields its refutation: Rest will not be other than all its others except on condition of being in motion, and if one makes motion another name for Rest, it is Rest that will need to move, in order to differ from all it differs from. Each will thus exchange is nature for its contrary nature, and Motion will become immobilized or Rest will be moved. The pair Motion and Rest cannot therefore have the same function as the pair Same and Other, because they are a pair of contraries. Each of the two can participate in the Same and the Other, but neither can be identified with either.
• There remains a third possibility, that “Being and the Same are only one,” but this is impossible. “Why?” asks Theaetetus. Because if they “meant nothing different,” when one says of Motion and Rest that they are, one would be saying that they are “one and the same thing,” which is surely not possible. “Perhaps,” answers Theaetetus, either because he is hardly convinced of the need to introduce two kinds he had never heard about or because he senses (as Plato makes him and us sense) that Being does have a certain affinity with the Same. In any case, he grants that the Idea of the same must be added to the three previous ones as a fourth Idea. And nothing more will be said about it. Twelve lines, each of which is quite brief, is all that the Idea of the “same” seems to deserve.
• How do things stand with the Other? Is one to say it is a fifth Idea, or that Other and Being are just two names for a single kind? It is not possible to answer this question in the way the Stranger has up until now, namely, by deducing the impossible or absurd consequences entailed by identifying them. For to identify Being and the Other would entail that everything that is is different: this consequence is neither impossible nor absurd, since the Stranger kept saying (against Parmenides) that there really exists a multiplicity of kinds, Ideas, and beings, and that any multiplicity implies an alterity, whether quantitative, qualitative, or essential. Being and the Other are therefore indissociable, but is one to conclude that they are identical? If what is other is precisely what it is “relatively to something other (pros heteron),” must one then admit that all beings are always spoken of relatively to other beings (pros alla), and that for them to be themselves is to be other than the others? In order to answer this question it will be better first of all to get rid of the Aristotelian category of relative terms (master-slave, for example), first of all because we are not here dealing with “terms,” with words, but with “beings” that would be given an absolutely relative being. Second, because in Plato the other is not said relatively to something (pros ti), but relatively to “something other” (pros heteron), or to other things (pros alla). Alterity cannot but be reciprocal, and every being must participate in it in order to differ from the others, since it is specified that it is not according to its own nature that each Idea differs from another one, but because “the Idea of other is extended through all of them.”
• To assert for an Idea or the things that participate in it that having their own essence is not sufficient for them to differ rom others is not only surprising: it comes down to giving the Other a power equal to that of Being, a power it diffuses, as does Being, through all that is. The Other does actually have this power, but as soon as he has added it as the fifth great kind, the Stranger puts this question to Theaetetus: “But I think you yourself will grant that among beings some are spoken of as themselves according to themselves, and some are always said to be relative to others (pros alla)?” He distinguishes two types of being, and this division will allow him to break the impasse in which the universal power of the Other confines him. That the Other is said always relative to others would in fact be impossible “if Being and the Other were not entirely (pampolu) differe t,” for if all beings were in every respect subject to the power of being, they would all, from this point of view, be the same.
• To maintain that that does not keep being from being the only Idea-vowel, will it suffice to refuse it all ontological or metaphysical signification, and to treat it like a word that like most words has many meanings? “These pervasive Forms are obviously the meanings of certain words used in affirmative statements. They are, in fact, the meanings of the word ‘is’.”
• That is a widely held solution; it may even seem glaringly obvious, since in the introduction to the first treatise of his Organon, Aristotle classifies the things that are, beings, in ten categories according to what is said of them:
• Inasmuch as the categories of Aristotle are acknowledged to be valuable to thought, they prove to be the transposition of the categories of language. It is what can be said that delimits and organizes what one can be thought. Language provides the fundamental configuration of the properties the mind sees in things. This table of predicates therefore informs us on the structure o the classification of a particular language. It follows that what Aristotle gives us as a table of general and permanent conditions, is but the conceptual projection of a given language state.
• Can these categorical remarks of Benveniste be applied to Plato? A passage in Diogenes Laertius implies a distinction that would enable classifying beings in two categories:
• “Among beings, some are absolute (kath’auta), others are said in relation to something (pros ti). Those said absolutely are all those which need nothing to be added in expressing them. Examples of these would be man, horse, and the other animals […] Those said in relation to something (pros ti) are all those the expression of which needs something [for example, larger, quicke , more beautiful than something].” (Lives III, 108–109)
• But into which category should the Same fall? For if absolute terms are complete and relative incomplete, the Same belongs to oth these two categories, since it is one of the greatest kinds but also requires a complement, namely, to be “the same according to itself.” So an “alternative category reading” would be that the category of relative terms includes both “aliorelatives” – terms that come in pairs of incomplete but reciprocating terms – and terms that are both relative and complete. And yet, is it the main objection that should be opposed to this reading? To answer this question one must trace the genesis of the expressio auta kath’ auta in the dialogues of Plato, which leads to observing once more its connection with power (dunamis), a notion still remarkably absent, so far, in the analyses of this passage. And yet it is the power of the Other that compels Being and each of the beings to participate in the Same, if Being wants to be what it is and if each of the beings can be and remain what they are. Such is the meaning of Plato’s “parricide” against Parmenides’s undifferentiated being, and such is also what leads him to see in the Other not a relative and incomplete term but a power to differentiate quantitatively (against Parmenides) and qualitatively. There is a number of ways of being, which only a dialectical examination can define. So the true question for him is not that of the different meanings of being, but that of the power belonging to each kind of beings, and of all that could make a being forget what it is. Those who inscribe their nature within becoming must remember what they are; those that enjoy an extra-temporal nature – the Ideas (eidē) – must be able to mix without losing their essential character (idea).
• Is it then possible to apply to Plato this “alternative” category-reading? This is all the more doubtful since in his Categories Aristotle is trying not to correct his master but to provide a basis for something he did not take the trouble to create – in one word, a “logic.” In his treatise Aristotle indeed enunciates the different ways of signifying and classifying “that which is” in general, but his elaboration of the primary elements of discourse is based on his classification of predicative propositions (or “judgments”), a theory that will be presented in his next treatise, the de Interpretatione and which the logicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will call a “calculus of predicates.” The problem is then obviously that in the Sophist the minimal proposition is not predicative but verbal: it connects an action to an agent, which confirms the origin and the sense of the expression auta kath’ auta, as found in some dialogues of Plato.
• We see how much the logico-linguistic approach inverts the problematic, but whoever comes up with such a logically unrefined solution feels almost tempted to apologize. Still, all the other hypotheses only hold on the condition, again and always, of substituting for Ideas and kinds concepts reduced to being abstract and general terms, terms that one can combine logically but tha nowise demand to be thought, questioned. The Stranger declares, at 259a5–6: “let it be said [...] that the kinds mutually mix, that Being and Other move through all, and the one through the other.” The vowel-kind “being” can have only its “existential” meaning, since for an Idea or a kind or indeed anything to participate in it is just to have the power to be. Being enables all the Ideas and all the kinds to communicate with other Ideas and other kinds because, in order to be able to communicate, Ideas and kinds should first exist. The kinds, the Ideas, exist, they are intelligible realities that have their proper power; they are not abstractions or concepts whose equivocity should be examined first of all.
• In spite of the statement that explicitly connects the mutual mixture of the kinds with the fact that Being and the Other move through them all, some have argued that the Other cannot be a kind that holds together Ideas and kinds, since it is what enables them to be divided. And yet the Other intervenes not only in negative judgments, like “the great is not the small,” or “motio is not being,” but also in positive judgments. For without the Other, Being, which is the same as itself and not affected by difference, would not be multiple. Because it is responsible for the differences between beings, the Other guarantees the existe ce of a multiplicity of Ideas and of kinds that are to be linked together: without difference, no multiplicity; and without multiplicity dialectic would be neither useful nor even possible. But the Other is also what ties together, and, in the passage about the five greatest kinds, it appears as the perfect instance of relation per se: “for we have in fact demonstrated both the existence of and the nature of the Other and that in being scattered throughout all beings, it related them with one another (pros allēla) ...” (258d7–e2). Every being needs to participate in the Other in order to be other, not only other than the others but also other than its others, which in turn are other than it. The Ideas are mutually interrelated by a relation of alterity and that goes for the kinds. Moreover, to be other is certainly to be other than (not identical to) all the others, but it is also to be other than these or those others. The other, the kind of the Other, confers upon all the things that participate in it a distinct existence, a simple non-identity, but it equally confers upon them a different way of being that permits them to be mutually differentiated. To determine dialectically their resemblances as well as their differences is the only way to know whether they can or cannot communicate. In other words, “the triad is even” is a contradictory proposition, “the triad is virtuous” is perhaps an absurd proposition, an effort to make two kinds communicate that have no a priori relation between them – sayi g that the kinds triad and virtue do not communicate only means that the dialectician has not found a way to establish even the slightest relation between them. A predication can very well be trans-generic and trans-categorial (in the Aristotelian sense), but only a dialectical examination (and not having recourse to the Pythagoreans) can decide this. It belongs therefore to the dialectician to question himself about the conditions for the possibility of the dialectical science, and to show that they reside in the existence and the difference of each of the realities he examines.
• Being and the Other would not be completely different if the Other had it in common with Being to participate in two ideas. Which two? Motion and Rest being excluded since it is they that participate in Being and not the reverse, and the Other not being able to auto-participate, it would need to be in Being and in the Same that the Other would participate. In this case alterity would no longer always be reciprocal, since there could then be a moment when some other “would be other without being so of an other (pros heteron).” This other would exist, since it would participate in Being, and it would be the same as itself since like Being it would participate in the Same. But in participating in the Same this other being would be so absolutely itself, and thus so absolutely other, that its difference would become an absolute transcendence, unthinkable and ineffable. This absolutized difference is the simple, transcendent, and indeterminable Imparticipable One of the Neoplatonists. To reaffirm that all alterity is reciprocal by the nature of the case is enough to rule out this One, and to show that the Other cannot participate in he Same, as Being does: for the Other, to be itself is to be other.
• It is upon the Other understood in this way that exclusively depend all the realities that, like it, are themselves only by being other. Certain of them are not “things” but processes, indefinite modulations whose motion perpetually transgresses any limit by going from the more to the less continuously, like the voice and its unlimited modulations, or pleasure. Some of these play a role as decisive in the Sophist as the role played by the indefinite realities in the Philebus. So then what are the things that belong exclusively to the Other? All types of “imitations (mimēmata) and homonyms of realities,” all visible and all spoken images. They are, but only relative to something else of which they can try to be faithful images, unless they usurp their name and reality to themselves. As to sensible things, they remain the same as themselves as long as they exist, but they are not the same according to themselves, as are the Ideas and the kinds. Thus it is not to Being that all things owe their way of being, but to the Same, to its absence or to the power of its presence. The most silent and secret of the kinds is also the one tha really discriminates the most. Isn’t having a power to resist the power of an ever changing becoming, and continuing to be “itself” in the sense of an itself that is intelligible to “itself,” the dynamic basis of a difference that is too often interpreted as a dogmatic dualism of being and becoming, of the intelligible and the sensible? To be itself according to itself does not mean to evade becoming, but having the power to inscribe itself within it and resist it by opposing it with the power of the Same.
• Isn’t this just what the sophist does not want to know? While he wants to hear nothing about the difference that separates the other from the contrary, he wants even less to grant the difference that exists between the Same and the Other. It is always disconcerting to see the extent to which the emphasis has shifted in certain readings of the Sophist, as if Plato’s main effort were reduced, thanks to his identification of “non-being” with “other than being,” to juxtapose with beings other beings, baptized by a sort of word-game “beings.” Couldn’t one then go so far as to think that perhaps the essential question of the dialogue may not be that of being and non-being but the nature of the effects of the Same and the Other? For what constitutes the true difference between beings is neither their participation in Being nor their participation in the Other: it is their participation or non-participation in the Same. Every Idea, every kind, participates in it, and this steadfast indefeasible participation in the Same in accordance to themselves is reserved to them alone. What differentiates their way of being (ousia) is not their pa ticipation in Being nor even their participation in Rest: it is their way of remaining themselves though being differently known and being participated in by a multiplicity: their participation in the Same, this kind that is not a kind universally participated in as are Being and the Other, but that is only selectively participated.
• So the Stranger has succeeded in demonstrating that the most important kinds are five in number and that the Other is one of them, and has done so by defining the nature and the extension of their powers. Motion and Rest possess the power to make the things that participate in one or the other of them mutually contrary; the power of the Other is just as universal as that of Being whereas that of the Same divides all beings into two species. The Stranger is however not yet done with the kind of the Other, for once they participate in it, contraries become others: do they for all that cease to be contrary? And if non-being is not he contrary of being, what about the sophist who takes refuge in it? If he is not the contrary of the philosopher in what does his difference consist? The Stranger has not yet answered the question Socrates posed, but he has finally understood that to answer this question, it will not suffice to define the sophist and the philosopher one after the other, as he had first thought. So he must follow a different route.
• “So that what we must say about the five kinds, taking them up in their relations with one of them,” the Stranger now says. Af er having distinguished them the Stranger wonders how to speak about their relations. Why choose Motion first for examining them? Let us suppose that the examination had dealt with the Same, or the Other, or Being: since each of these three kinds is participated in by the four others, it would have been necessary to say that although it is the same as itself, the Other is other than the four other kinds, or other than each of them. As to Being, it is the necessity that it is participated in by the four o hers that would have to be affirmed, since each of them must be in order for there to be five kinds. So the examination would only confirm what was just demonstrated: the being, the itself, and the difference that belongs to each of the great kinds.
• So Motion and Rest remain, the only two kinds whose participation in the other kinds lends itself to being expressed negatively. As to the reason for choosing Motion rather than Rest, we’ll have to grasp that as we proceed.
• – Motion is completely other than Rest:
• it is not at rest.
• – It is:
• it participates in Being
• – It is other than [the kind of] the Same;
• it is “not the same”
• but it is itself (hautē), relative to itself (pros heautēn) because of its participation (methexis) in the Same,
• – and it is not the Same because of its communication (koinōnia) with the Other, which made it become not the same as but other than all the others.
• But then if one supposes that Motion itself can participate somehow in Rest, “would there be nothing confusing about describing it as being ‘at rest’?” Theaetetus judges there would not, “given that we would have to agree that among the kinds certain ones consent to be mixed, but others do not.” But when the Stranger had asked him what would happen if all the kinds could communicate with all, Theaetetus had thought he was offering the best way to reject this hypothesis by saying that in that case, “Motion itself would completely (pantēi) be at rest, and in turn Rest itself would move, if they can fall upon one another” – his expression “fall upon” hardly being the best way of saying “communicate.” The Stranger had then answered him with this question: “but, I imagine, isn’t that what is necessarily the most impossible thing, that Motion should be at rest and Rest in motion?” At 254d7, he again asserts that Motion and Rest are “unmixable” but at 256b6 and c8 he comes to leave open the possibility that they might mix in some way (pēi). The only conceivable “way” would have to do with the motion imposed by knowing upon what it is trying to know. Motion cannot mix entirely with Rest, that is only possible for one of its types, the calm motion of intelligence which differs from the two types of motion distinguished in the Theaetetus (alteration and spatial translation). As for the beings that undergo it, they stay the same as themselves and unmovable, but they present themselves in different perspectives. Perhaps this is the reason Motion was chosen in preference to Rest, for it is not a moving rest that would introduce “soul, life, thinking, and intelligence” into being. If however a friend of the Friends of the Ideas discards the notion of an intelligible motion, he could only suppose there is a “lacuna” between 256b7 and 256b8.
• Being neither at rest and not the same,
• – Motion is also other than the Other:
• it is thus somehow non-other, “according to our present way of arguing” (i.e., that to be “other than” is said “not to be what it differs from”).
• Since it is other than these three kinds, why would one deny that it be other than the fourth, Being? If it were not, there would only be four kinds; so one must “energetically battle” without fear all those who (such as Heraclitus or Protagoras) identify Being and Motion, and maintain that
• – Motion is other than Being:
• thus it really (ontōs) is not being insofar as it isn’t Being, but it is being since it participates in Being.
• Deducing that existence is therefore a predicate, obviously boils down to “forgetting” the definition of being as power. To pa ticipate in a power is to possess its power to act and to acted upon. By being distributed among all the kinds, the nature of the Other makes each of them other than Being, and thus makes them be not being; and about all without exception we would be right to say that they are thus not beings, and conversely that because they participate in Being they are, and are beings (256d11–e3). Heracliteanism, the secret doctrine that underlies the thesis of Protagoras, will finally stop grumbling, and Polemos will no longer rule, for it is no longer the perpetual reversal of every opposite into its opposite that is confirmed by all that is, but rather the other, the difference which enables all things to coexist with each other, which does not keep some of them f om being the same as themselves. Only some of them, since the Same, as one has seen, is not a kind universally participated in, unlike Being and the Other. Being other than all the other kinds, it participates in the Other, but only participates in it from this point of view, insofar as it is different from all the others.
• “So in relation to (peri) each of these Ideas, there are many things that are and an unlimited quantity of what is not. [… ] Therefore, even being must itself be said to be other (heteron) than the others (tōn allōn).” (256e6–257a2)
• The whole analysis of the great kinds aimed at deciding what must be said about them, and what is said at the end is that an Idea can participate in and be connected with a multiplicity of other Ideas, and thus can find itself called by many names. To pass from kind to Idea is to pass from one mode of definition to another. To define an Idea consists in questioning it, the question “what is” is addressed to it alone, to its nature, its way of being, and it must be differentiated in order to answer. The plurality of the other Ideas would thus be responsible for the negation of the Idea of being: “as many ways the other Ideas are, so many ways it is not.” The difference being reciprocal, it is “by not being the others” that “what it is” is brought back to “its unique itself.”
• Since the “not” of “not-being” signifies, and signifies only its difference from a Being that is itself a kind different from all the other kinds, it affects nothing negative to the unique self of the Being that is negated, any more than to that of the Ideas and the kinds that differ from Being; they all remain what they are and do not for all that become “negative Ideas” or “negative kinds.” Conversely, this “not” does negatively affect both the relation of the other kinds with the kind of Being – not being what it is, they are not – and the relation the kind of Being has with them: not being what they are, “in this connection” it is not. What meaning are we to give to this negation?
• Before stating that “not-being is firmly in possession of its own nature,” the Stranger thinks there is still another point to consider. Being and the Other circulate through all the kinds, but if the Other participates in Being it is, whereas since it is other than being it is not; and if Being participates in the Other, being other than all the other kinds, then myriads and my iads of times it is not. Because it makes the kinds different, the Other makes them other than Being, and thus under this relation non-beings. But does the identification of negation with difference belong to this term “non-being” or does the latter only follow the rule that governs every negative expression? Such is the object of the passage that poses the question about the meaning of negation, just after the discovery of the five greatest of the kinds.
• STRANGER: So let us look at this... – THEAETETUS: What? – STRANGER: 1) Whenever we say something is not, it seems, we do not mean it is something (ti) opposite to what is, but only something different. – THAETETUS: How so? – STRANGER: 2) Thus: Each time we say that something is “not large” (ti mē mega) do we appear to you to be pointing (dēloun) to the small any more than the equal?– THEAETETUS: Surely not. – STRANGER: 3) So when one claims that negation signals the contrary, we will not grant it, a d we will leave it at this: that it is one of the others that the “non” and the “not” indicate (mēnuei) when placed before the words that follow, or rather before the things (pragmata) for which the names have been instituted (keētai) and that are uttered (epiphtheggomena) after the negation. (257b1–c3)
• These several lines are fraught with a multiplicity of interpretations in which judicious remarks blend with dead-ends, severe criticism, and generous attempts at repair. Apart from the fact that the irruption of difference and the negative into being is the least of their concerns, the majority of interpreters carry out their arguments in accordance with their own respective logical postulates. Since there is no reason to hope that arguments will not continue to answer arguments, it would be better to leave them to dispute among themselves – though there are some lessons to be learned from the problems they have raised as to the way of reading and not reading these three declarations.
• The Stranger however puts forth two warnings: “we do not mean,” and “we will not grant it,” linked together by an intervening hetorical question: “do we appear to you?” The first warns us against assimilating a negative expression with the expression of the contrary. For to say of a man that he is not good looking or not intelligent leaves little doubt about his ugliness or his stupidity; in this case negation is not a “true negation,” but is immediately taken as positive. These false negations are rhetorical moves for mitigating the brutality of an affirmation (it is kinder to say “not good” than to say “bad,” and “I do not allow” than “I prohibit”) or on the contrary to magnify the effect (“this is no small matter”). Such moves are extremely common in Greek; indeed they are “Hellenisms” and have the Greek name litotes. If Plato happens to use false negations, they issue in aporias. For if “not just” is equivalent to “unjust,” and “not pious” to “impious,” then justice becomes impious because it differs from piety, and piety becomes unjust because it is different from justice, whereas although different they still “could not be more similar.” And if “not true” is equivalent to “contrary to true,” what becomes of the verisimilar? Would it therefore be a matter of going against the naturally rhetorical slant in the Greek language and dissociating negation from the affirmation of the contrary? Probably, but there is more to it.
• What is questioned and rejected in proposition (2) is the capacity of the negative predicate to show, to reveal: “do we seem o you to be pointing (dēloun) by this expression to the small any more than the equal?” So one must be careful not to think the Stranger is merely repeating the point he had just made – that to speak of non-being is not to say a contrary of being but something other than it. This truth was established once the kind of the other was proven to exist. At present it is a matter of making certain that Theaetetus is persuaded of it – since on this point his answers had left some doubt – for if he is not, it will not be possible to continue saying “we.” His “metonymic” agreement will imply that of anyone who would be willing to listen to the Stranger. In thus asserting a direct connection between the problem of negation and the existence of the greatest kinds, the Stranger announces that it is an agreement on this decisive point that will ensure a rapid advance toward capturing the sophist.
• He then puts this question to Theaetetus: “Just as (hoion) each time that we say something is not great (ti mē mega) ... .” What sort of link does the adverb hoion establish between “to say not-being” and “to say not-great”? Is it a matter of giving an example, of making a comparison, of constructing an analogy? Or simply of making Theaetetus understand that even when the nega ed term includes a contrary – which is not the case with “being” but which is the case with “great” – a negative expression doesn’t necessarily mean the contrary, in this case “the small,” since it can also mean “the equal.” To take into account cases that seem most unfavorable to what one is trying to assert and to show that they do not gainsay its truth is an argumentative process of proven worth.
• The set sign of negation + adjective forms a negative expression (rhēma), substantivized grammatically with the aid of the deinite article. The Stranger will thus pass from a property, “not large,” “not beautiful,” “not just” to substantives: “the not-large,” “the not-beautiful,” “the not-just;” and from there to the not-being – a way of saying that “to be,” designated in Greek by the present participle “being” (on), can be negated in the same way as Ideas like largeness, beauty, or justice. This can only seem scandalous to those who continue to give the term “being” the sacred and transcendent meaning Parmenides gave it, a meaning that the Stranger’s parricide, culminating in his definition of being as power, should exclude. For to “being” understood in this way, one can only oppose the non-being – that is, nothing (ouden, mēden: “not even one thing”). But in order to escape this Eleatic presupposition, is it necessary to go to the opposite extreme and consider the putting-together of a sign of negation with an Idea or a property to be nothing but a linguistic act that condenses what is a negative judgment into a term? The on-beautiful for instance, could then be explained in two ways, and mean either that all the Ideas that are not identical with the beautiful are part of a class, non-F, opposed to the class F; or that all the properties possessed by a beautiful thing go into the class non-P, complementary to P, a class that includes all the things that are not beautiful. The former attributes to Plato an error noticed by Aristotle: “the negation of ‘being white’ is not ‘being not white;’” and the second generously credits him with the Aristotelian thesis that negation must not bear on the predicate but on the copula: “the negation of ‘being white’ is then ‘not being white’” Obviously this kind of explanation sheds no light at all on the function of negation at play in the expression non-beautiful. For saying it implies a “non-participation” (in the Idea of the beautiful) or signifies “not identical to the property beautiful,” the mystery remains as to what is to be understood by this “non-” and this “not”: a difference, a contrariety, both, or neither?
• In addition, by “not large,” asks the Stranger, “do we appear to you to be meaning by this expression ‘the small’ any more tha ‘the equal (to ison)’?” To translate to ison not by “the equal” but by “the middle sized” a meaning that would then be found in this passage alone, makes for setting up a series – the small, the medium, the large – and thus to assimilating “signifying he other” with “signifying a term intermediate (metaxu) between two extremes.” From this perspective when the negative expression signifies the other, “other” can only refer to the middle term or the multiplicity of middle terms located between the two extremes of a series, extremes because they are contraries. Wouldn’t this be what is said in the Parmenides:
• But surely largeness and smallness are ever farthest apart from each other? – Yes, absolutely. – So there is ever an intermediate (metaxu) between the two? – Yes – Now, can you say there is anything between them except equality? – No, only that. (Prm. 61d4–7)
• In this passage equality does not at all mean “middle-sized,” for if it is located “between” largeness and smallness it is because it is the tipping point for the incrementally increasing motion of largeness and that of the incrementally decreasing one of smallness. In contrast with the large, which can always become (more) small (than) the larger, and with the small which can always become (more) large (than) the smaller, the equal “does not surpass” and “is not surpassed”: it excludes all becoming because for itself any becoming would necessarily make it unequal. It is then the cessation of two motions that could continue indefinitely that is meant by “intermediate,” not a middle between the large and the small. In fact, those who understand and translate ison with “middle-sized” are talking about what Aristotle calls “privative negation”:
• The equal is thus that which is neither large nor small, but it is by nature either large or small; and it is opposed to those two as a privative negation, which is why it is also intermediary between the two. (Metaph. I 5, 1056a22–24)
• How then must we understand this rhetorical question – rhetorical since a negative response is being assumed: “Do we appear to you to be pointing rather to the small than to the equal?” Since it is not a real question, it might seem legitimate to convert the interrogative adverb “more than” (mallon ē) into the negative adverb, “no more than” (ou mallon). By saying “not large” one would then mean:
• – as much the small as the equal, the one and the other, according to the Democritean trope, “ou mallon”: in this case “the no -large” would cover all the Ideas other than the Large, which would be elements of the class non-F, the negative complement of the class of large things, F, unless it be the group non-G of the properties other than the property G. So that “non” means non-G or non-F.
• – neither the small nor the equal; here the “not-large” would no more signify “the small” than “the middle-sized” according to a trope Plato attributes to the “Heracliteans”: it would in itself carry no sense, would only be serving to exclude, which would leave us with something completely indeterminate.
• In a convincing refinement of this kind of interpretation, “other” would only mean “middle” – a middle term or the multiplicity of middle terms located between the “polar contraries” of a series. Inside one and the same kind, “other” would apply to any term which is neither contradictory nor a “polar contrary”: equality would thus be “other” than largeness and smallness since it is located between them. This interpretation has the merit at least of trying to solve the following difficulty: by belonging to the kind of the Other, would not the contrary cease to be contrary and become other? The solution proposed is that in being “polar,” a contrary would be an extreme degree of alterity, and would thus be “incompatible” with the other extreme, the positive term. Plato’s relation of contrariety would then correspond to the one Aristotle calls enantiōsis, a contrariety between the farthest elements of the same kind, as for example between the large and the small. But that relation still doesn’t tell us what the “not” of not large means, it only tells us that it refers either to a maximal alterity or to an intermediary reality within the same kind, and like the previous interpretations also gives it one or several positive meanings.
• Interpretations of this style, which we may call “logical,” find no other sense to give to the “not” that figures in a negative expression than that of “not identical to” or “not compatible with” which – it must be said – turns them into truisms. Most of them apply to circumscribing the negation by closing off classes, groups, series, without bothering to inquire the way they close them off. But according to proposition (3) above, “it is one of the others that the “non” and the “not” indicate (mēnuei), when placed before the words that follow, or better before the things (pragmata) for which the names uttered (epiphtheggomena) after the negation were instituted (keētai).” Instituted by what, if not by common usage and by its theoretician, Aristotle? The series, if there is any series, must be based on the semantics of ordinary language, the vehicle of opinions that vary in space and in time as Socrates asserts in the Cratylus. But “large,” “beautiful,” “small,” or “equal” do not have the same meaning in Greek, Egyptian, Latin, Hebrew, or Farsi. Any “series” that one claims to draw from a peculiar and provisionally common la guage cannot be logical, contrary to what these interpretations presuppose. Moreover they overlook the fact that they should rather deal with the things named by these names, things they would then need to question. But what is the crucial point is that hese interpreters devote all their efforts to localizing negation within these series, and thereby block access to the questioning of its meaning.
• It is however this question that is fundamental. By speaking only about the other, negation in itself and by itself raises the question of its meaning. The fact that a negation is not immediately meaningful does not at all authorize one to conclude that in itself it has no meaning at all, and that the best that can be done is give it a positive one. Isn’t what’s at stake in the Stranger’s three propositions, to show that negative expressions do signify, but signify in an other way than positive ones?
• What is rejected in proposition (2) is the capacity of the negative expression to show: “do we then appear to you to be pointing (dēloun) [by this expression, the not-large] to the small more than the equal? – Surely not!” When we say “the not-large” it is clear that by this expression we are not pointing to, not bringing to light, any positive determination. We do not mean “small” because we could just as well mean “equal,” and thus we are saying neither the one nor the other. The Stranger’s question does not bear directly on the meaning of the negative expression but on its way of signifying. It is unable to “point to” anything positive at all, which leads to the denial in proposition (3): negative expressions do not even signify the opposite of what they are speaking about. Negative judgments may be understood as Bergson does, as “affirmations of the second degree,” since hey affirm “something of an affirmation which itself affirms something of an object;” they arise from “a need of substituting for an affirmative judgment another affirmative judgment,” have “no other content than that of the affirmative judgment they judge,” and are expressed in propositions that “propose to teach others or to teach themselves.” It is not the case of negative expressions, but why talk about them at all, if they have nothing positive to tell us? Because they do have the power to indicate: “it is one of the others that the ‘non’ and the ‘not’ indicate (mēnuei), placed before the words that follow.” – or better before the things (pragmata) for which the words were laid down.” Proposition (3) is doubly decisive, first in that it grants to negative expressions the power to indicate one of the others, and second in that the other they indicate is not a semantic difference that belongs to a language instituted by convention, but a real difference that remains to be defined. The importance of these two points will be clear once Plato comes to the negative expression, “non-being.”
• The Cratylus is very illuminating as to the use of the two verbs: there, dēloun designates the capacity of a name to shed ligh on the essence (ousia) or the nature (phusis) of the thing; mēnuein in contrast indicates in what direction to look for the sense of the negated word, a direction that by the way could be true or false. For “the fine language (phōnē) that we have today” has for instance “twisted and disguised the term ‘obligatory’ (deon),” which is “an essential aspect of the good (agathou idea)”, to the point that it appears to be a brother of blaberon: “what hinders or harms the stream (phora).” Whereas the ancient tongue shows clearly (dēloi) what each name means, our modern language has twisted the names in so many ways that it erases their intelligible content and “makes them indicate (mēnuein), point to the contrary.” In the Symposium, Diotima says of Eros that he is “neither good nor beautiful,” and when Socrates understands that she means that “Eros is ugly and bad,” she shoots back, “Don’t blaspheme! Do you think that if he is not beautiful he is bound to be ugly?” Just as there exists an intermediary (metaxu), namely right opinion, between expert thinking (phronēsis) and ignorance – the non-desire to learn (amathia) – there exists an intermediary between the beautiful and the ugly. In both cases this intermediary is “the desire for that which one lacks”: in the first case for thinking and in the second for beauty. This intermediary is not a predicate located in the middle between two contrary predicates, but a desire, an aspiration of the soul that drives one in the “good direction.” The nature of the intermediary must therefore always be determined, and Diotima herself must specify and respecify what she means by that: Love is an intermediary insofar as it is a desire for beauty, or more precisely a desire to give birth to beauty. Not only is the relation to the beautiful not of a predicative order, it isn’t the mere relation of desire to its object. Moreover, the determination of the nature of the intermediary determines at the same time that of the extremes.
• What kind of discourse can this sort of intermediary thinking possibly use when it is applied to intermediary objects? For in heir case, what would be the reason “for each of these things to be, rather than not be, the thing that one might say it is?” These things have the same sort of being as that of the eunuch or the bat. The eunuch is not both man and woman, no more than he is neither man nor woman, he is another way of being a man, and also another way of not being a man, different from that of being a woman. The same sort of logic rules the discourse of opinion, the illogical logic of ambiguity: what is rejected is direct affirmation as well as double negation. Just as certain realities are not reducible to the juxtaposition of two different determinations, nor to their double exclusion, so the negative expression (“not large”, for instance) signifies neither “the contra y and the different (the small and the equal),” and neither the contrary nor the different (neither the small nor the equal). The alternative of a plurality of positive meanings or a total lack of meaning is a false alternative. By indicating one of the others of the “thing” it is negating, the negative expression opens up another way of signifying, or a way of signifying the other, that is different from the one consisting in not signifying at all.
• To claim that “not-being” is an exception and can only mean “other,” leads to misunderstanding the very purpose of this examination of negation, which is precisely to show that “not being” is not an exception, that it obeys the same rule of signification that any negative expression obeys. The reason for the reluctance to accept this obviously has to do with the example given in proposition (2). As it seems difficult to admit that “small” is not a possible sense of “not large,” one goes to the other extreme: not only this predicate does not include a plurality of positive senses, it has no sense at all. To escape this false dichotomy, it is enough to note that a negative expression does have a meaning, but has no reference, whether this reference be a class of Ideas or a group of things. Its meaning does not consist in bringing a determination or a plurality of determinations to the term being negated, but to deny that one can determine it by some positive term. In a word, the sense of a negative expression is negative. It does not amount to asserting the opposite, it indicates “the other relatively to” what it negates. Just as the non-being is not – is other than being – so the non-large is not, i.e., is other than large: the way they are others than the term they negate remains to be questioned. The function of the two signs of negation (“not” and “non-”) is indeed to negate the positive determination that is present in the term they negate, but the negative expression consists in opening up the field of this term’s others: it is just this open horizon, a signal pointing in the direction of one of the negated term’s others.
• It implies the intervention of one of “the greatest kinds,” that of the Other: only the “putting together” or synthesis (which Plato will call an “antithesis”) of the positive determination and the other is able to make sense of the way of signifying that belongs to a negative expression. Bergson brings up this Platonic analysis, again without referring to him, when he affirms hat negation and affirmation are not symmetrical, and that “there is more and not less, in the idea of an object conceived of as ‘not being’ than in the idea of this same object conceived of as ‘being’.” There is, indeed, more – not more being or more meaning, but more constitutive operations – in such complex terms as “not beautiful” or “non being” than in the Idea of the beautiful or that of being, since every negative term brings together the positive term and its difference. Only antithesis – the placing in opposition of the positive determination with its other – is capable of accounting for the meaning of a negative expression.
• The function of the signs of negation is to negate the positive determination present in the term they apply to. And more than an opposition of the closed and the open, it therefore brings into play the static and the dynamic: Plato thinks of negative expressions as so many “calls to question,” to examine, to dialectize. “No question could be asked, in particular not that of bei g, if negation did not exist.” It is a matter of a question, not a problem. A problem is an obstacle, it calls for a solution that will make it disappear, whereas the question must persist in the answer, or else it wasn’t really an answer: the sophist makes the problem of non-being his hiding place; Plato makes the question of non-being the path leading to the question about the meaning of being.
• Negation thus is not just the quality proper to a certain species of judgments, for non-being would then have its origin in negative judgments and negation could not be found elsewhere – that is, not within being. So the question is: is negation, conceived as the quality of certain statements, the origin of non-being? Or is non-being the origin and basis of negation? The answer is right there in the question, for how can one formulate even the smallest negative judgment if one admits that all is full of being and therefore of positivity? As belonging to a category and resulting from a process of sorting and separation? In that case, being and non-being pop up at the same time as the two limits of a logical series: they would be contemporaneous. But only two contraries can enjoy this logical simultaneity, and non-being is precisely not the opposite of being. It is neither before or after nor outside being, it is inside being. To see in negation the result of some sorting and separation between judgments boils down to stripping away from it any negative power. How then could it deny being, dig a hole in it and “shake it at its co e”? If being touches being and touches nothing but being, as Parmenides asserts, it is not only nothingness, as the opposite of being, that is inconceivable and unsayable: “from being negation will never be derived.” Whence then shall it be derived? From questioning, for insofar as it implies questioning, negation is not the opposite of affirmation but what precedes any affirmation. It is questioning that brings down the wall of positivity that seems to surround us, a questioning that puts being into question. The question of non-being contains in itself its prejudicial understanding, it is enough to indicate that non-being is not the conceptual unity issued from negative judgments, but that it is the negative judgment, and with it negation, that are constituted and supported by a non-being that is not nothing, but interweaves with being and compels one to wonder about its meaning.
• As long as questioning is the only possible access to non-being, the being of non-being can never be given: it is always questioned. And when non-being is questioned, its difference from being provokes a retreat of being in relation to “itself” – in making it other it prevents it from being “in itself” since alterity implies reciprocity. As is shown in the Sophist, it is the question of non-being that leads to the discovery of the Other, the kind that has no less being than being, but that is only itself when being other, and thus enjoys only a borrowed being that, considered in itself, disappears and is exhausted in its being o her than being. Nonetheless it possesses a redoubtable power: understood as other than being, non-being poses a question aimed at the core of the absolute plenitude of being, and for that to occur requires a soul that is not satisfied with what it is given but starts questioning, and thereby prevents being from closing upon its own dazzling obviousness. The question of non-being opens up “like a hole, a gap” in being. This, by the way, is why Parmenides didn’t ask any questions.
• By inscribing itself within Being, will the Other break it up quantitatively and qualitatively into millions and millions of little parts, atomize it, at the same time pulverize itself, so that it will be just as impossible to speak about being as about its other, non-being? How are Being and what is affected by the Other, and if the effect of the Other is not an infinite fragme tation, but a partition, in what does that partition consist?
• The analogy with science shows how, setting out from a unity, a multiplicity of differentiated parts can be engendered. When i applies itself to a particular object science particularizes itself, the object cuts out the science applied to it and constitutes it as a part. Once it is constituted this part breaks away, and this separation allows it to receive a name of its own. As science applies itself for instance to the healthy and the sick, one part of it is detached and is called “medicine.” In the same way, when confronting the beautiful the other is particularized: its confrontation cuts out a part of the other that is not anonymous and is called “the not-beautiful.” From this analogy one can derive, first, that medicine is no more “the science of the healthy and the sick,” than “the part of science having for its object the healthy and the sick,” so likewise the not-beautiul is not the other of the beautiful, but the part of the other that results from confronting it with the beautiful. The relationship of medicine with the healthy and the sick is a relationship mediated by science: medicine is not just that which has for its object the healthy and the sick – one could say this just as well of magic: it designates the way of addressing this object scientifically. In the same way the relationship between the beautiful and the not-beautiful is not a direct relation – that is the why “not-beautiful” cannot mean “ugly,” its opposite, since ugliness and beauty are two Ideas that are contraries: each excludes its contrary and neither is constituted by its relation to the other. The not-beautiful is in itself a derived construction: it is the part of the other that refers to the beautiful and it comes into being (sumbebēken einai) thanks to the partition of the other. Its genesis results from a separation and a confronting of one of the parts of the other with the beautiful. The not-beautiful is thus not the whole of all the others of the beautiful, it indicates the way of relating to the beautiful through the mediation of the Other, the way of being otherwise than beautiful:
• Healthy / Sick ––> Science Beautiful ––> Other
• | |
• Part of Science Part of the Other
• applied to healthy/sick confronting the beautiful
• = Medicine = the Not-beautiful
• Negative expression is a complex and elaborated notion, it says the other of “something.” “Not-large” does not mean small but other relative to the large, but to be other than large is also a way of being other in an “otherly” way. Even when it is particularized science implies a particular way of knowing, different from that of sensation and opinion (and one can if he is scrupulous denominate it either tekhnē, or mathēma, or epistēmē) and which is defined according to the nature of its objects. The same goes when the other confronts the beautiful, the large, or being: each of these Ideas possesses a particular way of being other, they impose upon the other to differ differently (axiologically, qualitatively, quantitatively, semantically, onto-logically ...). There is no more univocity in differing than there is univocity in science: there are several ways of knowing and several ways of differing.
• STRANGER: Come on then tell me this. – THEAETETUS: What? – STRANGER: Whatever being it is that one distinguishes from a particular kind, which now comes to be confronted with some other particular being from among the things that are, isn’t this the way that the not beautiful turns out to be? – THEAETETUS: Yes, this way. – STRANGER: A contraposition of a being with another being: this, it seems, is how the non-beautiful comes to be something. (257d12–e7)
• The constitution of the not-beautiful results (the verb is in the perfect) from a double operation, and it is not a matter he e of defining what the not-beautiful is. The proof of this is Theaetetus’s answer: “Yes, this way.” It is in this way that the not-beautiful “comes into being”, and not “is what it is.” The object being partitioned is obviously the kind of the other, but while it itself possesses unity and determination, that does not necessarily go for its parts: they might only be “pieces” (mo ia). The limitation of the analogy with science lies in the nature of their “parts,” and thus in the nature of the partition. Can one however say that the parts of the other are exactly as specified in their content and as well and as precisely defined as the positive natures by which they are being confronted? One must pay attention to the verb being used: “to break up into lit le pieces” (katakekermatisthai, perfect passive of katakermatizō). “I had asked you not to shatter (katagnunai) virtue and not to break it into pieces (kermatizō),” Socrates says to Meno, “as if I had to recognize its unity even if you tore it into li tle pieces.”
• The same verb is used in the second hypothesis of the Parmenides, for translating the fragmentation of the One into an unlimited plurality, and in the penultimate hypothesis it designates the crumbling of the masses that takes place in the absence of the One, a crumbling that issues in an indefinite quantity. This is what the antilogical art does: it fragments discourse into an alternation of questions and answers that only bear on words, without there ever being a question about anything. The clearest passage on this subject is surely that of the Politicus, where katakekermatistai designates the “fragmentation” of the non-homogeneous species of “domestic animals living in herds,” an error in division that repeats the confusion between part (meros) and “species” or “essence” (eidos) that was denounced in connection with the faulty division of the human kind into Greeks and Bararians. While every species is a part, not every part is a species (“Barbarians” is not one), and so every part of the other is not necessarily one either, nor does necessarily correspond to an essence.
• In order to express the nature of the operation that brings about the constitution of the negative term, the Stranger speaks o anti-thesis: of contra-position. As Heidegger very aptly said, “Plato has already, long before the Sophist, perhaps from the very beginning of his philosophical enterprise proper, seen the distinction between enantiōsis, empty negation, and antithesis, he disclosive “not” [...] he actually saw the concept of the heteron very late.” This is why one finds no Platonic occurrence of antithesis outside this analysis of negation. Might antithesis – contraposition – introduce another sense of alterity, a “constitutive” alterity, whereas previously the other had merely an adventitious function? It is their being placed in contraposition that separates out one part of the nature of the other and permits one to affirm a parity of being between the part thus sepa ated and the term it confronts. Antithesis is not a logical relation but an operation, a contraposition. It is united with a coming to be, it designates the way negative terms are constituted and not a particular species of relation that Plato would have defined here and then forgotten. From this point of view there is in fact a rupture in the Stranger’s examination, a rupture that took place earlier: since Motion is other than Being “it is therefore clear that it is really not Being.” He then begins to demonstrate that the Other both produces non being and gives it its unique meaning. In the demonstration which begins in 256d5, there is at no time question of the difference between any two Ideas, but only of their difference with being: of their non-bei g, and of the being of this difference: that of the Non-being. The transition is from “non being” as a property of every determinate being – since it is other than being, this being is “not-being” – to Non-being as a single Idea. The examination moves from the ontological to the semantic and back to the ontological, it is never logical. For what logical difference could there be between a negative judgment and a negative expression? Interpreting logically does necessarily confuse negative judgment with negative expression. Yet it is the genesis of negative expressions that describes the partition of the other, a “coming into being” from which these derive their meaning.
• One part of the other detaches from it when it is undergoing the action of a determinate being. In confronting it this part, non-X – a part detached from the nature of the other relatively to X – enters into opposition with X. The beautiful presides over the constitution of the not-beautiful: the positive term, which is a condition for the partition of the other, necessarily comes before the negative term. But their being opposed has the effect of erasing this precedence and setting up a reciprocal relation of being to being. It is thus insofar as being parts of the nature of the Other – this kind that is – that its parts, even if they are not essences, are: for them, to be is to participate in the nature of the Other. Their entire being lies, and lies only, in their being other, in their “difference from,” whereas it is insofar as they participate in Being that the beautiful, the large, and the just are. They all participate in Being, they make up part of it, and thus are part of the beings. But when the beautiful enters into confrontation with the not-beautiful, the only parity it seems possible to affirm between the two terms is their parity of being, for while the beautiful has the property of being other, the Other is constitutive of the being of the not-beautiful.
• From this parity of being derives the mutual alterity of the terms placed in contraposition:
• STRANGER: What then? According to this reasoning, is the beautiful for us more belonging to the things that are and the not beautiful as belonging less? – THEAETETUS: Not at all. – STRANGER: So the not-large and the large itself must be said to be as much? – THEAETETUS: As much. – STRANGER: Therefore the non-just must also be given the same rank as the just, at least insofar as one of them is not at all more than the other. – THEAETETUS: Certainly. (257e9–258a5)
• The interchangeability of the examples – the not-beautiful, the not-large, the not-just – and the rapidity of their succession suggest that all terms put into confrontation exist equally – that is, one is neither more nor less than the other. All have exactly the same amount of being: to participate in Being does not confer more being than participating in the being of the Other. Their alterity becomes mutual, the effect of putting them into confrontation is that each of the two terms, the positive one and the negative one, now correspond with each other: neither of the two is more, neither of the two is more or less other. All have exactly the same amount of being: to participate in being does not confer more being than participating in the being of the other. Their alterity becomes mutual, the effect of their contraposition is that each of the two terms, the positive and the negative, now relate to each other as another to another: neither of the two is more, neither is more or less other. Not only does the attribution of “not-beautiful” not exclude participation in the beautiful, but in order to be constituted the not-beautiful necessarily implies an indirect participation in the beautiful: it only exists out of the participation of the beautiful in the Other that results in the formation of a separated part of the Other, the one that is opposed to the beautiful. In the part of the Other relative to it, the beautiful finds its other, which is not just any other, nor is all the Ideas with the exception of itself, but is its other, which in no way has less being than it does. The not-beautiful and the beautiful thus have the same amount of being because their contraposition confronts a being that is affected by the Other with an “other” that is affected by Being: within an antithesis, each of the two terms becomes the other of its other. While the not-beautiful only signifies the alterity relative to the beautiful, the nature of the beautiful starts to signify only relatively to its negation: mutually opposed, beautiful and not-beautiful they surely are, but they are just mutually determined. Whether it goes from the positive to the negative or the negative to the positive, their differentiation entails neither a loss of being nor an increase in alterity, but they leave open the question as to their nature: the positive term presents a determination just as incomplete, from the dialectical point of view, as the negative term. When I say “not-beautiful” I may be wrong about the nature of the beautiful, but my expression will no less signify something: the other, relative to what I believe the beautiful to be; so the “nature of the beautiful” will no less have fulfilled its function of focusing the opposition, and it will remain no less other than the nature of the not-beautiful. While it can be but a piece of the other-that-is, a piece deprived of any real unity, it will not be any the less: it will be the other relative to the beautiful, which in this case is not necessarily an Idea. For the beautiful and the not-beautiful can both be a matter of opinion, and no more the one than the other; and both can be names badly instituted or badly understood. Truth and error have nothing to do here, they are a matter of dialectical examination, while in negative expressions the other plays no dialectical role but has only a semantic function: to determine the meaning of a negative expression when it is opposed to a positive one, and to assure from this point of view the ontological parity of the two terms.
• Identical operations constitute both the nature of the Non-being and the nature of the property, not-being.
• To assert that the Other is a kind, it was not necessary to go through the analysis of negation: the difference between Being and Motion and Rest was enough to establish that the Other is the condition of a multiplicity of differentiated kinds. But to be able to affirm that the Non-being “assuredly possesses its own nature” and is “one Idea” (eidos hen), the question of the sense of negative expressions and the determination of the two operations that preside over their coming to be – separation and contraposition – had to be examined first, since unlike the “other,” “non-being” is a term that results from such operations, whose meaning can then only be discovered by considering other terms of the same kind. The not-beautiful is only insofar as it participates in the Other, which itself in turn participates in Being: the Other is at the same time constitutive of the being of the not-beautiful and the condition for its having a sense. In exactly the same way, the Other is what permits one to affirm the being of the Non-being and to confer upon “not being” only the meaning of a difference from being.
• That which has an opposite necessarily excludes its opposite, the cold excludes any participation in the hot, and the even in he odd. Wouldn’t what is non-being therefore exclude all participation in being? This would obviously be the case if not being signified the opposite of being, and if the Non-being were the opposite of Being. That it is not, is precisely what the Strange wants to establish, but what he has done so far has only demonstrated that when confronted with the nature of a being, and therefore with a “part” of the nature of Being (the beautiful, the just), the nature of the Other becomes fragmented and brings i to being the other of this part of being: the not-beautiful, the not-just. Is the next sentence just repeating it? Can the similarity of “not being” with “not beautiful” or “not just” be maintained?
• STRANGER: Thus, it seems, when a piece (morion) of the nature of the other and the nature of being enter into opposition, their opposition (antithesis) is no less – if we dare say so – endowed with its manner of being (ousia) than that of being itself, since it is not its contrary that it signifies, but only this: its other. – THEAETETUS: That could not be more clear. – STRANGER: So what name are we to give it? – THEAETETUS: It’s obvious: the Non-being we were looking for because of the sophist, here it is! It’s him! (258a11–b7)
• The beginning of the Stranger’s first sentence, with its series of genitives, can be constructed in several ways. Does it cont aposit the “nature of a part of the other” or “a part of the nature of the other,” with “the nature of the being” or with “[a part] of the nature of being”?
• To supply [a part] to pair up “part (of the other)” with “part of being” comes down to repeating what the Stranger has just said: the nature of a part of the Other – the not-beautiful for instance – confronts a part of being, the beautiful. But it is a part of Being, namely the beautiful, that fragments the Other. Yet if one reverses the direction, and if it is a part of the Other that partializes Being, what parts of Being would be those that would not be confronting the Other, since the two kinds are universally participated in, and therefore co-extensive? If there is little doubt that it is with the nature of Being, and not with the nature of its parts, that the Non-being enters into confrontation, then we are left with the first alternative: is it the nature of a part of the Other, or a part of the nature of the Other that is confronting Being? The difference is that in the first case, it is its confrontation with Being that would cut out a part of it, whereas in the second, the Other would by nature have parts one of which would naturally be confronting Being. The question then becomes: what would its other parts be confro ting? Well, if for example copies differ from simulacra, it is a part of the Other that makes them differ, whereas they nevertheless all are. But if there is not only one manner of differing, if the past does not differ from the present in the same way i differs from the future, or if the philosophers do not differ from the statesmen as they differ from the sophists, it is necessary that these different ways of differing fragment the Other, which has then an infinity of parts, its power being coextensive with that of Being. This is why it seems we must opt for “a part of the nature of the Other.” It is only a part of it, not because there would be other parts that would oppose something other than being, since this “other thing” would be, but because it does not oppose the nature of a being but that of Being.
• But when it confronts Being, does the Other partialize in the same way as when it confronts the beautiful and the large, and even does it partialize at all when it is confronted with Being? One might think it is impossible, first because Being and the Other are universally disseminated: How could Being separate out a part of the Other, and how could the Other cut out a part of Being, since Other and Being are co-extensive? But if, when it is applied to the Other, Being were impotent to separate out a part of it, the Non-being would strictly be equivalent with the Other, since it is opposed to Being and not to the being of each thing. How to justify the term “part” in these two cases? In fact, this objection assimilates two things that are completely different: on the one hand the universal extension of Being, and on the other its sense, distinct from that of all the other kinds. The Non-being confronts Being insofar as Being signifies only being, and not the Same or anything other than itself. Thus, one must think of every negative expression, including Non-being, in terms of intension or sense, and not in terms of extension. To say that Non-being confronts Being means that it confronts what Being signifies, its own nature, in itself and in all the beings: it does not confront Being insofar as Being extends to all the beings, but insofar as it possesses the power to bring into being, to exist, all the things that participate in it.
• This is what the Stranger strongly affirms when he concludes that the Non-being is firmly assured of its own nature and that i is so in exactly the same way as the not-large and the not-beautiful:
• … must we not have now the audacity to say that non-being is securely in possession of its own nature? And that, exactly as just now the large was large and the beautiful was beautiful, as well as the not-large and the not-beautiful, the Non-being was and is in itself not-being – and thus a single Idea to be counted one among the many things which are? (258b10–c4)
• The nature of the Non-being is contraposition, and it has no other. Antithesis is not for it a constitutive operation, it does not result from it, the Non-being is itself a contraposition: an antithesis. Like every Idea, the Non-being is not the ensemble of its participants, the ensemble of these antitheseis that are the not-beautiful, the not-large, etc. In other words, “non-being” is not an incomplete expression, or the general form of the enunciation, “not to be X;” it is not the sum of all the parts of the Other that confront any other term, it is – like every Idea – a condition for intelligibility, and like every Idea it re ains the same nature while being multiply participated in. But what participates in it are the contrapositions, which do not participate in the Other in general but in a part of the Other, in its contraposition with Being that is called “Non-being.” Cont aposition of the nature of a part of the Other with the nature of Being, the Non-being keeps being at a distance, it is a retreat from it.
• We know the fine descriptions which the Stranger in the Sophist gives of this “other,” [...] that has no being except its being-other, i.e., enjoys only a borrowed being, which, if considered in itself, vanishes and takes on a marginal existence only if one fixes one’s gaze on being, and which exhausts itself in being other than itself and other than being, others which are no less than being itself.
• The Other, the last of the three great kinds to be discovered, only emerges if one considers the differences among the kinds: its power of differentiating and relating exhausts it, for this power is not a property of its nature, but constitutes the whole nature of the Other. All the being the Other possesses, it borrows from Being, without this ever becoming its own proper being. Thus, “considered in itself” this being vanishes: it is the inconsistent and evanescent being (though a being, still) of the absolutely relative. But if one fixes one’s view on Being, if one relates the Other to Being, then the Non-being is constituted, and it is about it that the Stranger affirms over and over that it has no less being than Being. To participate in the Other is to have only a relation with an other as its being. The alterity of the Other confers upon each being the property of being o her relatively to an other. The relation of the Other with Being thus triggers two operations: the partition of the Other, and its contraposition with Being, which constitutes the being of the Non-being.
• Amidst the discovery of the five greatest kinds, the Other is the kind that requires Being to be other than the Other and all he other kinds: to be but one of the kinds that are. Its difference could however only be stated provided that Being is not the same as itself, and not the same in all beings: that there exists an infinity of different beings and of different ways to be. In this lies the core of the parricide. Being universally distributed, the Other differentiates Being into beings numerically distinct and mutually different. As a kind, the Other is what prohibits Being from being only being, since it too is other, so that it can only be “itself in itself” in a mediated way, by participating in the Same. The Other is therefore what forces Being and each being to participate also in the Same, to be the same as themselves, if Being is to be truly being and if a being must truly be the being it is. The existence of the Other imposes upon Being that it participates in the Same and in the Other. For to participate in the Other and not to participate in the Same is to have no other being than alterity – a total, perpetual, and relative alterity – which only allows relations and relations of relations whose terms are themselves relations. It is to this aspect of the Other that the penultimate hypothesis of the Parmenides refers: if the One is not, the others can only be mutually other, but from afar each appears to be one: they all appear (phainomena) to be affected by the Same. As to the “sophisticates” of the Theaetetus, they deny all being in itself, concluding that the word “be” must be eliminated and that all being must e denied to relation. Understood that way, the Other does not only signify the other, it is that which has no part in the Same.
• If such a world may happen – that is, the world of the sophist – it is because the Other, alone among all the kinds, can be the same as itself only by being other. Each kind, in fact – for instance motion – is said to be “same” by reason “of its participation in the Same, in relation to itself,” a relation that, in turning it towards itself confers upon it its “itself.” Participating also in the Other, “it becomes no longer itself, but other.” The Other is thus an exception, since in its case being turned toward “itself” is to be turned toward the other. Beings can be said in two ways: insofar as they are said “in themselves according to themselves,” and insofar as “they are always spoken of relatively to others”: “as for everything that is other, is it necessarily in being other than another that it happens to be exactly what it is?”
• Between the other-that-is and the being-that-is-other, between the Not-being-that-is and the Being-that-is-not, it would be impossible to make a distinction if the Same should not intervene: there are beings that are the same as themselves as long as they exist, and beings that are always the same as themselves and remain so despite the discursivity of dialectic that determines hem by differentiating them, and can only differentiate them as long as they stay the same. Dialectic would however be also impossible if the Other did not connect beings by being distributed across all of them. The dialectical function of the Other presupposes the ontological function of the Non-being, which supports the equal possibility of differentiating being from other, being from being, and other from other – the only way to think of Being differently from an undifferentiated identity assimilable o nothingness. As for the roar of the Non-being, it is not in the Sophist that one must try to hear it, but rather in the last hypothesis of the Parmenides, which draws the consequences of the absence of the One: “then nothing is” (ouden estin, 166c1); or at the end of the Phaedo, since, though immortal, the soul is not certain of being indestructible (106c–107b). It is only when one imagines this total retreat of the One or this destruction of the soul that the power of the nothing would come into view, and that it would be. The Non-being being the difference inside Being, “it must be counted as a single Idea (eidos), one among the number of Ideas that are.” But if it is not this external nothingness, which would at most be an image, and if it is not identified with the kind of the Other since it is but a part of it, how are we to define its Idea, what essential aspect could it confer upon all that participates in it? The only possible answer is that the Other is the opposite of the Same.
• To participate only in the Other is not to be oneself. A being is itself that is able to be other than its others without thereby being altered, denatured, and it is from being “according to itself” that it draws this power – in other words, it draws it from what it has done of its soul. Conversely, to possess a way of being that is not that of the other, is to have no other bei g than being other relative to another: such is the being of appearance, of simulacrum, and such is also the “being” of the sophist.
• Theaetetus having agreed that he sees no reason not to believe what has just been asserted, the Stranger needs to specify the rue nature of his parricide. He has assumed that the Other has by nature a power of differentiating: having such a power, it is, and its nature is the condition for all contraposition. When a being connects itself with another being, their contraposition metamorphoses into a mutual alterity: it is then possible to say about not-being that it is the other of being.
• Therefore, the “parricide” of Parmenides is not content with affirming the being of Non-beings, it necessarily implies that Being, in a certain way, is not. Plato’s Non-being is opposed to a pluralized and differentiated Being, and it is this Being that has no contrary: not-being is not the opposite of being because being does not exclude it. For if one persists in considering their relation as a mutual exclusion, Being is conceived as positing its own possibility – since it is obvious that “there is” rather than nothing, and that “it is possible to be and it is not possible that nothing (is).” – as well as with its necessary a d exclusive affirmation. Since everything is full of the same being, no internal or external difference can split the sphere. The Stranger is thus right to declare that he has pushed his refutation of Parmenides further, wider, and that in affirming the existence of Non-being he has not only taken the prohibited way but has introduced alterity into being “so that incontestably, thousands and thousands of times it is not, and the others, each taken separately or all together, under multiple relations exis and under multiple relations do not exist.” Whoever will claim that he has not refuted Parmenides will have to refute both what he affirms about Non-being (that it is) and what he affirms about Being (that it is not).
• Beyond Parmenides, then, but also beyond Hegel. For to think of not-being as contraposited with being is also the only way not to posit the identity, quite Hegelian this time, of identity and non-identity, and therefore not to affirm the domination, initial or terminal, of the Same. Neither Parmenides nor Hegel: the Platonic interplay of Being, the Other, and the Same allows no preponderance to any one of these three great kinds over the other two.
• Since not-being is not the opposite of being, there is no reason to fear that the Non-being is unsayable: “as to what we’ve now said, that Non-being is, let one either persuade us we are wrong and refute it; or, as long as he cannot, he too must say as we say.”
• – First, that the kinds can mix. The opposite hypothesis was rejected because it made discourse impossible, and it was then the hypothesis of a selective communication that was retained: all that is being stipulated here is the general possibility of their mixing. Is it what must be refuted, and if one succeeds at that, the question of knowing “which kinds with which?” will obviously no longer be raised.
• – Second, even if he grants the general possibility of a mixing of the kinds, the gainsayer will be able to contest whether it is valid between two of the greatest kinds in particular, Being and the Other. It was established that because they are universally participated in, they participate in each other, and it is their mutual participation that has allowed for the conclusion on the one hand that if the Other participates in Being, it is not what it participates in, but that since it participates in it, it is; and on the other hand that since Being participates in the Other, it differs from all the other kinds. Differing from all the other great kinds, it is impossible to identify it with any of them, but also to assimilate it to any other kind. Every partisan of universal mobility, for example, claims that he has refuted the first impossibility, but yesterday Socrates refuted these refuters in the person of Protagoras, and has launched a different attack today. So it remains for them to answer how, if everything – thought included – is incessantly moving, how could it perceive and much less affirm that everything is moving. But who could have attempted to refute the second? Nature-thinkers like Thales, according to whom “all is water”: if all that is is water, it is water that makes all that is be, not being; and so also for the atomic theory: if everything consists of atoms here is no need to add the kind of Being to that of the atoms, since it is identical to them. The physical transposition of the Being of Parmenides turns being into “the group of all the beings minus itself,” and there is no need for a communication of kinds, since as far as kinds are concerned there is but one. In both cases the possibility of non-being is refuted by the nature of what is, and being has become useless as a kind. One can understand why Plato never cites Democritus, for he is probably the most dangerous representative of this sort of refutation, and it is not certain that this Son of the Earth could be improved upon, especially since the physics of later times have proved him right.
• The first consequence of the participation between these two kinds, Being and the Other, is that since the Other is other than Being, it is not; but that since it participates in being, it is. But the second, the one that concerns Being, is oddly dissymmetrical: it participates in the Other, “and therefore will be other than all the other kinds.” It is no longer a matter of these two great kinds, but of the way all the other kinds and each of them are affected by their reciprocal communication. Hence Being is said “thousands and thousands of times” not to be: the multiplicity of beings and thus of kinds they belong to is a quantitative multiplicity resulting from the participation of Being in the Other; it turns back upon Being and makes it not be, thousands and thousands of times – as many times as its others exist. But these thousands of kinds that are different from being, these “other kinds,” are and are not “under certain relations.” The multiplicity of kinds, in order to be said to be and not to be, requires two interventions of the Other: the first is quantitative and results in a numerical multiplicity; the second is diferentiative: each kind will be said to be and not to be to the extent that and in the way that it is able to differ from Being. Difference forces the question under which relation each of the other kinds differs from Being: it calls for a dialectical examination.
• The Stranger is thus not content merely to sum up all that has just been said, he has connected two arguments whose connection might not be seen: the possibility of the communication of kinds along with the science that derives from it, and the discovery of the kind of the Other, which affects being by engendering thousands of other kinds, all of them affected by Being and by the Other.
• This recalling of the principles they have established is not meant to repel any attempt at refutation, but to show that refutations will be dealing with an argument solidly articulated. Without saying, like Socrates, that he would be pleased to be refuted, the Stranger would willingly make himself available for such, as long as it be “a real refutation,” therefore neither rheto ical nor eristical.
• He now states the three conditions for this:
• – He who is setting about refuting a thesis must, before rejecting the solutions it claims to have brought, discover the difficulty it has tried to resolve, submit himself to it and try to formulate it more correctly, and only then to confront it, without making up a new one easier to attack “by dragging it now one way and then the other.” Thus, refutations that do not understand the nature of the difficulty are not real refutations, but neither are those that do not see where the difficulty lies and from what point of view it must be considered. That is what Plato the Stranger has done: from the start, he confessed he was defea ed every time on the topic of the Non-being, but then he came to understand why he had declared it unthinkable and ineffable; having located the difficulty in the nature of Being as it had been conceived by Parmenides, he saw that his parricide would not be enough, and that he would have to take into account that each great kind advances under the mask of one of the former great myth-making “philosophers” to claim its identity with the kind “Being,” and to make Non-being its opposite. If the hunt for the sophist is so difficult it is therefore because nothing is more difficult to make out than non-being. The sophist makes no mistake in taking refuge there, for he can then find refuge in all the other kinds than being, a list of kinds that is neither full nor ever will be.
• – The second condition is that one must take the time to proceed step by step, often to go back and do it over, before being ale to make a leap forward. This condition refers to the perverse use very young men make of dialectic. “Imitating those by whom they are refuted, they themselves refute others, like little dogs enjoying pulling and tearing with speech at those who happen to be near.” To play at contradicting anything and anybody for the sake of the game lacks measure and moderation. Proceeding step by step, following the meanderings of an argument without leaving anything out and going back through them as many times as eeded, is a condition for the proper use of dialectic, which resists haste as well as immediacy. To really refute thus requires that one submit to the painful and lengthy temporality called for by a dialectical refutation.
• – The third condition consists in taking into account the point of view adopted by the adversary when he asserts that what is he same is other or what is other is the same. The Stranger here applies the elements of the method of the purgative refutation of erroneous opinions described in 230b, to the refutation of his own theses: to demonstrate on the same objects, from the same points of view, and under the same relations that they are mutually contradictory. One must understand the point of view of the adversary and not stick at words if one is to determine how to combat his assertions. Refutation too is thus a matter of modality; it is not a game in which the same and the other are used as pawns. This is the meaning of what happened yesterday: Socrates had to defend Protagoras in order truly to refute him. To make the mistake the Stranger denounces in the Sophist furnished Socrates yesterday an opportunity to teach the lesson about refutation that he lends to Protagoras. “Without being either aggressive or hostile, it is by starting from this” – the theses maintained about universal mobilism and man the measure – “that you must examine whether knowledge and sensation are the same thing or two different things,” and not – as just now – “take off from the expressions and the words in the conventional language, which most men generally drag in somehow or other regardless of the way they are being used, and end up in all sorts of dead ends.” This is what the Stranger repeats when he says that one must “be capable of following each point in an argument, by putting it to a test, when someone states that what is the same is in some way (pēi) different and what is different the same.” So one must also take into account the point of view of his adversary since all these assertions are “determined (peponthenai) in this way (ekeinēi) by his way of seeing the objects he’s speaking of.” However we translate this passage, the text of which is very uncertain, the modalizing expressions indicate that every affirmation must be related back to the way thinking chose to get there.
• The conclusion to be drawn from what has come before is that in order to capture the sophist we must opt for the hypothesis of a selective communication among the kinds: this alone can save logos. But who are they that threaten logos? What sort of logos would they deprive us of and deprive themselves of?
• Since those for whom all the kinds communicate with all or none with none contradict themselves, they present no danger. But there remains those for whom discourse consists in empty words that refer to each other and can be identified, assimilated, and juxtaposed without difficulty exactly because they are only words. Talking only talks about talk, never about things: this is what Gorgias says, but also what Plato thinks Parmenides has said, who only grants to speech the task of signalizing and pointing the way along the only available way. These two conceptions of logos, the one that radically cuts it off from being and the other that roots it in a being that is neither multiple nor differentiated, both deserve a “parricide”. However the first vindicates its descent since it draws from Parmenides the consequence that he ought to have foreseen: the total autonomy of language ove against what is – which for him is what is perceived. Endowed thus with a purely linguistic kind of existence, language can be the object of many techniques while remaining their instrument. This is why what the sophist says deserves to be listened to a d understood, because in this he is dangerous: as a god of refutation, as Socrates alone has been able to detect, he very easily exploits the inherent weakness of mortals’ language and reasoning. In concocting his killer sophisms he perverts the majestic Only Way of Parmenides for his own gain.
• Although the separation of speech and being is radically affirmed by Gorgias, it is problematic for Plato – literally so. To place language “among the kinds that are” – to make it “a kind that is”– what does this mean? Doesn’t this kind, language, belong to the “mimetic” art? Isn’t verbal expression a branch of mimetic? Aren’t words mere imitations of things? The etymologies of he Cratylus show that they only express the opinion that the name-giver, the legislator of language, has about things. Language expresses his opinions, but it does not imitate them. Let this be agreed, but as to language (logos and not glōssa) spoken or written, isn’t it an imitation of the silent language the soul speaks with itself? Of this it is only the audible emission or the fixation in writing, with a vocabulary and syntax exactly the same: spoken or written language is not an imitation of thinki g, since thinking is language. It collides with the limits of “ordinary language,” of one’s “mother tongue,” and invents ways to bypass them and transgress them, but in doing so shows that they are the only language that can be a common one. The philosopher can dream of having a technical language of his own as the mathematician does – that’s called logic, which when used in an extreme and violent way constitutes eristic. By thus dodging its possibility of being true, a logical language reduces truth to othing more than a property of coherent reasoning, which is the essence of dianoetic thinking. The problem then is that nobody talks to himself with this perfect and perfectly artificial language: in order to speak it one must stop talking to oneself and therefore stop thinking – refuse, that is, the discontinuities and divagations of a thinking that seeks to learn and understand what is really true, and thus to disallow what thinking truly is. “Mustn’t one call them philosophers, rather than philodoxers, those who desire to grasp what each thing is, in itself?” Once again the hunt for the sophist, this convinced philodoxer, falls upon the philosopher. For if every speech arises from a desire and takes its objects and its goals in accordance with it, eve y statement depends upon who is making it. The speaking subject thus reveals his nature in every word he speaks, and it is this that determines the kind of power he grants to speech and the sorts of things he thinks it able to speak about. In order that discourse be a kind able to communicate with other kinds, it is necessary to give it as its subject a soul able to desire to understand what each of the realities truly is, for it is “from their mutual interweaving that discourse is born.” If it is from Being that each thing derives its being, it is from the Other that each thing derives “what it is,” its difference, its own way of being, its ousia.
• From here on, the dialogue can make its way toward the truth that, no more than non-being is the opposite of being is the false the opposite of the true, and thus that the sophist is not the opposite of the philosopher. He is his other: his false semblance, his simulacrum.
• Yet, Theaetetus does not understand why they should come to an agreement about discourse, and so the Stranger undertakes to explain why.
• This much has rescued logos by rooting it in being, but to count logos among the kinds that are does not in itself assure that its way of being is such that it can communicate with non-being. So this is what remains to be examined.
• If logos does not mix with non-being, says the Stranger, “then everything (panta) is true.” What does “everything” mean, here? All the things? It has already been said that, though they are, they are not all true beings. Perhaps then, instead, “everything that discourse says” – all its statements, even if they are about appearances and about the opinions one has about them. For what happens if non-being mixes with opinion and with discourse? Both of them turn out to be false: “for the fact of believing and saying things that are not is, I think, what the false (pseudos) consists in, when it occurs in thinking (dianoia) and in speech.” Thinking is substituted for opinion, rather for a certain kind of thinking: “dianoetic” thinking; as for the definition (a prudent one) of false discourse, it is at least premature, since it will first need to be demonstrated. This is why it is better to begin by exposing its effects: once the false exists, there is trickery, ruse, and illusion (apatē), and everything is filled of images, whether they are copies, semblances, or psychic images (phantasiai). Yesterday Protagoras asserted (through the mouth of Socrates) that phantasia is the measure (the kritērion) by which man decides what is real. Since it is the way reality “presents itself” through the intermediary of sensation, the psychic image is always true, and it only arouses true opinions, for according to Protagoras sensation cannot be deceptive. However, “since it has clearly appeared (ephanē) that non-being participates in being, it is probably not on this front” that the sophist could “join battle.” Perhaps he could say “that certain Ideas participate in non-being, and others do not, and that discourse and opinion are among those that do not participate in it.” In this way he would be protecting the domain in which he operates, that of spoken images and of appearances cut loose from their originals, and he would thus possess an art: the art of fabricating simulacra.
• The Stranger then turns to the list of steps with whose help they will be able to answer the objection he just lent the sophis , all the while uncertain that they will succeed in capturing him:
• – to discover completely what discourse, opinion, and imagination can possibly be
• – so as to examine what communication they have with non-being;
• – then to prove that the false does exist
• – and establish what connection the false has with the speech of the sophist; and if there is none, to detach him from this and look for the sophist in another kind.
• Having still to do all this without even being certain of its result throws Theaetetus into still another fit of discouragemen , which leads him to understand why the hunt for the sophist is so difficult: it has to do with his seemingly inexhaustible power to put up defenses and to generate problēmata – defenses or ramparts thrown up against the assailant, but also problems since problems are “obstacles.” The problem of non-being has barely been removed when the sophist takes refuge behind the existence of the false, and after that he will raise some other obstacle, and then another, with no end in sight. As the proverb says, “Fine things are difficult,” and one can hardly help but admire the sophist for his creativity in defending himself and his artful dodging. Besides the philosopher might even be happy to have an adversary worthy of him, knowing all the while that if the sophist wins it will be he that will pass for a philosopher, whereas for the opposite to happen it will be necessary to satisfy many improbable conditions before the philosopher becomes able to put an end to the tribe of the sophists. The Stranger answers wi h an exhortation to courage, the fundamental virtue with which the philosopher is provided by his nature. He has proved it by destroying “the highest rampart” – the sophistic negation of non-being – and “from here on, the rest will be easier and of lesse importance.” One must now move on as much as one can, since to stop advancing would amount to retreating.
• The existence of what is not but appears to be is the condition that makes it possible to say something other than what is, thus to speak falsely. So one must begin by asking whether all words “harmonize with each other, or none with none, or some will and others will not.” The problem is a problem of a harmonious adjustment (sunharmottein) which was already treated in connection with the Kinds, the Ideas, and the letters of the alphabet, and the analogy with the vowels showed that certain kinds “circulate through all the others” and serve as a hyphen “to make them capable to combine.” We must proceed in the same way with words.
• Why undertake this inquiry? asks Theaetetus. Because “it will be that way (pēi) and there (tautēi)” that what we are presently looking for will appear in full light (phainetai). The reference to the Ideas and to the letters did imply a slight shift in the vocabulary used in dealing with the relation between kinds: whereas for kinds, “to communicate” means “to mix,” for the le ters and the Ideas it means “to connect” (thanks to the vowels), “to participate” (thanks to the vowel-Ideas). Words present the same problem of communication and the answer is the same: “some indeed are willing to fit together and others are not.” The verb to be willing, to consent (ethelein) hearkens back once again to the last argument of the Phaedo. Words spoken in sequence agree if they show (dēlounta) something, those whose succession signifies nothing do not agree. To show and to signify are the tests and proofs of their agreements and disagreements.
• In the Cratylus onomastic agreement was compared to the graphic art of painting, which brings together colors to portray a living being, whereas it is “out of nouns and expressions that we strive to build a fine ensemble.” “We have at our disposal two kinds of means for showing with our voice a way of being”: the Stranger says “we,” meaning neither the artists in language, the poets, orators, or sophists, nor those who are rational enough to give an account of what they say, but all animals that have certain corporeal and psychic abilities. Logos is therefore the power possessed by the entire species of living things that are of the human type (barring accidental cases), and it is “the breath that emanates from the soul and goes out through the mouth as an emission of sound” that is called “speech” (logos). This definition is only superficially descriptive, for it gives a different meaning to the union of the soul with the body: the body is no longer an obstacle, on the contrary it gives the soul the means to make itself heard equally well in its stammerings and nonsense as in its flights of inspiration. This minimal definitio of logos entails the no less minimal and moreover equivocal definition of man as “an animal endowed with logos.”
• So we – “we” human beings – have at our disposal two sorts of vocal signs: the verb (rhēma), which is a showing (dēlōma) applied to actions; and as to the agents of these actions the vocal sign that applies to them is a noun (onoma). The two terms are here given a narrow sense: onoma usually means “word” in general, all words, all vocal signs, for even if they only have a syn actical function and not a denominative one, they signify something. As to the word rhēma, it had kept its general sense of “expression” when it was applied to the “not large;” being derived from one of the Greek verbs meaning “to say” (eirō) and akin to rhētōr, it has “connotations of the juridical, the religious, and the solemn,” and denotes “speech, motto, formula, sentence”: the sayings of the Seven Sages of Greece are rhēmata. To give examples of primitive words Socrates begins in the Cratylus with the set “stream (rhoē), to go (ienai), and retention (skhesis)” – two nouns and one verb – unconcerned with the difference between noun and verb. Does the Stranger then introduce such when he says that onomata and rhēmata are made up of syllables? He is not saying they have the same degree of complexity, and the sequel tilts rather toward an increasing complexity: it is with these two groupings “that we will constitute a great and fine group” comparable to the lifelike portraits painters produce. It is not enough to say “Theaetetus flies” or “the sun shines” – to put together nouns and verbs without resorting to syntax and of metric – to be Homer or Pindar. Expressions and sentences (rhēmata) have more syllables than words (onomata), and stories and poems are assemblages of expressions and sentences. In the Cratylus the distinction between onoma and rhēma is but a matter of a difference in complexity.
• Yet, to attribute the origin of the distinction between nouns and verbs to the Socrates of the Cratylus or to the Stranger of he Sophist, what importance can it really have? A great importance, for the Cratylus wants to demonstrate that language is both an indispensable diacritical tool and a vehicle for opinions one should distrust, even though it may enable the composition of great works. In the Sophist, speech is the instrument sophists and orators use to acquire power, either private or public. So, one must discover the nature of this instrument and make speech, and not one’s own mother-tongue, the object of an analysis tha is in the first place grammatical. But “when speech becomes the object of an analysis, it always re-emerges next to the knowing subject – as soon as that subject expresses what he knows,” whether to others or to himself. In the Sophist, the speech that e-emerges is that of a subject whose speech is no longer “logical” but dynamic, since it is the outcome of a reflection on power that animates the entirety of the dialogue. Who could deny that speech is a matter of power – the power that the sophist, the philosopher, and the statesman are fighting over?
• A sequence of nouns, no more than a sequence of verbs, will never make up a statement, contrary to what the “tautologists” say, for in both cases “the sounds uttered show neither action nor inaction, nor a way of being of that which is or of that which is not.” A statement is born when a noun combines with a verb, and their interweaving (sumplokē) “generates a statement, perhaps the first and smallest of all.” The minimal proposition is thus a verbal proposition, not a predicative one. This means that the subject of the proposition is not conceived of as the substrate or the center of gravity of the predicates one might attribu e to it: it is the agent that accomplishes the act, which also implies that verbs are not predicates. From this it follows that the sense of a statement does not result from the juxtaposition of a noun denoting an agent and a verb denoting an action as i they were distinct realities a copula would put in a relation by “attributing” the second to the first: the minimal statement is an interweaving, a mixing. Interweaving and mixing here have in common that it is the elements themselves that connect, without need for some third term to do it and keep them so. One could speak of a relation here, but it is obvious that the relation that unites the agent with his action is not the same relation as that which connects a subject to a predicate, for which Aristotle defines two possibilities: either the predicate is essential, and it is said of the subject, or it is accidental, and it is within a subject – from which “being” is accorded the function of a copula. It is this that is charged with putting into a relation two terms which otherwise would remain external to one another. But even a “predicative” proposition (“snow is cold”) depends for Plato upon the power a thing has to accept or refuse participating in an Idea, an Idea that possesses the power to coner upon it its essence and its name, provided the thing is able, “willing,” to accept it. The difference between these two species of propositions is that a verbal proposition would have no meaning if it speaks of an agent without specifying what the age t is doing, or if it speaks of an action without specifying who is accomplishing it. Each of the two terms is implied by the other: between the agent and the action there is, so to speak, a reciprocal action and passion. The agent is determined by its ac ion and the action is a function of the nature and abilities of its agent. In contrast with a predicative proposition, the smallest statement (logos) – the one that interweaves a noun and a verb – can dispense with participation in Ideas. It presents nakedly the originary power of logos: to mix, to interweave an agent and an action.
• To put into the place of the subject a name that signifies an agent and not a substance or a logical subject therefore makes a considerable difference. To mix nouns with verbs that express actions introduces no less a difference: a verbal proposition has no need of a copula to be complete: any verb will do. But verbs neither have the same logical neutrality as the copula, which is indifferent as to the terms it separates as much as it connects them, nor do they have its atemporality, for although the verb “to be” can be conjugated, when it serves as a copula it has only a function and no meaning, a function that a simple symbol could perform just as well. A logos must speak about something (must be a logos tinos) and the primary and smallest logos is a statement that determines its subject as a capacity to act (or to undergo) as shown by the verb with which this subject is directly bound.
• The first example of this minimal statement, composed of a single noun and a single verb, is “man learns.” It has not and still does not generate a torrent of interpretations comparable to that raised by the examples that will be given of true statements and false statements. And yet it deserves equal and perhaps more attention, for in pronouncing “man learns” it is a definition of man that is being proposed. Yesterday Socrates was saying about the philosopher: “What a man may be, what such a nature, unlike the others, can suitably be made to do or undergo: that is what he is searching for and is taking the care to bring out.” The Stranger’s example is saying that to be a man is to be capable of learning: “being,” in general, “is nothing other than power,” and the being of man is no exception. Thus the verb cannot be converted into a predicate: “man learns” cannot and should not be converted into “the man is learning,” because the verb – this vocal sign – includes a temporal dimension which lacks both a subject and a predicate. Every action is located at a moment in time and is performed within time, or rather within the mode of temporality belonging to the verb being used. The “showing” of a logos, no matter how short, can therefore extend into the past and the future. The power to learn that is recognized in man is put in the present, it inscribes man in the present of a becoming in which each time makes something happen that is at once the same and different. In the perpetual occurrence of learning, its coming into process, its near or distant past, and the future it opens are all conjugated. All the more so, since “learning” – manthanein – also means “understanding” in Greek, which implies a series of adventures both unforeseeable and necessary. The time of learning is a kind of time that is repetitive though always new. For in man, intelligence is not only the means to solve problems but a power to be affected by the realities it invents, a power of which the human soul alone is able.
• As long as one is content with saying that logos can show and signify, there can be error or misunderstanding, but not falsity. The Stranger then proposes an example “that unites a thing (pragma) with an action (praxis) by means of a noun and a verb”: “Theaetetus sits.” This statement is true, he says to Theaetetus, because it says, “speaking about you, of things that are that they are”. The “things that are” refer to a Theaetetus (correctly) said to be sitting, and thus to an agent in his performing this action and to an action in its being performed by this agent. The proposition is only true because this “you” sits: in other words, the statement is true if it is affected by the external presence of what the statement is speaking about. For any statement speaks of something, to speak of nothing is impossible, but in this case it is speaking of an agent whose name is “Theaetetus.” This statement speaks of him, and it says about him that he sits: the verb that points to his action is in the present indicative. Of what kind of truth is this statement true? Obviously not of an essential truth, but of a truth that is essentially temporary and fleeting: the moment Theaetetus gets up, the statement will become false. Its truth is the truth of Hegel’s “Now it is night,” a truth which the future destines to be contradicted, and in this instance both agent and action are realities suject to the change of becoming. This difference was recalled when facing the Friends of the Ideas: “through the body we have a communication with becoming thanks to sensation, but as to what really (ontōs) is, it is through the soul thanks to reasoning.” This sentence is striking for attributing to sensation a function analogous to the function of reasoning, which implies that sensation is not in itself misleading: it can attest to the temporary truth of a thing in becoming on an equal footing with reasoning when reasoning speaks the truth about the way of being of an essence.
• Why the devil does Plato choose this sensible, singular, and fleeting truth as his instance of true speech? Because he wants to establish that true and false necessarily qualify all speeches, even the smallest, and even when it is about a sensible thing undergoing becoming? The smallest is made of a verb and a noun, not of a noun and a predicate. Any predicate attributed to a noun presupposes that the subject of the proposition participates in an Idea, which presupposes its agreement to be affected by it, and that presupposes in turn that the meaning of the predicate has been subjected to an examination that has purged it of its equivocity and determined in what sense it is suitable to be attributed to this subject. But conversely, the shortest statement does not attribute, it associates an agent with an action, and the agent’s effective realization is not dialectically proven, it can only be proved by acting, and it is situated in time. What time? Since they clearly imply two different types of temporality, a comparison between the two examples of minimal statement – “man learns” and “Theaetetus sits”– enables us to grasp the nature of the truth that belongs to each of the two examples. The first, in order to be declared true, calls for a dialectical examination of the nature of its subject, the human soul, in order to see if it has one or more parts capable of learning, a verb that must in turn be subjected to examination. Fully half of the dialogues of Plato are devoted to these two questions. The truth involved cannot be put into two words, cannot be answered yes or no, nor can it be located in this kind of time. It is an in elligible truth, and as such not final but interminable since it raises as many questions as it answers – which by the way is the only way of learning.
• “Theaetetus sits” is obviously not true according to that kind of truth, as another comparison can be used to establish, this ime with the example of the false statement “Theaetetus flies.” That statement includes two specifications: Theaetetus is “he with whom I am discussing,” and am discussing “now.” Both these specifications are necessary if one wants to affirm that “Theaetetus flies” is a false statement, but also for indicating a contrario which sort of truth is uttered by the small statement “Theaetetus sits.” First of all it is a singular truth, that of an object targeted by discourse as an extra-discursive entity; but within discourse this object has become the subject of the verb, its agent, and thus is itself a discursive element. That this referent (“you”), the thing of which the statement speaks and the subject of the proposition (“Theaetetus”) which affirms some hing about him, are identical may seem so obvious that there would be no need to distinguish them. Plato however does distinguish them: in the two examples, the agent is called Theaetetus, but the referent is called “you,” never Theaetetus. “Yourself” and “myself” are posited as external to the statement: they are the beings of which the statement speaks, whereas “Theaetetus” is the name that signifies the agent about whom the true statement says that he sits and the false statement says that he flies. To specify that this name “Theaetetus” designates “he with whom I am now conversing” rules out the possibility that this “proper” name, though in fact it is shared, should be that of an individual of the same name, or of a creature in a fairy tale – a new Icarus – or why not a tamed bird? If this bird were seen flying up in the air the statement asserting that “[the bird] Theaetetus flies” would be true. It is thus only if “Theaetetus” points to the “you” with whom the Stranger is conversing, that it is false to say that he flies and true to say that he sits. And it must further be added that it is “now” that Theaetetus is conversing with the Stranger, and not yesterday with Socrates, and that it is now that he is sitting, since Theaetetus does not hold that position all the time. Truth and falsity therefore bear on the entirety of the enunciation, on the subject (the agent) and not only on the verb (the action). The nature of the subject making the statement, who is a perceiving subject, must therefore come in: as both eyewitness and earwitness, one ought to trust what he says, provided that he tells us, in the manner of Gorgias’s Palamedes, “in what way, where, at what moment, how and when” he saw Theaetetus sitting.
• But the question returns: why use examples of a truth and falsity that are sensible, singular, and fleeting, and thereby make sensation the criterion of their truth as well as of their falsity, which then burdens them with the relativity denounced by Protagoras? In order to gainsay him? But how? First of all, by affirming that it is the unity of agent and action/passion that car ies the meaning: in being said to sit, Theaetetus becomes a “discursive” agent, just as the action he is lent becomes a discursive action: such is the power of discourse, namely to confer a discursive reality upon what it speaks about. The definition of he verbal proposition follows from the dynamic definition of being as a power to act and to undergo.
• Second, it confronts the sophist with two definitions of true speech and false speech that are both assertoric, and can only be so because they must be considered from the point of view of being in general, and of the being about which one is speaking. The true statement says “about you things that are, as they are;” the false “says about you things other than those that are.” I passing from sos (the possessive adjective of the second person in the singular), from the being belonging to what the statement is speaking of, to peri sou, to the things the statement says about you, “other things” takes on a different sense: they are the things that are other than “Theaetetus.” They differ, then, either about what Theaetetus is, in affirming for example that he is not the same as the one who was conversing yesterday with Socrates, or about what he does, “flying” whereas he is sitting. But “we have just said, I think, that about each being there are many beings and many non-beings.” What are these many beings? All the beings that differ from the being of which one is speaking. They do not differ from what this being is, they differ f om him insofar as he is, and is thereby different from all the other beings. It is thus the function of the numerical differentiation of the other that is first called on, a function which fragments being once it applies to a particular being. Each fragment of being that is cut away in this way is necessarily other than all the other fragments, it is other than all the beings that are not it but are no less beings than it, alterity here having its function of non-identity. So there are not “many” beings around each being but an illimited quantity, incalculable and so undeterminable.
• What are, then, the multiple non-beings that orbit around Theaetetus? It suffices to remember the quick definition of the image to answer this question: “The image is something that differs from the true but resembles it;” true means “really being (ontōs on);” “that which resembles (eoikos) is not”: “And so, it is something we say is really a semblance (eikōn) does not really (ontōs) exist?” These “things” have a different way of being than the beings ontically existing: they are things that really are not, that really are “non-beings” (ouk onta), things other than those that are, but which seem to be the same as them because they resemble what is. The question of truth and falsity only makes sense in connection with this sort of difference, a difference that claims to be similar to the thing from which it differs. If it were a matter of the alterity of two beings, it would be complete non-sense, for any mistake supposes at least a generic similarity: one man can be mistaken for another man, but not for a number or for a kettle – unless one is completely deranged. False statements “therefore say about you things that are on ically (ontōs) other.” So the multiple non-beings that gravitate around Theaetetus are his shadows, his reflections, his dream appearances, or for that matter portraits or statues of him, but also all the images of him that false statements produce, the spoken images (eidōla legomena), the illusory appearances conveyed by statements (ta en tois logois phantasmata). For images are structured the same way as statements, and they can be quite eloquent: the images produced by what one may say to oneself aout things are many. But these statements don’t just produce images: they also assert them. The speech that asserts that the spoken image it produces is the same as the thing itself, is false. “Theaetetus flies” is false because there is no “you yourself” who flies, but this statement not only produces one, a “Theaetetus” who is flying, but it affirms this Theaetetus to be real and to be the same as the one I am now talking with. A flying Theaetetus would be a mythical Theaetetus, not a real Theaetetus. A Theaetetus said to be walking while he is sitting would simply be a little younger or a little older Theaetetus; confusion would then arise between two Theaetetuses taken at two different moments in time, between a memory or an anticipation, and thus be ween an image and a perception. The falsity thus comes from asserting that what possesses being only by being other (the image) is the thing itself. To which one could object that there are degrees of falsity, and that the statement that affirms a walki g Theaetetus while he is sitting, is less false than the one that affirms that Theaetetus, with whom I am now conversing, is flying. Perhaps.
• For after all, Theaetetus is no more sitting than discussing: he is sitting as much or as little as the current king of France is bald. The seriousness with which the interpreters gloss over this exercise in mimesis is equaled only by their unawareness of the fact that it is, indeed, mimesis that it is about, namely a species of production. “Theaetetus sits” is only true in that Plato makes us believe it, and in that it seems verisimilar to us that he should be sitting, surely more so than if Plato had represented a flying interlocutor. The choice of the example can only seem innocent to the innocents who believe that once Plato completes his dialogue on the mimetic art of the sophist, he is himself carrying out a mimesis without knowing it. The “you” and the “me” on whom true as well as false discourse are supposed to focus are players in a scene that we take to be real because it has every appearance of reality. Theaetetus is the image Plato’s writing produced of a real long-dead Theaetetus; as for the Eleatic Stranger he is a mask, a fiction, just like the dialogue that sets them face to face. So we must believe in the value of the testimony of a fictional character conversing with a dead Theaetetus and we only believe in it because Plato is able to make us do so: his written dialogue is thus an indirect proof of the mimetic, poetic, and productive power of speech. A power that is drawn from the verbal nature of his affirmations: in giving to these affirmations a temporal dimension, every verb makes the written dialogue the narration of an event, an occurrence. In other words, it tells a story or it puts something on stage: when it is lacking any interrogative dimension logos can only be a muthos, not a dia-logos. A dialectical discourse cannot be false, it can only be aporetic. As to those would judge these considerations unconvincing, perhaps even fantastical, one would be empted to ask them whether they believe, for instance, that the speeches in the Symposium were really delivered by the authors Plato attributes them to? Plato is able to write in the way he thinks and in the rhythm of his thinking, but he is also able to make others speak who think differently from him – who think differently what thinking is – and those who speak without thinking.
• So let’s be a little less taken in by this good Platonic mimetic – good in that it moves us, or ought to move us, toward inqui ing into the sort of truth such a statement as “Theaetetus sits” can have. For as will be shown in the subsequent examinations, truth and falsity of a discourse must be related back to what is inserted in between the word and the thing: the opinion or the representation of the subject who is affirming or denying.
• Neither of the two statements the Stranger has just enunciated is truly true, but the one seems true because it is verisimilar, since becoming realities cannot have another sort of truth. And so doing he has differentiated the fictitious from the false; a muthos is not false just because it is a story: the myth of the Politicus may be a digression, but a necessary one, since it is this myth that will reveal the difference between a divine shepherd and a human one. Moreover, a fiction may seem false to some and true to others, and if “we are presented with a verisimilar story on these matters, it is not appropriate to look furthe ,” since a fiction can serve to reveal a truth, provided one knows how to interpret it. So, let’s not look further – at least as to the question whether it is true that Theaetetus sits.
• This disturbing light having been cast upon speech, the Stranger now moves on to the second step of the plan sketched at 260e, but begins by adding a new one: “What shall we say now? Thinking (dianoia), opinion (doxa), imagination (phantasia) : is it not obvious by now that all these can give birth in our souls to the false as well as the true?” In order to make sure, each of them must be defined.
• What is it one calls thinking (dianoia)? This is how Socrates phrased the question yesterday; the question was not about its essence (What is thought?), but about what one can put under that name, or rather this verb, to think (dianoeisthai): “To think – do you call thinking the same thing I do?” The description that follows is thus less a definition than a normative description of what Socrates calls “thinking”:
• Talk (logos) that the soul conducts with itself about whatever it is examining. But it is, at any rate, as someone who does not know that I’m explaining it this way to you. A soul that is thinking seems to me to do nothing but dialogue (dialegesthai) with itself, asking itself and answering itself questions and saying yes to this and no to that. (Tht.189e6–190a2)
• Socrates is here speaking “as someone who does not know”: he can just describe how what is going on in the soul appears to him, and he specifies that this way of describing it is his own. In the Sophist, the description is radicalized, and is reduced from an hypothesis to a short definition:
• STRANGER: So, thought and speech (logos) are the same thing, except that it is an interior and silent dialogue (dialogos) of the soul with itself which we name “thought.” THEAETETUS: Exactly. – STRANGER: Still the stream that comes forth from it through the mouth with sound is called “speaking” (logos)? – THEAETETUS: True. (263e3–9)
• Therefore, thought and speech (logos) are not really “one and the same thing”: thought is not a logos, it is a dialogos. In what do they differ? In the fact that logos must pass through the mouth and be audible, whereas the dialogos of the soul with itself, thinking, remains within the soul and is silent. Something, then, takes place in the soul, and both Socrates and the Stranger call it “thought”. But he removes from its dialogue with itself two elements: orality – thinking is dialoguing but “without phōnē” – and the presence of an interlocutor which would obviously require audible speech. One could conclude that thinking is an amputated form of dialogue, that what animates spoken dialogue is sorely lacking, and in particular the request for shared agreement, a request reiterated as often by the Socrates as by the Stranger. But hear now the anecdote from the Philebus:
• SOCRATES: Will you not agree that it often happens that when one sees things from a distance without seeing them clearly, he wants to decide (krinein) what he is seeing? – PROTARCHUS: Yes – S.: And won’t he ask himself this question? – PR.: Which? – S. “What can possibly be this thing that appears to be standing next to that rock and beneath that tree?” Don’t you think this is what one asks oneself when his gaze rests upon things that appear (phantasthenta) to him this way? – PR.: Yes. – S.: And then, if in answering himself he should say, “It is a man,” wouldn’t this be right? – PR.: Yes, perfectly. – S.: But he might be mistaken when saying that what he sees is a statue made by shepherds? – PR.: Surely so. – S.: And someone is next to him to whom he could say out loud the same things he was saying to himself, would not what we were just now calling “opinion” have become speech (logos)? (Phlb. 38c5–e4)
• From the outset thinking is structured as a dialogue, and when the breath that comes forth from the soul passes through the mouth, modulates the air, and reaches one’s ear, it embodies thoughts without altering them. In this case the body is compliant, it is a sēma, a sign, not a tomb. The man walking along would say to his companion the same things as he was saying to himself: he phonetic expression, speech, would not modify the contents of the silent internal dialogue in any way, the phonetic articulations of the one being the exact translation of the silent articulations of the other. This conception of dialogue may seem strange, at least to anyone who substitutes unthinkingly “conversation”, “interview”, “debate” for dialogue. To dialogue toward another (pros allon: for the benefit of another, rather than with another) is let him in on the questions and the answers one makes to oneself about the things one is examining. The only change brought on by the presence of a companion is that the walker “will think out loud …”. This would obviously not be the case if his companion were the object of his desire, his anger, or an object for flattery. But in that case one would not be talking to him, but trying to act upon him. Thinking, dianoia, is thus described as an internal dialogos which is called logos when it becomes audible and is addressed to another – with neither gain nor loss.
• This is confirmed by a rather remarkable semantic trait that is shared by all three passages. In the Theaetetus, the term logos is applied indifferently to the act of speaking and the act of thinking. It is the same in the Sophist: “thinking and logos are the same thing,” but it is the uttered dialogue that is properly called logos. And the same goes for the Philebus: there, logos designates the oral transposition of the silent dialogue; dialogos is absent but dialegesthai is quite present since the walker asks himself and answers himself questions. Dialogos and dialegesthai designate only the interior dialogue of the soul, always described as an alternation of questions and answers, whereas logos is used indifferently for both the interior dialogue and the spoken one. These simple observations indicate that it is the internal, silent dialogue that properly deserves the name dialogos, whereas its audible and sensory expression, spoken dialogue, is called logos. The spoken dialogue is thus far from being the model for describing thinking. Besides, internal dialogue is the only one that is inimitable: an oral exchange may have all the appearances of a dialogue, but if it is not the expression of an internal and silent dialogue it will only be a false semblance, a mock dialogue. How then could this true dialogue be false? It is only so when it ends by affirming or denying:
• But when [sc. the soul] reaches its decision, whether slowly or in an excited rush – when it affirms from now on the same thing and no longer doubts it – this we call an opinion (doxa) of its own. So that for my part I call this act of opining (doxazei ) “saying” (legein), and call opinion (doxa) a statement (logos) that has been pronounced, though surely not in the presence of another nor out loud (phōnēi) but silently and only to oneself. (Tht.190a2–6)
• By deciding more or less rapidly, thinking suppresses its previous movement: it doubts no longer, wavers no more, it decides. Its opinion is expressed in an enunciation (logos) that no longer retains any disquieted trace of questioning and answering in what is now a logos without dialegesthai. Once thinking comes to a halt in an affirmation or a negation, the interior dialogue akes on the appearance, from its point of view, of time wasted, time lost. The movement described in the three passages is that of dianoetic thinking that leads toward nothing but an opinion – toward, that is, its own suppression. For it wants the securi y and certitude of the affirmation: “to affirm from that point forward the same thing and no longer to doubt.”
• The Stranger is much more abrupt:
• STRANGER: But among statements in turn we are know there are, in addition... – THEAETETUS: What? – STRANGER: …assertion and negation. – THEAETETUS: We know that. – STRANGER: Whenever, then, this happens in the soul as thought and silently, have you another name to address it other than “opinion”? – THEAETETUS: How would I? (263e10–264a3)
• It is not the interior and silent dialogue (dialogos) that the Stranger says is positive or negative, though unlike Socrates he did not find it necessary to characterize it as a back-and-forth of questions and answers. Rather, it is the expressed statement, the logos that affirms and denies; and just as Socratic as Socrates, it is to thinking understood as dianoia that the Stra ger attributes affirmation and negation as its modalities. The location of this way of thinking on the Line of the Republic shows that it is not an intelligent kind of thinking (noēsis) precisely because it uses opinions and images. Opinion appears to the Stranger as a completion of thought (apoteleutēsis), and it is exactly what the walker hopes for: to end the internal dialogue and to decide between two possibilities, which he does the moment he finally “is saying to himself, ‘It is a man’.” His inte nal dialogue wavered between two affirmations up to the moment his soul decides more or less quickly and ceases thereby to be “divided,” “split,” but now retains only an affirmative or a negative statement (“It’s that,” or “It’s not that”), and thus finally stops thinking.
• Once it fixes itself into affirmation or negation, opinion makes its choice in spite of a twofold absence: the absence (of course) of a true knowledge that would attain an essence, which it does not care about let alone even suspect it exists, and the absence of a perception that could be relied upon. But it is certain that anyone would always prefer to be able to go and see fo himself, rather than to find himself with a soul tossed to and fro by doubt, hope, or forgetting; and it is certain that all would prefer to perceive rather than to think, since everyone begins by believing that perceiving is knowing. The passage from the Philebus is based on this postulate, which was analyzed at length in the Theaetetus: that knowing consists in perceiving is an opinion implicit in every opinion, it is the opinion constitutive of all opinion. As such, opinion is a nostalgia for immedia e knowledge, for a perception so obvious, so incontestable, that it would dispense the soul from talking with itself and thinking, even thinking this impoverished thinking we are condemned to when we are not perceiving clearly, or not at all.
• To the extent opinion is a completion of thought, it is for the subject who is affirming or denying, his own opinion, and it has a recoil effect upon his soul: it makes the soul an “opining thing” (doxazon, the correlate of the thing opined, to doxazome on). In opining the soul overcomes its being split, it re-unifies, it no longer talks to itself but simply asserts (whether an affirmation or a denial). In the face of this opining subject, the object too unifies itself: it no longer provokes uncertainty and is finally taken to be what it appears to be. The anxiety of thinking springs from the possibility that being and appeara ce are different; by suppressing this difference opinion completes the thought that came before: it puts it to an end, and it fulfills its anticipation. To be done with it is what the walking man wants, which is what he is doing when he finally “says to himself, ‘It is a man’.” How does this transition to a provisionally firm doxa take place? In all three passages, there is no indication at all. It is a fact that nothing justifies. Stopping at an opinion is in fact always possible, but it has no transcendental possibility nor any legitimacy. The soul possesses the power to affirm and to deny the content of its affirmation or denial no matter what. If it is more concerned with stability and believing than with truth, it affirms or denies an opinion whose content can be existent or non-existent.
• It is well known that for Plato opinion is always only verisimilar, that it is irrational, unreasoned, unstable, and nevertheless fixed for all the time I make it my own. What is less known, reading certain interpreters, is that for Plato this also goes for judgment, for the simple reason that there is no difference between them and that this difference exists only in the minds of translators aiming to distinguish between the psychic aspect (opinion) and the logical aspect (judgment). But doxa has for Plato a reality that is primarily and essentially psychic, and the properties we might be tempted to call logical – truth and falsity – are precisely not so: the most certain and easy way to determine the truth and falsity of an opinion is its agreement with perception. For there are in fact things that “only he can know who sees them: otherwise it is impossible.” It is these tha make us believe that knowing is perceiving, and this is why the judge, who is never himself a witness to the crime on which he adjudicates, always wishes to have an eyewitness; he treasures this testimony above all other for this only seems to him truly irrefutable, like the walking man in the Philebus believes that it would suffice for him only to come near in order to know what it is that is standing before him under the tree: to know … that is, to see.
• Besides, he is not wrong, with the caveat that there are cases when going there and seeing is impossible, first when the affirmation and negation are about things not sensible, examples of which, further on, will be justice and virtue in general. One can only reach these with thinking (dianoia). But when thinking ends up the interior dialogue with an opinion (doxa) what happens? How can one know if this opinion is true or false? What happens is what happens in every dialogue when an interlocutor, or sometimes Socrates, proposes a definition. From Hippias’s “beauty is nothing but gold,” to “knowledge is sensation” in the Theaetetus up to the identification of pleasure with the good in the Philebus, the false definitions are the ones that miss the other for the same, what appears to be for what is, the definitional image for an Idea. Gilding, sensation, pleasure are false sembla ces of beauty, knowledge, and the good, and the only way to know this is so consists in asking and answering, in examining dialectically. But according to the Philebus, even when sensation is impossible it is not impossible to distinguish between true and false opinion, for one cannot disregard the nature of the subject who asserts and denies. The good nature of soul would be the sole guarantor of the truth of its opinion and it again would urge the soul to suspend its opinion as long as it has no way to verify it. And it may happen that a man who is moving along toward he knows not exactly what, will “move along ruminating within himself, and sometimes even for quite some time.” He will then have no opinion, true or false, about what is standing under that tree, but he runs the risk of beginning to philosophize.
• If one brings together the indications from the Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Philebus, one can make out the following: opi ion brings an interior dialogue to a halt; whether the subject is opining correctly or not, the act of opining (the affirming or denying) is no less always real, even if this act bears on things that are not, were not, nor ever will be. Speech is verisimilar if the content of the opinion – “Theaetetus sits” or “It is a man standing there” – seems it can be able to fit the extra-discursive reality the statement is speaking about.
• According to Protagoras, a psychic image cannot be false and thus deceive the soul, and that is how Socrates sums up his thesis: “As each thing appears to me, so it is for me; and as it appears to you, so it is for you.” Psychic image (phantasia) and sensation “are thus the same thing in the domain of the hot and all such things.” Protagoras is right: sensation is absolutely sujective, it “constitutes the very egoism of the self,” it encloses the sentient subject within a “private world.” Conversely that which is sensed is objective, for the sensible qualities, the pathēmata, are at the same time the properties belonging to ex ernal objects and the affections produced in an animated body by these objects, affections they can produce in it only because they possess these properties. But some affections “die out” in the body before they get to the soul, while other excitations, “in extending through both, bring about in both the soul and the body an upheaval that belongs to each and is shared by the two of them.” Sensation is sensed when a seism propagates from the body to the soul, and when they “conjoin in a single affection (pathos) and are moved conjointly, to call this movement ‘sensation’ would not give it a name contrary to common usage.” In order to be sensed the excitation (whether exterior or interior) must be interpreted by a sensory organ – interpreted, for one and the same sting leads to two different affections as it acts on two different organs: if the pyramids of fire sting my eyes they will give me a sensation of whiteness, but if they sting my skin a feeling of heat. The sensory capacities of a living being a e limited both by the nature and the number of senses it has at its disposition, and by the commensurability (summetria) of physical bodies with its organs. What is felt is objective since the sensible qualities are not known and identified by sensation alone: that they may be so, it is necessary that certain distinctions provided by language be added to this innate discrimination. This diacritical task is the work of common opinion (doxa) as carried by the names “we are in the habit of using.” A soul hat is capable of perceiving the quality common to a species of sensations is a soul that possesses a memory able to compare and to tell itself what it is feeling, and thus to form an opinion about it. It feels, since a sensible quality is transmitted to it once it has been interpreted by the sensory organs, but then in turn it interprets it, thanks to an opinion (doxa) that transforms the sensation into a psychic image (phantasia). Sensations are natural and immediate, they occur in a present that has neither duration nor orientation; they do not succeed one another, they appear and disappear: what succession and persistence they have they owe to the “scribe Memory.” According to the genetic process of the psychic faculties as it is presented in the Philebus, memory arises immediately after sensation and appears to be a very elementary or inferior kind of thinking (phronēsis) but also as the condition for the existence of the faculties that arise after it, in particular imagination (phantasia). When a remembrance comes to adjust to sensations in such a way that in their encounter, memory and sensation come to be the same – that is, when one experiences a sensation recognized, identified, named thanks to a memory – speeches are somehow inscribed within our souls. In the Theaetetus memory is described at length as an impression of signs in the wax tablet within our souls, signs “of what we have seen or heard.” When a sensation occurs, it either comes to mold itself adequately to one of the mnemonic traces present in the soul, and the recognition (anagnōrisis) is correct, or else it stumbles across a trace, a remembrance, that is not its own and there is a misunderstanding. In both dialogues memory is compared to an activity of impression, of engraving, of writing, and the soul is thus a kind of book.
• When the scribe memory “inscribes in the soul impressions (pathēmata) that coincide with the sensations,” the result is “a true opinion accompanied by true speeches.” The thing then appears as it is, the only being it has is an appearing which occurs and only occurs to the one who has the sensation of it. While absolutely relative to each, and subjective, it is objective to the extent that its object is not different from it: it is its “content.” “Thus, phantasia and sensation are identical, in the case of the hot and other similar states. For such as each feels it, such it may well be for each.” Thus Protagoras allegedly spoke yesterday, and according to him phantasia founds its truth upon that of sensation, with which it is identified. In contrast, for Plato the content of a sensation is determined by the opinion one has of it, and it is upon this that the truth or falsity of the imaginative representation depend. They are “akin to those of speech”: phantasia is always about “something” and falsity arises when, about something that is other, this something is mistaken for the same. But in this context what exactly does this word phantasia point to?
• In the singular, phantasia is a faculty of the soul that is defined by its genesis: “when opinion does not present itself except through the intermediary of a sensation, it is called imagination” (phantasia), its genesis leading to this definition: “imagination is a mixture of sensation and opinion.” This makes a refutation of Protagoras possible, since for him sensations and opinion have as their sole contents the impressions that occur in the encounter of the sensing with the sensed. In this case, Socrates had concluded yesterday, maieutic and dialectic as a whole had better keep silent, “for examining the opinions that are believed by one another, and trying to refute them” when the psychic images each one has of them is said to be correct, “isn’t this a ridiculous chatter?” Imagination (phantasia) is thus the faculty of the soul that produces images (phantasiai) that one could also call “representations.” Yet, if one takes into account the nature of sensation – it is not simple, but requires two interpretations, the one sensory and the other psychic – the “chatter” to which Protagoras reduces the science of dialectic is far from being ridiculous. As the psychic images result from the mixture of two interpretations, they engender an opinion different from the one that had interpreted sensation psychically. The scribe having imprinted in the soul the memory of a sensation, he painter who comes after him traces into this soul the images “of what is said,” so that “once the sensations have disappeared, as well as the opinions and the speeches by which they were accompanied, one sees within himself their images.” The memory o a sensation is not a sensation, it is the image of a sensation as interpreted by an opinion, whence “the images of the true opinions and true speeches are true, and false those of the opinions and speeches that are false.” The phantasiai are therefore the common genus of the “paintings” traced in the soul according to what it said to itself about its memories of sensations inscribed in it by the scribe: they are psychic images – which much later will come to be called “mental images.”
• They can be likenesses (eikones), if the opinion (what the soul has said to itself about them) is true, or appearances, simulacra (phantasmata), if its opinion is false. Their falsity does not lie only in their lack of conformity with a thing or with an event that affected the soul: it also has to do with the bad inspiration or mediocre nature of the one who imagines. Psychic “images are true to those who are somehow worthy, who have some nobility and are loved by the gods, and false to those who are bad, mediocre, or worthless.” One can have false hopes, not in the sense that they will not come true in the future (the man who imagines that gold will rain down upon him), but because he makes the wrong connections (as between gold and the happiness i is supposed to bring). One has what phantasms one can, and one imagines as one is.
• Now one can understand why the falsity that is constitutive of the image is identical to the one that is mixed with opinion and with speech. True speech produces, within the soul and outside it, a veri-similar image of the thing; false discourse produces a semblance taken to be the thing itself. But how can an image, even a discursive one, be true? By being verisimilar. The falsity of the image is “akin” to that of speech because it is contrary to the same sort of truth, to the verisimilar truth of opinion. Opinion is true when the soul is affected (by chance or by its good nature) by the thing itself, and it is false when the soul produces another thing than that which is. It is possible to correct the inscriptions of the scribe memory, but never those of the painter, since the painter’s deal only with the inscriptions of the scribe. When the latter has finished his work the walking man can “see in himself” the image of a statue he will never have seen, for the good reason that it did not exist. The good nature of the opining subject is the only guarantee of the truth of opinions about things that cannot be perceived, either because they are not about sensible things or because an insuperable distance, spatial or temporal, separates the subject from the object:
• Insinuated in perception itself, mixed in with the operations of memory, opening around us the horizon of the possible, accompanying the project, hope, fear, conjectures – imagination is much more than a faculty to evoke images that would duplicate the world of our direct perceptions: it is a power to step aside, thanks to which we make representations to ourselves of distant things, and we distance ourselves form the realities that are present.
• The possible that opens up for the walking man is that of “conjectures,” his imagination does not evoke images it produces them in the mode of the possible; it projects the images of a man, or perhaps of a statue, standing under the tree before him. His interior conversation wavers between two possibles having to do with things spatially distant, which distract it from direct pe ceptions.
• What comes to insert itself in between the vocal sign and the thing is thus not a linguistic sign, but a state of the soul, a state that departs, moves it away from unmediated or present perceptions; it is this that is the real content of the speech when these perceptions are unable to provide a decisive opinion as to their nature and their reality. Between the enunciation made with signs and its referent, there is therefore a third term: the psychic image or images (phantasiai) that the opining subject makes of the thing he is talking about, and which he may or may not convey for us to see. The introduction of this other species of mimetic confirms that the difference between eikastic and phantastic actually is a difference in orientation. For the faithful image of a false opinion is no less a likeness of it, but a simulacrum if one compares it with the object of opinion – tha is, its model. While they put the soul at the risk of falsity, they also open to it the unlimited field of fiction. This hasn’t to do with elaborating a logic in order to preserve it from speaking false, it aims at showing how a doxomimetic is possible.
• (When it is a present sensation that provokes the intervention of the painter because it reactivates the memory of a past sensation, the role of the sensation prevails over that of opinion and one has Proust’s little piece of madeleine that, In Search o Lost Time, lets loose the torrent of memory-images, images that are true of a truth that is not of the order of conformity).
• Image-memories, or memory-images, all are effects of the power of phantasia. The voice (phōnē) as well as the imagination (phantasia) have a mysterious power: the first makes the intelligible sensible by making thought manifest in sounds, the other by transforming the interior dialogue into images. Voice and psychic image result from a particularly close union of soul and body. To paraphrase the Kantian formula, a double “art hidden in the depths of the human soul” enables it to modulate orally what it says in silence or to cast it into images. Although it might seem impossible to demonstrate that these images could be false, heir “kinship” with discourse has made it possible to do so faster than anticipated.
• It is necessary to remember that the fabrication of images had been divided into two species, the eikastic and the phantastic, but that the question of knowing in which to range the sophist had remained open as long as the existence of falsity had not been demonstrated, its existence depending upon that of a non-being understood as the other of being and not its opposite. But it had nevertheless appeared that the sophist had to belong to one or the other, since his art was a mimetic art. The conditions for making a decision and choosing in which species to range the sophist have therefore now been met, and so it is time to move on to a final division.
• The last definition of the sophist has just been presented by the Stranger as the conclusion of all the previous examination. It aims at stripping the sophist of the characteristics that he possesses in common with the other “artisans” so as to leave only “his own nature,” so as “to reveal it first to ourselves but also to those who belong by their nature to a lineage (genus) that has a great kinship with this method.” Who could these be if not the “dialectician philosophers” mentioned at 253e–254a, and whose nature Plato defined at the beginning of Book VI of the Republic?
• The sophist is confined within the mimetic art. The initial kind to be divided is thus that of production, “for imitation is, I suppose, a sort of production.” It is this, therefore, that must be divided, and its nature is such that each cut brings on two species of which the one on the right has as its sole ambition to pass for the other, the one left behind on the left – and that it can only be done by eliminating, each time, an occurrence of the same.
• The sophist had made non-being his refuge, he took shelter in the impossibility that non-being could even be utterable. The examination directed at establishing the existence of non-being, and thus that of the image and of the false, had only been undertaken to flush him out. Since his nature is determined by his power of production, this power must entertain an essential relationship with non-being. This is true of production, since it contains some non-being in its very definition, but it is not the case with acquisition which deals “only with things that are and that have come into being.” For production is a cause of generation in terms of the before and the after, it makes being succeed non-being and thus it joins being with non-being. All this can only make sense if non-being is not the absolute nothingness Parmenides declared to be unrealizable and unengenderable. Produc ion passes from a non-being that was, and was perfectly determinate, to a being that was not and that is only led into being from its non-being. It is, in itself, a parricide. Because it is, it is the kind whose division will make it possible to trap the sophist. Does the choice of production as the initial kind to be divided however entail that the sophist is not to be found in any art of acquisition? After all, it was in hunting, in trade, in contest, in some arts of acquiring that “he appeared to us.” The sophist does practice these arts, but he does not possess them nor exercises them: he pretends. A pseudo-hunter, pseudo-contestant, and pseudo-merchant, all his ways of acquiring derive from a mimetic art, an art that is part of the art of production. So the art to be divided is therefore the art of producing.
• The action of producing had already been defined, early in the dialogue. The Stranger rephrases it by affirming right away tha a productive art is “a power (dunamis) that turns out to be the cause of the subsequent advent of realities that did not exist before,” whereas at 219b it was the review of various productive arts that led to granting a power to production in general. If this kind, “production,” is a power, so are all of its species, and to define them consists in specifying what they accomplish and upon what they are capable of acting.
• The art of production horizontally breaks in two, into divine production and human production. But if one performs a vertical division, the divine art is subdivided: it “produces the thing itself and the image that accompanies each thing.” The same goes for the art of fabrication that belongs to us: Theaetetus understands and rephrases it his own way: as to the two species, the human and the divine, “on one side the being of the things themselves, on the other the engendering of certain semblances (homoiōmata).” As to human art, that of the architect makes the house itself and “the graphic art makes another one that is like a d eam made by human hands for the use of the waking.”
• This division raises two questions. The first is that of the absence of any paradigm the demiurge (whether divine or human) would fix his gaze upon in order to regulate his activity. The Stranger should not say that divine production is a production of the thing itself (autourgikē), let alone Theaetetus take it that there exists a production of “the being of the things themselves.” For in good Platonism, natural things are only images of the veritable beings, the intelligible Ideas, and as to images made by human hands, they are only images of images: everything other than the eidetic models can only be an image. Whence the second question: oughtn’t the divisions obey an ontology of subordination rather than a logic of coordination? Moreover, oughtn’t the hierarchical relation between the model and the image render the method of dichotomy inapplicable? That Plato judges differently here would indicate either that one must not take what is a simple pedagogical exercise seriously, or that a radical change in ontology is involved.
• One can perhaps explain the text at a lesser cost. Why, first of all, does the Stranger need this horizontal subdivision, leaving thereby divine production not on the left but above? For the reason he gives: to note that man possesses the power of producing only a single species of images, contrary to the sophist’s claim “that he knows, thanks to a unique art, how to produce and do every thing,” without exception. The art that he most obviously does not possess is qualified as divine, but one can, even from the Stranger’s words, attribute it to a natural spontaneity. In truth, and in the subsequent divisions, this would not make a big change: division “widthwise” will only influence “division lengthwise” – the only kind that is regular as to the method – to the extent that it traces the limit of human fabrication from the point of view of things but also from the point of view o images. No man can send dreams to a man asleep, no man is the master of the light that multiplies things by projecting their shadows and their reflections where they are not. Without this horizontal cut there would only be human production, and no cause whether divine or natural would have the power to make something occur or make something come into being. As to a being that by its nature would exclude all becoming, since becoming is an illusion for which “the two-headed mortals” would be responsible, what would that be unless being were such as Parmenides thought it was? And more, if this cause were not identified with a divine art, human technique would only be dealing with a nature deprived of sense, of logos, upon which it could wreak its omnipotence. The Stranger affirms that it is not in this direction that a good nature must be oriented, and he trusts enough the good nature of Theaetetus to judge it unnecessary to prove to him that Nature has a meaning.
• There is no need to develop any further what is only a surplus beyond the method’s strict requirement of a dichotomic verticality, but there is even less need to introduce the ideal paradigms. However, the lack of precision as to the nature of the models will keep repeating itself, which creates an undeniable frustration in the commentator. Does it play no role at all in the diference between their images? What are the things that the semblances and the likenesses (eikones) imitate? And what things, or what semblances, do the simulacra (phantasmata) simulate? And how can Plato claim that he is distinguishing between the kinds of images without ever specifying what they are images of? This last division aims at dividing production in general, and then at specifying the manner of producing that belongs to each of the species reached by division, which are species of techniques, of arts, but can it do this without specifying the nature of what they produce? This problem will indeed be encountered in connection with a certain productive art, but it is not considered as a preliminary and initial problem. Why?
• The omission of the intelligible paradigms after this first cut is justified if one remembers the overall purpose of the dialogue: inserting the hypothesis of the Ideas here would come down to actually suppressing the question with which the dialogue opens. For if it postulated the existence of a difference between the sophist and the philosopher and if it focused on the accepta ce or rejection of the hypothesis of the Ideas, the whole dialogue would have no need to be. This hypothesis is probably that of the philosopher as Plato conceives him, it guarantees his objects, orients his desire, his practice, and determines his own way of using logos; but that is not what constitutes his difference. A philosopher is not for Plato one who professes a certain doctrine, but one whom a certain desire animates and who has a particular way of defining knowledge and thought. What is more se ious is that for the sophist, his rejection of the hypothesis of the Ideas would be enough to deny the existence of this difference: it would not be enough to make him a “genuine sophist,” he would then be only a philosopher claiming the right to adopt a other hypothesis and to practice and profess another doctrine. So to be established, their difference does not require subscribing to too strong an hypothesis. The philosopher does not differ from the sophist because he embraces this or that philosophical doctrine, he differs from him because he doesn’t do what the sophist does, and does not set about it the way the sophist does.⤀
• Moreover, in order to unmask the sophist it is enough that alongside an art of producing things there should exist an art that only produces images. But if the whole genus of images ultimately refers back to intelligible models, each species of it consisting of reflecting the model in a more or less distant or deformed way, if there were transitivity from the model through all the different species of images, every producer of images would necessarily be maintaining a relation with eidetic models, including the sophist. The definition will show that this is not the case since there exist images without models, images that imitate without imitating anything but opinions. True, the sophist claims not to have eyes so that he only sees things where everyone sees images, or vice-versa: what he does not see is the difference between the two. He must therefore be made to admit it, and e forced to acknowledge that where he says “not-being,” what enables him to declare absolute non-being is only alterity. True, the image is not the thing, but that only means that its entire being consists in appearing and thus differs from that of the thing itself.
• The other question raised by this second step in the division has to do with Theaetetus’s reply. He understands that the art that produces things produces the being of the things themselves. His statement seems to come into direct contradiction with that of Socrates after his celebrated analysis of the three beds. The carpenter “does not produce the being of the bed,” he produces “something similar to that which is, but not its being” – according to the definition of the Sophist he would be producing an image. But Theaetetus is affirming that there is an art of producing the being of the things themselves, distinct from that of producing images. What appears to be scandalous is not that this being should be produced (the scandal seems indeed to be large in the text about the three beds, where there appears to be a divine gardener of essences), but that the Stranger should oppose images over against other images while calling them “the things themselves.” Since only the positing of an eidetic paradigm can confer upon the bed made by the carpenter the status of an image, the second question is partly related to the first.
• Only partly: for the Stranger’s point of view, here, is not that of the participation of things in Ideas, but their communication with the greatest Kinds. Not because he is supposedly substituting one ontology for another, but because he is asking a question that eidetic participation cannot answer to. For the question is not that of knowing what gives the thing its form and jus ifies its name, but of distinguishing two modes of being, that of the thing and that of the image. This distinction is made by referring to the greatest kinds in which each of these modes participate. The production of things is called the “autopoietic part,” and then autourgic. The thing opposed to the image is expressed by the pronominal adjective, autos (Latin ipse). Every thing is, and is other than what is not it; but if it is a thing, it has to have an ipseity, to be “itself” and to stay so, at least as long as it exists. If it is a thing, and not if it is an image: the image gets its being from participation in the Other, all its being consists in being other, and one knows that the Oher, as opposed to being, cannot participate “in these two Ideas, as being does”: it participates in Being but it does not participate in the Same. The cut between autourgikē and eidōlopoiikē is thus done by means of the Same and the Other: what participates in the Same is called a “thing,” what does not and participates only in the Other is called an “image.” Participation or absence of participation in the Same is thus the principle for the initial division of the genus of production. The being of the thing is constituted by a triple participation, in Being, in the Other, and in the Same; the image essentially participates only in two of these: in Being and in the Other, and further it only participates in Being in a mediated way, and to the extent that the Other participates in it. But it does not participate in the Same: a portrait for example possesses both the status of a thing and the status of an image; it is a sensible thing which as such participates in the Same, and it is the image of somebody. It is in the latter sense only that a portrait only participates in the Other and that its being is fleeting: “I would be at great pains to say where the painting is I am looking at. For I do not look at it as I do at a thing; I do not fix it in its place.” But autourgikē is the art of producing the thing “itself” a d it matters little that its nature is conferred upon it by an Idea: the presence of this Idea will render it as intelligible as a sensible thing can be, but it will not suffice to determine the mode of being that belongs to the sensible thing. Insofar as it is what it is, the thing can be said to be the image of the intelligible Idea; insofar as it is a “thing in itself” it is opposed to an image.
• Everything therefore depends upon what must be stressed in a given context: to say, as in the Republic and the Timaeus, that sensible things are images is to insist that only their participation in Ideas renders them intelligible as much as they can be. The perspective is that of cognition, and more exactly the movement of learning and of paideia. The image therefore has a metaphoric function, it can be seen as a way of pointing out an ontological degree in a hierarchy. In the Sophist, where the perspective is that of participation in the greatest Kinds, the image gets rid of this metaphorical role: the term belongs to the technical vocabulary of production and thus loses its pedagogical, psychagogic function of removing belief and orientating toward truth. The images mentioned by the Stranger are images in the standard sense of the term, those that can be seen with open eyes on the surface of mirrors and of water or when the darkening of light casts shadows, and with closed eyes in dreams; and they are also what can be seen with open eyes as if in a dream by those who are contemplating certain productions of human art.
• The initial principles of the Stranger’s division are the very same principles one is tempted to find in common sense – the ve y same common sense every sophist wants to make one lose, and which, just for once, is found present on the side of this divine being that is Plato the Stranger. Things do exist, he is saying – animals, and also houses. Human art can produce the latter, ut not the former. These things present a reality their images lack: no sane man would try to ride the shadow of a donkey, nobody would try to live in a painted house. The art of producing is thus divided again, and to do this the Stranger has mobilized othing more than what he has just established: the relative existence of non-being and the relative existence of being are sufficient to prove the existence and the power of a mimetic art.
• The Stranger then recalls that the species “engendering of semblances” had already been divided, but that because the species assumed the existence of the false, its division had to be suspended until the reality of the false had been established. Its participation in the Other relative to the being of the thing guarantees the reality of the image, but in order to be an image it requires another characteristic, one that needs to be produced. Its difference with the thing would not be enough to define it: it is necessary that an art worked to make it to be similar. To fabricate an image is indeed to fabricate something other rela ively to the thing itself, but it is still necessary that the difference take on the character of resemblance. According to the definition previously proposed by Theaetetus and restated by the Stranger, the image is something that “while really something that is not, really is what we’re calling a likeness”: it resembles what truly is, “but is other”: The image can be more or less similar and thus more or less dissimilar, its degree of “fidelity” depending only on the skill of the artisan. But if an image does not seem to be the thing of which it is an image, it is not an image of it. Alterity is enough to guarantee its reality but not its nature as image, which consists in being a pseudo-thing: its essential falsity comes to it from its resemblance.
• The falsity coming here into play rests upon the fact that one can produce, or there can be produced, something that appears to be the same as an other simply because it resembles it. But participation in the Same only confers existence in the mode of “itselfness,” not in the mode of “sameness as.” The falseness of the image does not lie, as Theaetetus again too Eleatically affi med, in the fact that it would be the opposite of the true thing, it resides in the perversion of the “same” into the “same as.” The image brings about this transition from the similar into the “same as” (the thing): in this lies its kinship with dream. To produce semblances is thus to make the kind of the Same pass for a kind of relation, and thus to make of it a species of other, a species of the Other: it is necessarily an art of deceiving, an art that inverts the “normal” relation of the image to the model, since it is from the image that one forms an opinion about the model. The production of images is thus found to be entirely in accordance with the regime of falsity. Images are, and they truly are images, but no image can be true.
• But doesn’t the subdivision of their production into eikastic art and phantastic art indicate that Plato intends to separate t ue images from false images? If not, what would the subdivision be for, and what could its principle be? No doubt the fact that certain ones are distinct from others in that they authorize being used in a way the others exclude. All geometric drawings are false, as are all phonetic images (words), but they can be corrected by the art of the geometer or the dialectician. Hymns to the gods and eulogies of noble men are all marked with falsity, but they can all be used by the good statesman who knows that all education goes through rhetoric and myths. This good usage is only possible as regards certain images, images produced in a certain way. The difference between the two modes of production, the eikastic and the phantastic, comes down to the difference hat is pointed out by these two verbs, eoike and phainetai. The eikōn, the copy, the semblance, recognizes in the model the power to impose its structure onto its images, its own kind of multiplicity and unity – a structure the image must respect in orde to be a semblance of it that is verisimilar, appropriate, natural, probable, reasonable. All these connotations denote the requirements that preside over the production of this type of images and result from a relation to their model. Phainetai, on the other hand, only refers to what “imitates the apparent as it appears,” to the simulacrum (phantasma), to all that is turned toward the spectator and is preoccupied only with the effect produced on him:
• Toward which is painting directed in each case: toward imitation of the being as it is or toward imitating what appears as it appears? Is the imitation an imitation of an appearance or of a truth? – Of an appearance, he said. (R. X, 598b2–5)
• In the second step of this last division, the nature of the models is still not taken into account, for it would furnish no principle of distinction. It is enough to recall that eikastic is preoccupied with preserving an equilibrium between difference and resemblance, the only way of maintaining the care for the true into the production of the false; conversely the art of the simulacrum tries to conceal the difference and to produce only the effects of their resemblance: the falsity is thus doubled, two-fold, and it is this that makes the sophist able to imitate everything.
• Now, it must be divided again: an illusory appearance can be produced with or without an instrument (that this should also be true of the eikastic is irrelevant here) and this goes for the producer of images, the imitator, when he uses instruments to fabricate images that resemble the opinion he has of their models. Once an instrument is used, three terms necessarily come into play: the producer, the instrument, and the product, whereas the producer who forgoes using any instrument can only produce by using himself as instrument; but nothing prevents a producer to use himself as instrument. Thus the cut is not made between “with or without an instrument” but between the use of external instruments and the use of oneself as an instrument. When a fabricator of simulacra “lends himself as instrument” it is himself that he makes resemble an other, he speaks and behaves like an othe . As an instrument to produce what? To produce the appearance that he is no longer himself but an other, or something other. In granting himself the status of instrument the producer thus becomes identical with the product. What was the essential characteristic of the image, not to be an “itself,” now flows back upon him who produces in this way; this is inevitable since the imitator uses himself, his voice, his body – and probably his soul as well – in order to become an image and to appear different.
• While the mimetic art encompasses the whole production of images, the sophist is an “imitator of the things that are,” and he practices “the sort of play that calls for the finest technique and the greatest charm.” But at the end of the preceding divisions it is this phenomenon of a dispossession of oneself and of possession by another that the Stranger says should be called mimesis par excellence, imitation. Probably because mimetic art then reaches – if one dares to say it – a supernal perfection: falsity here affects not only the product but the producer as well, who uses himself so as no longer to be himself, in such a way that this “himself” he uses can only be considered as an other. So who is he? This illusion of otherness that he provides for others? or this voice, this body which are nothing more than means for passing off as another? or just this capacity to resemble a d in doing so to deceive? For he only exists by being taken by others to be an other, he is shot through and through by his imitating. If he wants to imitate Theaetetus he will mimic his posture, his grace, perhaps his way of walking or talking, laughing or crying. But in this case the model is involved, even though he has no part in the action: Theaetetus at least remains himself, exterior to the imitation of him and perfectly distinct from his imitator. So it is necessary that the Stranger make one more division.
• Some imitate having a knowledge of the object they imitate, and others without. The kind of model mentioned in the previous division indicates what sort of knowing the Stranger is now speaking of: what the imitator of Theaetetus needs to know about him in order to give an image of him is what he can perceive of him. But what sort of perception can the rhapsode have of the gods o of bygone heroes, to whom he lends his words and his voice? If one thinks that he has no other way of knowing than perceiving, then a shortcoming in perception or for that matter its impossibility, whether de facto or de jure, will justify him in resorting to opinion, whether his own or that of others. The imitator must of course have formed some opinion of his model, he must have himself some representation of it if he hopes to represent it. It will be necessary for him to be a “doxomime” in order to be able to offer a convincing, a ressemblant image. It might here be useful to recall to how a certain painter, who thought all his life about what he was doing, put it: “Things do not have resemblances between them. They have or do not have similarities. It is only for the thought to resemble. It resembles in being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it.” One has here an accurate definition of a thought that is secured “in what the worlds offers it,” in other words in opinion, and whether the opinion is true or false, its resemblance with the thing works like “an index” piercing through the image and pointing toward an original, a sovereign model that prescribes and hierarchizes all the copies and all the simulacra in which it asserts itself and makes itself known thanks to a convincing resemblance. To abolish this monarchy is to free graphic images from any duty to resemble. Hence the title given by Magritte to all his drawings of a pipe: “This Is Not a Pipe.” He thinks it prudent however, to specify on the back, in an entirely Platonic manner, “The title does not contradict the drawing; it affirms in a different way.” It affirms this drawing as not being a pipe but as being not anything else either, for a drawing, an image, is not something. The lines drawn on a piece of paper or some other medium, or chisel-strokes that shape a piece of marble or some other material, do not produce “things” endowed with a lesser degree of reality. They do not lead toward the superior reality of a model, but toward the opinion the artist-artisan has of it. If he gives an image of his opinion that conforms and is faithful, this image is a “copy,” but if one refers it to the “thing” he has chosen as a model, it is a simulacrum. It is this double status that we must mistrust, as Plato keeps repeating in the Sophist. For the increasing submission of graphic or sculpted images to an imperative of resemblance (the invention of skiagraphia, the “realism” of the statues of Polyclitus) aims at producing a maximum illusion and thus at strengthening the power of opinion. What then do these images, emancipated from all duty to resemble, become? What Plato calls phantasms, simulacra. A proliferation of reflections now opens up, in which reality is fragmented, broken up, multiplied according to the way it appears to each individual, just as Protagoras affirms. And as Theaetetus says, these reflections are “such” as the thing, and such as each other, they are in both cases similar, but they do not resemble the thing of which they are reflections. Interior phantasm and represented phantasm are but one: doxomimetic is an imitation that no reality, whether external or internal, can any longer affect. Its only measure is the way another sees it.
• Imitator, instrument, representation of a model, resemblant image, and convincing ruse: all this comes together in one and the same act:
• But what about the figure of justice and of virtue taken together as a whole? Don’t many, without knowing them but having formed somehow an opinion of them, try hardily to make it appear they ardently desire that what it seems to them to be is really present in them, by imitating it as much as they can in what they do and say. (267c2–6)
• Through his external comportment, the imitator mimics a desire supposed to be within his soul. He does not want to appear to be virtuous, he wants to appear ardently desiring a virtue that corresponds with the opinion he has made of it, willy-nilly. It is the presence of this ardent desire in his soul that he wants to make one believe in, and it is an appearance of himself that he is trying to produce. For as to desire, an imitator has no other than the desire to produce an effect on the others so as to gain an advantage. The three infinitives (prothumeisthai, phainesthai, poiein) mark the stages of this sort of imitative art: he who practices it tries to produce (poiein), to produce an appearance (phainesthai) to appear to be ardently desiring (prothumeisthai) a virtue of which he is completely ignorant, and about which he wants to create a belief that it is present in his soul by mimicking with actions and words. The inward only exists as being represented and mimicked to be seen from outside, a display made only for producing the illusion that an “inside” exists. This kind of imitator thus produces, by means of the indiscernibility of the inward from the outward, the simulacrum of a paradigm that he can only appear to imitate.
• A confusion of this sort has at least the merit of simplicity: this perverse way of unifying can only take place in the absence of any kind of participation in the same. The games allowed by the other are not terribly complicated: they are harder to describe than to practice, contrary to what those believe who practice them when they know they are practicing them. To mimic opinions one has gotten from who knows where in all that one says and does, to believe that that is what it is to be oneself and that that is the only way to make a bit more solid things lacking any sensible presence, is what everyone is doing every day.
• So it is necessary to divide once again. The healthy and flawless doxomime practices in good faith a doxomimetic which uniformly and without the least worry takes the other for the same. In the figure of this simple imitator, this simpleton, one can read ignorance in the Socratic sense: believing one knows what he does not know. This imitator does not play a knower, he believes he really knows, and he is really ignorant.
• Conversely, the ironic imitator is haunted by a suspicion, a fear: he fears he might appear to be ignorant of subjects about which “in the presence of others he gives himself the appearance of an expert.” If the sophist were certain of knowing, he would be indistinguishable from the simpleton; if he were conscious of not knowing he could set about learning, and we would be deali g with a completely different kind of irony, that of Socrates, who says he does not know whereas inwardly he knows that he knows – knows at least that knowing does not merely consist in having an opinion, even a true one. Socrates says about Dionysodorus, “and he, ironically remaining in complete suspense as if he were examining a matter of great importance.” But when Thrasymachus calls out, “There he goes again, the usual irony of Socrates!” he indicates that the same pejorative connotation attaches to Socrates’s irony as to the sophist’s, so close in their subtle play of knowledge and ignorance, and so similar in their efforts: to paralyze the interlocutor by refusing to answer the question such as it was asked. Similar they surely are, but listen to what Socrates says in the Phaedrus:
• He, then, who wishes to deceive others but does not want to be deceived himself must know with perspicuity and accuracy the similarities and dissimilarities between the things that are[...] So is there any way that one is able skillfully and at will to bring his audience along, by making a gradual departure from the truth toward its opposite with the help of similarities, while eing able to avoid this happening to himself, if he lacks settled knowledge of the distinct characteristics of the things in question? (Phaedrus, 262a5–7, 262b5–8)
• Phaedrus fears he cannot be, but this is the art of the sophist that Socrates has just defined and opposed to his own: the art of an ironic imitator who knows how to dupe without himself becoming a dupe though being one, and who makes what he knows not to be pass for what is, since he thinks that what is is unsayable. When the Athenian of the Laws divides a primary form of impie y, not believing in the gods, he divides it into two species parallel to those having now been distinguished in the Sophist: the first is simple and frank – and one could call it “naive;” the second is multiform, “is replete with artifice and traps,” it encompasses all those who are skilled in sorcery (including the political kind) as well as the “machinations of those called sophists”: it is a form of concealed atheism, which one could call “ironic.” Whatever the domain, this art of double-dealing is what constitutes the sophist, and it is the only art one can grant him.
• For the Stranger has just reminded us: in the end, the sophist “is not among those who know.” He dreads not knowing, but as he does not even know what knowledge could consist in, the ignorance he dreads is only a simulacrum of ignorance. As to his mistrust, it comes to him “from the fact that he has been through all sorts of speeches (logoi).” So the Stranger here brings together, just before he separates them from each other in his last division, two apparently incompatible traits: the misology of the sophist born from his practice of antilogy and his trust in logos as “the great sovereign.” How can one deny speeches the possiility of reaching anything true or valid, and with a straight face declare oneself able to talk about anything and to produce in others the illusion that he knows what he is talking about? If the sophist dissimulates an ignorance that he at the same time fears he has, it is because he is certain that it is shared by all, or at least by the great majority of men. His confidence is commensurate with his defiance: the sophist can mimic the expert all the better since he is convinced that there is no other way of being a knower than of appearing to be so in the eyes of others, just because one knows how to speak. So the game can go on forever: the sophist does not believe that he knows, nor does he even know that he is ignorant, and ultimately he does not even desire to appear to know. What he wants is to appear to be an expert, a scientist, a scholar. But since they are no one but he himself, the sophist mimics the sophist when he mimics them. He is not ignorant in the ignorance of the simpleton, he is not he dupe of the knowing he makes a show of, but he is the dupe of his own mimetic art.
• So this penultimate cut has not defined two species of mimetic art but two species of imitators. The ignorance they have in common bars us from considering the species on the right, that of the ironic imitator, as truly an “art.” The ignorant mimetic art can only be practiced by imitators who mimic the image, issued from their opinion, of the “sophos” they wish to appear to be.
• This mimetic art in its turn breaks in two, and the division is done according to oppositions that are familiar: the sophist i onizes in public or in private, he practices either macrology or brachylogy. “The man of too-long speeches” will be called “demological,” a public orator: he mimics the statesman. The genuine sophist is not to be found on this side. When one thinks of the many well-known passages in which Plato represents a sophist claiming to be able to speak either at length or briefly, or again those in which Socrates brings up his poor memory against the macrology of the sophist who is his present interlocutor, one can wonder how the public practice of long speeches would not belong to the genuine sophist. The Stranger makes his cut: but is he right to do so and why does he? The reason is that even if he is empirically identical to the man that forces one to contradict himself in private (even if it is the same Hippias or the same Gorgias that performs the one as well as the other), the public orator does not use logos in the way that essentially characterizes the sophist. For the rhetorical use the sophist makes of logos – oratory – does not imply the destruction of logos as such: by increasingly enlarging it he perverts its power but not its essence. The discourse of a demagogue, while it does not really make sense and as such is not really a speech, does retain, viewed from a distance, a perspective, a coherence. A fictive coherence, analogous to the kind presented by huge statues or paintings, but coherence all the same since the speech has an ultimate goal: to seduce or persuade. Seducing or persuading maintains the naivete of the auditor, his “simplicity.” In remaining ignorant he escapes the sophistic effect of this kind of mimetic art and undergoes only its political effect.
• When he practices in private the sophist has another goal: “to force the one that has entered into dialogue with him to contradict himself.” In private, the sophist confesses: he does not confess he does not know, he confesses what type of power he lends speech. In order to corroborate his prestige the sophist speaks in public, he needs an audience; in private what admiration he arouses springs from the coercion he imposes upon the speech of the other: he does not contradict him, he causes the other to contradict himself. He does not produce a beautiful speech, but always imposes an image of speech entirely submitted to contradiction and by nature unable to save itself. But if contradiction is the only relationship speeches can reach, all dialogue becomes impossible, whether with another or with oneself. The sophist does not contradict, he makes it appear that nothing that is said can stay the same and exclude its own contrary, inasmuch as it is said. His speeches make “the same appear other, at the same time and no matter how, and the other seem the same, and the large small, and the similar dissimilar,” and in this they condem language to perpetual self-destruction.
• The Stranger then proceeds as he has in all the other cases: he recapitulates his final definition. But he does so backwards, as he has done when defining antilogy, that practice almost indistinguishable from Socrates’s purifying dialectic. When dealing with speech, such a reversed procedure is required, for the division must begin by positing the essential character that disti guishes it from the one who strives to define it, and then go back through one division to the other toward what has made it possible to grasp this essential character.
• So then is now displayed the same lexicon bristling with technical terms, their syntactical linkage minimized in a successive listing-off. So much so, that when reading its original version, it seems difficult not to wonder to who and to what this last definition could possibly be any use:
• He who is expert in a mimetic art belonging to the enantiological art, an ironical part of the doxastic art, itself a part of he phantastical kind distinguished in the eidōlopoiic kind, the portion not divine but human of the production which expends in speeches its thaumatopoiic art – whoever will state that this is “the race and the blood” of the genuine sophist will speak, i seems, the purest truth.
• The Stranger seems perfectly satisfied with what he has reached. Have we any grounds for not being so?
• Yes and no. Yes, for though being similar in appearance with all the preceding definitions of the sophist, this one is characterized by the same use of an artificial language meant to make one believe that it issues from a scientific knowledge – a language that is only slightly marred by “phantastic” and “thaumatopoeic” – while indeed these two words might arouse admiring stupor. In this sense the last definition is ironic, not because saying the opposite of what it says but because it is a species of the Socratic irony, that of a feigned admiration which while seeming to admire provides every reason not to. But doesn’t concludi g this way on the contrary prove that the others were not meant to be parodic? And doesn’t it prove on the contrary that the method of division cannot lead to another kind of definition? Especially since it is supposed to define the nature of the sophist while all the others only defined his ways of appearing to different eyes. It seems to be so disappointing that it is never commented upon by the interpreters of the dialogue. The Stranger says however that it “allows all the threads of his name to be tied together,” these threads once again being expressed by neologisms in -ic. To tie together the threads of a name, of a word, to cancel its equivocity and to delimit its attribution, wouldn’t that be to define something dialectically, scientifically?
• This is what every dianoetic definition aims at, but is that what a dialectical, Socratic, definition is aiming at? And isn’t it this difference that is once again being affirmed? Hasn’t this last definition precisely as its goal to show that to sum up in this way all the steps in the pursuit of the sophist, leaving out all its advances, its impasses, and the growing awareness that a relation exists among the defenses raised one after the other by the sophist, that all this leads to no comprehension and thus leaves us nothing to think about? In this case, no, the last definition of the sophist does not disappoint all those who, owing to their nature and their lineage, have the greatest proximity and kinship with the dialectical method of division, those who know that dialectizing, even when it consists in dividing, aims not at defining but at understanding what a sophist truly is, and know above all that in order to understand it they must read the whole of the Sophist.
• Perseus was able to behead the Medusa “only by gazing at what an indirect view alone can show him, that is, on an image captured on his bronze shield.” Blocking the light emanating from the eye and the light emanating from the object, the mirror deprives these two lights of their power and reverses the images. The definition the Stranger recapitulates in reverse order – as he had done for the definition of the antilogical art– also deprives a sophist’s way of speaking of its magic power. For indeed, only the words articulated by speech, logos, can define the species of discourse (logos) that it holds, it is itself the mirror, the surface where this species can be reflected upon and thus differentiate itself, going back from its definition to the successive divisions that led to it. As to images of himself, the sophist has presented many, and as soon as the philosopher Stranger could cut off one of his heads he would sprout forth another that spoke a different language. Something that could well happen again, for the sophist could retort that the image this last definition gives of its model is but the opinion its author has of him, and thus that it, too, is a product of doxomimetic. The sophist would be right in his interpretation, if the last definition did not make the two discursive modes of which the sophist claims to be master clash with each other: the scientific discourse whose technical terms he imitates, and the poetic which he only exploits for rhetorical effect.
• In this definition, the pseudo-scientific jargon ends with some words from Homer, a line that speaks “of race (genea) and of lood.” The very least one can say is that one cannot detect the smallest ounce of flesh or drop of blood in the lines that came before. As it has just been defined the nature of the sophist has truly nothing natural about it. Bloodless and skeletal it is but artifice, mystification, phantasm. It is “natural” only in the sense that no matter what he is doing or is saying, the sophist “pretends,” he offers false semblances of acts and false semblances of speeches. But why end things by telescoping two styles so little compatible? Technical clatter and poetry generally do not mix well, but Protagoras does include the poets in his genealogy of sophistic, and Gorgias was known for having given a rhythm to his prose as enchanting as that of poetry. But the words from the Iliad were not chosen for pure poetic effect. They are uttered under the walls of Troy by a Glaucos originally from Lycia (whose king Sarpedon was allied with the Trojans), when he finds himself facing Diomedes, prince of Argos, whose very name connoted a paralyzing necessity and who claims to be the son of Ares. What does Glaucos do in the face of this terrifying character? Over against the divine lineage claimed by Diomedes he contrasts his own: he descends from Sisyphus who is the son of Aeolus, god of the winds, and who of all men is “the most fertile in trickery.” To descend from Sisyphus is to descend from the one who had been able to shackle Thanatos, Death itself, and then persuade Persephone to send him back to earth. Sisyphus in tur engendered Odysseus, the hero “of many twists,” and also one Glaucos, whose great-grandson bears the same name. With such a family tree it is not surprising that this Glaucos should manage, thanks the wind of his eloquent words, to dissuade Diomedes from fighting him. But Zeus then “troubles him in spirit” and he exchanges his golden arms for the bronze ones of Diomedes. And so the most astute and clever man exchanges the gold of truth for the brass of appearance: this is “the race and the blood” of Glaucos – and of the sophist.
• Plato the Stranger is capable of imitating any and all sorts of speech and styles, and that goes for Socrates, too: “at the drop of a hat,” Phaedrus says to him, “you turn out speeches from Egypt or from any other place you please.” Plato is not only capable of composing the five speeches in the Symposium, or that of Lysias in the Phaedrus, or that of Aspasia in the Menexenus, he knows how to speak concretely and knowledgeably about “trades,” is precise when he dialectizes, is implacable when he refutes, is inspired when he speaks of what he “honors above all”: “knowledge, thought, and intelligence.” To intermingle all these styles in a dialectical way is one of the ways that Plato saves logos, to save against the sophist its every possible way of speaking the truth, by denouncing and imitating all the possible ways of speaking false. Interweaving the styles is not for Plato merely a literary device but a method meant to bring extra meaning one must pay attention to, for every style is in itself a power, a force.
• At the beginning of his lessons on Plato, the young Nietzsche writes: “as an author Plato is the most richly gifted of prose w iters: stylistically most versatile, having mastered all the registers, the most accomplished and cultivated in the most cultivated age.” He explains this in his last work: “To communicate a state, an inward tension of pathos, by means of signs, including the tempo of these signs – that is the meaning of every style.” And thus, “Any style is good that really communicates an inward state.” The conclusion: Plato possesses “the most varied art of a stylist;” he owes it to his “overflowingly philosophical na ure, equally capable of grand and lightning overviews, and of the dialectical labor over the concept.” Nietzsche notes moreover that “Plato has a distinct penchant for the comic.”
• In case this reference to Nietzsche seems too Nietzschean to be convincing, here is what Campbell says of the Sophist, quoting W. H. Thompson:
• ... there is no dialogue in the whole series more thoroughly Platonic. In their structure the periods are those of Plato, and hey are unlike those of any other writer. ... If vivacity in the conversations, easy and natural transitions from one subject to another, pungency of satire, delicate persiflage, and idiomatic raciness of phrasing are elements of dramatic power, I know no dialogue more dramatic than the Sophistes.
• Not to pay attention to this diversity of styles, present in its most extensive variety, is to condemn oneself to see in it no more than a “shell and a core,” or a manual for division.
• Of reasons to conclude this way, there is basically only one: this expert at logos, the sophist, can only engender hatred of language, misology. His perverse use of language foments a conviction in any man of fairly good sense that he must no longer put his trust in words but in the brutality of things and deeds, if he would reach what is true. But distrusting language not only destroys the social bond, the connection between men, it comes down to denying the human soul its power to think by talking to itself and to think while speaking. By presenting a reverse image of the sophist, which because it is reversed is put right, this definition aims at unbewitching him, disenchanting him by parodying his language and opposing against him an interior state of which his nature is incapable. But in the name of what does Plato do this, if not that of the opinion he has of the sophist? The answer is that the philosopher has pursued the sophist in every possible way: he has sought him here, there, and everywhere at the risk of his seeming to catch himself when trying to trap him. His fearsome eros for the truth has driven him to exercise his sovereign and divine liberty, and he has invested all the time that was necessary, since it is the logos that had to be saved. He has understood that it was necessary to restore its true power by giving it understanding and making one understand its horizon, by rooting it in this desire to understand Plato calls “philosophy.” And yet he has left Socrates’s question unanswered, he has not defined just how the philosopher differs from the sophist. No, he has done better: he has exploited every opportuni y to show his difference – his now dazzling and then imperceptible difference – and no one could provide him with as many opportunities as the sophist. It is not only for this reason that he has chased him with such boldness and energy, it is because he has astonishingly foreseen what sort of danger his spoken images represent, and has understood that there is urgency in the matter. But he could not save Socrates, neither could he save his language, nor his world.
• There is urgency, and no doubt there will always be, for what comes with images, with false semblances, and with beautiful appearances, is their magical power to be deceptive, to create illusions, to proliferate and make opinions proliferate, and thereby to break up and fragment all reality. It is highly unlikely that the masterpiece of drama that is the Sophist will ever succeed in persuading men to prefer the gold of truth to the brass of images and opinions. All the more reason to move on, and to say how it is with the Statesman.
• ’Til tomorrow, then...
• These diagrams attempt to formalize the definitional recapitulations, showing in parentheses their derivations from the divisions being made. If one refers to the presentations of Diès, Benardete, or Mary Louise Gill, one will find the same embarrassment as mine and may well see why others have dispensed with trying.
• General Division of Arts
• production acquisition
• by exchange by capture
• by contest by hunt
• inanimates living
• humid climes walking
• Definition of Angling
• Hunting the living in humid climes
• flying aquatic: fishing
• by enclosure by striking
• with trident with hook
• downward upward
• Angling
• Definitions of Sophistic
• First Definition
• Hunting the walking
• wild peaceful
• tamed human
• violent persuasive
• public private (erotic)
• disinterested interested
• by gifts paid
• for pleasure for virtue
• flattery doxopedeutic
• The Sophistic Art
• Second Definition
• Hunt exchange
• barter commerce
• direct sale retail
• local merchant intercity trade
• of bodily foods psychotraffic
• of knowledges of excellence
• The Sophistic Art
• Third and Fourth Definitions
• Acquisition by commercial exchange
• specialized psychotraffic
• reseller (third definition)
• producer – vendor (fourth definition)
• The Sophistic Thing
• Fifth Definition
• Acquisition
• by exchange by capture
• by hunt by contest
• bodily combat verbal controversy
• forensic antilogical
• artless eristic
• unpaid remunerated
• (clap-trap) Sophistic
• Sixth Definition
• Acquisition
• by exchange/capture by sorting
• of the similar of the better
• purifying body purifying soul
• of its evil of its ignorance
• by information by education
• admonition antilogic
• Sophistic or Noble Sophistic?
• Last Definition (set to rights)
• Production
• Divine……anthropic
• (of realities) eidōlopoiic
• (graphic) discursive
• eikastic ... phantastic
• (of a model) doxastic
• (by fabrication) mimetic
• (naive) ironic
• in public in private
• enantiopoiological
• The Sophist
• (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound)
• Prometheus – They who at first seeing saw in vain, hearing they heard not. But, like to the forms of dreams, for a long time they used to huddle together all things at random, and naught knew they about brick-built and sun-ward houses, nor carpentry; but they dwelt in the excavated earth like tiny emmets in the sunless depths of caverns. And they had no sure sign either of winte , or of flowery spring, or of fruitful summer; but they used to do every thing without judgment, until indeed I showed to them the risings of the stars and their settings, hard to be discerned. And verily I discover for them Numbers, the surpassing all i ventions, the combinations too of letters, and Memory, effective mother-nurse of all Muses. I also first bound with yokes beasts submissive to the collars; and in order that with their bodies they might become to mortals substitutes for their severest toils, I brought steeds under cars obedient to the rein, a glory to pompous luxury. And none other than I invented the canvas-winged chariots of mariners that roam over the ocean. After discovering for mortals such inventions, wretch that I am, I myself have no ingenious device (sophisma) whereby I may escape from my present misery. (vv. 447-471) (vv. 447-471)
• HERMES – Thee, the contriver (sophistes), thee full of gall and bitterness, who sinned against the gods by bestowing their ho ors on creatures of a day, the thief of fire, I address. (vv. 944-947)[…] But on the strength of an impotent ingenious art (sophismati) thou thus violent; for obstinacy in one not soundly wise, itself by itself availeth less than nothing. (vv. 1011-1013)
• tr. T. A. Buckley, 1897
• The two versions of Gorgias’s On Nature or on Non-being that have come down to us are later summaries marred by uncertainties and lacunae (especially that of the Anonymous, preserved in the corpus of Aristotle as On Melissus, Xenophanes Gorgias [Bekker pages 974, ff.], though it is generally recognized as the better version). A farce for some (e.g. Gomperz), a parody and philosophical nonsense for others, this treatise is taken to be purely a language game. Still others see it as a foreshadowing of dialectic in the Kantian sense, unless in the Hegelian, or a critique of the noumenal being – in brief the prefiguration or rather the expression of a tragic vision. But how did Plato himself understand it? Diès, followed Cornford, cited the passages in the Parmenides parallel to some passages in the Treatise of Gorgias, among which the penultimate hypothesis of the Parmenides which would refer to Gorgias’s first argument. So here is the first demonstration, said to “belong to Gorgias”:
• The version of the Anonymous (MXG, 979a25–28):
• If the not-being is not being, no less than being would the non-being would be. For the non-being is not being just as being is being. Thus are, in no degree more than they are not, the things (pragmata) spoken of.
• The version preserved in Sextus Empiricus (Adv. Math. VII, 67.1–4, 6-8):
• And surely the non-being, as to itself, is not. For if the non-being is, then it will be and at the same time will not be; for, to the extent that it is thought as not being, it will not be; but to the extent it is not being, being predicated to itself, it will be.[...] As for being: It is not, if the non-being is, since it is its contrary.
• According to the Anonymous, if Being can be identified to itself (it is being), the non-being must be able to do the same: it is what is, not being. But then, predicated to itself, the non-being is. In this version, the contradiction is not explicitly mentioned: being and non being, to be and not to be are merely supposed to be contraries. Sextus is for his part aware of that difficulty, and he solves it thus: the non-being is thought of as not being, but it is said to be not being. The contradiction then operates only on the level of the enunciation. Would the parallel passage in the Parmenides help to resolve this difficulty?
• Thus, as it seems, it is, the not being One. For if it were not non being, but somehow letting itself go from being to not bei g, it will straightway be being. (Parm. 162a1-3)
• To say of a thing that it is not not being is to affirm that it is:
• “It (the One) must have as a bond of its not being the being of non being, if it is not to be.” (162a4-5)
• The One is not on the condition to be not being. Symmetrically:
• being must have (as a bond) not to be not being, in order completely to be. (162a5-6)
• The bond that attaches the being to itself is that it must not be not being, and it is only on that condition.
• Conclusion: Being and non-being are both equally the subjects of “is” and “is not”: being is being and is not not being, non-being is not being and it is not being. The conclusion redoes the arguments in chiasm: being will be if it is not not being; non-being will not be on condition of being not being. So we here see a third subject coming in: after the One not-being and being, the Non-being. It is this transition – from “not being” as an adjective predicated of the One, to a substantive, “the Non-being,” this symmetry that was just established between to be and not to be – that makes the paradox so striking. Parmenides then moves from the language of logical necessity (that of Gorgias) to the Platonic language of participation, which does not suppress the paradox but gives it an ontological meaning: it is “by participating (methekhonta), on the one hand, in the way of the being (ousia) of being, not in that of the non-being being” that being “is to be completely,” and, on the other hand, it is by participating “not in the way of being of the non-being not-being, but in that of the non-being being,” that “the non-being, in turn, completely is not.” Thus, the Parmenides can also shed light on how the assertion that “the Non-being is not being” makes the Non-being be. What causes the contradiction, for Plato, is equating a double negation with an affirmation. The paradox resul s from this logical equation, and not from the use of “is” as connected to the Non-being. Accepting it leads to trouble in the case of the Non-being, for it is this that makes it be.
• Being can therefore be maintained as well from an affirmation as from a double negation, and it is even how, according to the Parmenides of Plato, he binds his being to his being. But not the Non-being, which is constituted by a single negation. For Plato, then, the identity of the being has as its first condition that the double negation corroborates it, for if not, how could we discern it from what binds the non-being to itself? The opposition is thus very clear: Being participates in the way of being (ousia) of that which is, whereas non-being does not participate in “the way not-being is not,” which is a double negation. Being and non-being are thus both the subject of “is” and of “is not”: being is being and is not not-being; the non-being is non-being and it is not being. Gorgias thus substitutes for the absolute krisis of Parmenides a relative krisis which no longer separates being from non-being, but double negation from simple negation. In doing this, Gorgias has introduced negation into being, and for Plato it will stay there. Gorgias’s parricide can thus be a joyful one, and if Plato’s parricide is less joyous, it is because he took seriously the ontological import of the logico-linguistic move of Gorgias.
• Here is how a janitor, almost unalphabetic but philosophical, recurs to the principal ontological theses of the Sophist and fo mulates them in a way that could not be clearer:
• Philosophy, you understand, has made two great mistakes; there are two great omissions in it; in the first place it’s omitted o study the different ways of being, primo; and that’s no slight omission; But thass still nothing, in comparison; it’s also omitted the most important thing – the different ways of not-being. A lump of butter frinstance – I am taking the first thing tha comes into my nut – a lump of butter frixample, it’s neither a caravaserai, nor a fork, nor a cliff, nor a eiderdown. Because, you see, this way of not-being is precisely its way of being. I’ll come back to that. There’s still another way of not-being; rixample, the lump of butter that isn’t on the table, isn’t. That’s taking it a step farther. Between the two, there’s the isn’t-any-longer, and the isn’t-yet. In this way each thing is responsible for determining heaps of non-beings. The lump of butter isn’t everything it isn’t, it isn’t everywhere where it isn’t, it stops everything else being where it is, it hasn’t always been and won’t always be, ekcetera, ekcetera. And similarly, a fairly infinite infinity of non-being. So that we can say that this lump of butter is up to its eyes in an infinity of non-being, and finally, the thing that seems to be the most important isn’t being, but non-being. And you can make a distinction: there’s what can’t be because it’s contradictory – the lump of butter is a kettle of fish. And there’s what it isn’t, though it doesn’t seem to be contradictory – the lump of butter isn’t on this table (whereas in fact it is on it). The strange thing is that what is expressed by a sentence like this: the lump of butter is a ke tle of fish – belongs to the category of non-being, and yet to a certain extent it is, since you can express it. And so in one way non-being is, and in another way being isn’t. … The point is that non-being isn’t on one side and being on the other.
• Raymond Queneau, The Bark-Tree (“Le Chiendent”, 374–376)
• tr. Barbara Wright (London 1968) 246–247.
• The hypotheseis of the second part of Plato’s Parmenides can be read as a sort of Greater Logic, a logic which is for Hegel the “philosophical theory that accounts for both the subject who enunciated it and his inscription in history”. Since Plato’s Parmenides leaves it to the reader to find out which figures from History may match each of the “conceptual worlds” erected in each of them the following tries to comply with it in regard to the fourth one.
• Once Parmenides has stated his method, he takes as an example “the One” (Prm.164b5–165a1). He then offers two, and only two, possibilities: “if the One is” and “if the One is not,” each hypothesis comprising two versions, one radical and the other attenuated, from which he deduces the consequences for the One and then for the others of that One. The passage from the two positive to the two negative hypotheseis is devoid of any transition, their change of modality is an event occurring “in an instant” and so is interrupting their succession.
• The first negative hypothesis (the third hypothesis being mentioned) is an “attenuated” one, since it posits that, in order to affirm that the One is not, it is necessary to have a representation of it: “Therefore it is, as it seems, the not being One.” Being same as itself and other than all its others, it is knowable and sayable. Parmenides’s Unity can be participated, it provides with a limit the unlimited multiplicity of its others, but if the One is not, the others cannot be different from it: they can only be other than each other. So the fourth hypothesis deduces that, being only other than each other, they are not “othe ones,” but “masses.” A mass (ogkos) cannot be one, it can only appear to be one, and it can neither be a whole nor have parts. The only determination of these masses being their mutual alterity, “for that is all that is left to them, unless they are other than nothing,” their being as well as their being one is an “appearance” and their alterity is just “a phantom of otherness.” The individuals they appear to be are themselves an unlimited plurality, since masses “are going on becoming unlike.” So, if knowing is perceiving, as Protagoras declares, he must also admit that it is possible “to know now sharply, now dimly, or from close up or from a distance, or know a lot or just a little bit about the same thing.” Yet it is to these masses, these aggregates, that “wise men” give the names of “man,” “stone,” etc. It is in fact possible to give them any denomination, for each one of them may mutate abruptly into its contrary: what seems to be exceedingly big or hot can appear exceedingly little or cold. We are in the illogical logic of dreams.
• Who is capable of locking us up in it, if it is not the sophist, whose speech claims to produce the world with all its contents, and who is capable of persuading us of the truth and reality of the unsubstantial mirages and phantasms he projects upon it? As for the historic figure that may match this fourth hypothesis, doesn’t the Theaetetus tell us that it is the hypothesis of P otagoras? No sophist is present “in person” in the Sophist, but neither Protagoras nor Gorgias could be more present all along.
• Apology 136, 166, 167
• 17b3 123
• 19d-20c 154
• 20b 95
• 21d sq 95
• 22a 217
• 29e1-3 247
• 38a 89
• Charmides 88, 94, 125, 163, 166
• 166b-169c 95
• 168d-169a 269
• Cratylus 102, 110, 192, 293, 303, 326, 330
• 384c-386e 195
• 384d1 90
• 386e 110
• 387b-c 353
• 388b10-c1 283
• 393d3-4 304
• 396a5 304
• 400b-c 341
• 401b 158
• 403e3 111
• 405a-b 161
• 411a1-4 247
• 418b3-6 305
• 418e5-8 305
• 422d2-3 304
• 422e-423a 361
• 423e8-9 304
• 424a9 330
• 424b7 160
• 425a 330
• 431b 330
• 435a-c 90
• 435c8 360
• 438e-439a 266
• 439b, sq 110
• Critias
• 108a 87
• Crito
• 46c-d 181
• 47d1-2 102
• 52d2 90
• 52d8-e1 90
• 54c3 90
• Euthydemus 166, 192
• 271c 177
• 272b 121
• 275a5-6 158
• 275d-277c 157
• 275d-278a 121
• 280c-281c 349
• 282d1-2 158
• 282d5-9 112
• 284b-c 201, 353
• 284c-e 157
• 285e 330
• 287c 177
• 287d3-4 157
• 290b10-292d2 120
• 290c 121
• 295b6 157
• 295c4-7 342
• 296a8 157
• 298c6 279
• 298d-e 157
• 299a5 120
• 302b 365
• 303a9 121
• Euthyphro
• 6d9-e6 271
• 11b-c 344
• 13a10-b13 120
• Gorgias 85
• 428a 146
• 448b4-c2 126
• 448c4-5 124
• 449b-d 367
• 449c 111
• 458a 100, 168
• 461b-481b 166
• 461e4 312
• 462a 168
• 464b-466a 146
• 464c, sq 138
• 464c7-d3 122
• 465c 366
• 470c 168
• 472b-c 168
• 475e-476a 168
• 476d3-4 238
• 481e-482b 144
• 484d-486c 101
• 485e 14
• 487a-b 168
• 487e6–7 90
• 490d-491a 112
• 500a1, sq 138
• 500d9-10 122
• 517b-522e 146
• 523a1, sq 168
• 523a1-2 339
• 524c1-5 232
• 524e 162
• 525b2-5 112
• 525c2-d6 112
• Hippias Major 85
• 282b-283d 154
• 282b-c 103
• 282c-e 151
• 282e 236
• 285c-e 367
• 287d10-289d5 230
• 287e5-288a5 156
• 289e 345
• 304c 217
• 304c1-2 107
• 304c2 265
• Hippias Minor
• 366a-c 237
• Ion
• 542a-b 97
• Laches
• 186c-d 154
• 187a6-7 112
• 187e6-188a3..89
• 188c-e 181
• 188e-189b 181
• 193c2-4 133
• 194b5-9 120
• 195c-d 181
• 197d 154
• 200e3 342
• Laws
• Book I
• 629b9 97
• 631c5-6 247
• 644e1-4 282
• 648b 167
• Book II
• 663b-c 179
• 667c-669b.. 186
• 667c9-d2 ..182
• 669a6-8..179
• 678b-e 152
• Book III
• 682a3 97
• Book V 164
• 726a-727a 145
• Book VI
• 758a 280
• 766a1-4 141
• 778a9 14
• Book VII
• 822d-824a 118
• 823a 118
• 823b 143
• 823d7-e1 ...119, 121
• Book IX 133
• 862d 164
• 864b 164
• 875c6-d3 ...266
• 878b 15
• Book X
• 885b 365
• 889b4-5... 246
• 893c-894e 2..45
• Letter VII
• 341c5-d2 195
• 341c-e 203
• 344b3-7 195
• Lysis 85
• 204b4-c2 145
• 208d-209c 182
• 216a 157, 177
• 216c4-6 187
• Menexenus
• 240b-d 184
• Meno 256
• 72a 230
• 72a-73c 276
• 72a-75a 193
• 74a9-75a9 113
• 79a 112
• 79a10-c2 276
• 79c2 310
• 84a-d 90
• 84b-d 171
• 84c10-d1 171
• 93c-e 97
• 95b1-d4 153
• 97d-98a 344
• 99b 97
• 99d 96
• Parmenides 99, 105, 218, 228, 229
• 126c 92
• 129d6-e4 283
• 130c 115
• 131a-b 263
• 131b-e 106
• 132b-134e 242
• 132b3-5 251
• 135b4-c5 267
• 135b5-c6 105
• 135d 158
• 135e1-4 218
• 136b6-c5 106
• 137b2 106
• 137e 265
• 137e-138b 223
• 138b-139b 257
• 144b4 276, 311
• 144e3–5 311
• 144e4 276
• 150d7 301
• 156c-157b 245
• 161d4-7 301
• 164b-165e 318
• 164b5-165e ... 381
• 164c-165e1 ...348
• 164d4 311
• 165b5 311
• 165c2 311
• 166c1-2 192
• Phaedo 102, 136, 258, 261, 273, 329
• 59c 91
• 60b 280
• 64c1-2 102
• 66a3 121
• 66c2 121
• 66d6-10 284
• 66e2-3 247
• 68b2-4 284
• 69a6-c3 153
• 70a 233
• 70e-71b 301
• 79a7-8 234
• 79a-b 233
• 79b4-c1 234
• 79c2-8 217
• 79d1-7 97
• 79d6-7 235
• 81a 217
• 81d3 284
• 81e-82b 235
• 82d-83c 203
• 83d9 284
• 82d9-e1 234
• 87a2 312
• 90e 181
• 96a-100a 205
• 100d3-7 264
• 102d4-8 234
• 102d-e 301
• 104c7 235
• 104c11 ...235, 236
• 104e-105b 242
• 104e4-6 271
• 104e7 236
• 105a2 235, 236
• 109a-110a.. 115, 116
• 109e2-5 116
• 115d-e 232
• 117c 211
• Phaedrus 85, 157, 160, 237, 274
• 230a3-6 141
• 247a7 107
• 248e3 111
• 249b-d 101
• 249c4-6 98
• 250b1 270
• 250d5 247
• 257a6-9 145
• 257d 111
• 262a5-7 365
• 262b5-8 365
• 262e, sq 152
• 265c-e 272
• 265d-e 193
• 266b 104
• 266b1 160
• 266d-267d 178
• 267a8 169
• 267b 111
• 270a 158
• 270d 127
• 270d-e 239
• 271e3-272a1... 270
• 273b-c 169
• 274b-275b 114
• 274c1-3 206
• 275b 370
• 276e5 268
• Philebus 293
• 27b 281
• 33d3-9 346
• 34a3-5 346
• 37a-b 346
• 38c5-e4 341
• 38c9-d6 342
• 38d5-6 343
• 38e 345
• 38e2-7 342
• 38e11-12 347
• 39a1-3 347
• 39b9-10 349
• 39b-c 195
• 39e-40b 349
• 40c 346
• 41b 345
• 48e-49c 164
• 52c1-d4 284
• 52d10-e4 167
• 59c-d 203
• 59d1-2 247
• 60d 33
• 64d9-e2 264
• 65a1-2 121
• Politicus 86, 88, 103, 111, 113, 125, 137, 144, 238, 263
• 257a3-b4 104
• 258a 263
• 258a2-3 162
• 262d10-263a1..140
• 262e3-263a1 ..135
• 263b 311
• 263b3 281
• 263d6 312
• 264a1-3 141
• 266a2 311
• 275b1-7 339
• 277d-278c 113
• 277e6-7 270
• 279b 115
• 279c7-280a7... 328
• 281c8 281
• 285d5-7 121
• 286b-287a 218
• 286b7-c3 202
• 288e8-289a5... 128
• 299b-c 96
• 305d9-10 138
• 306a1-309a4... 88
• 307c6-7 161
• Protagoras
• 310d-312b 111
• 312a-314b 154
• 313c-314d 151
• 313c4-6 150
• 314b 153
• 315e 177
• 316a 97
• 316c5-d1 136
• 316d-e 97
• 317b-320c 154
• 318e-319a 152
• 320c 367
• 324c-326e 165
• 327e3-4 165
• 329b 105
• 331a7 299
• 331b 299
• 331e1 167
• 333e-334c 158
• 334c-336c 158
• 335b7 111
• 335d3 342
• 336b1 342
• 338a2 342
• 338c7 342
• 341b1-5 123
• 343a-b 330
• 347c-d 153
• 347d6-7 91
• 348a5-6 104
• 350a, sq 133
• 352b, sq 164
• 357b4 126
• 358a6 160
• 390a2 120
• Republic 85, 94, 125, 153, 274, 343
• Book I 166
• 330b 236
• 331b 88
• 331e 97
• 336b 169
• 337a3-6 365
• 354b9 342
• Book II 124
• 360e7-361a1. 270
• 369b-372d.. 129
• 369d1-2 ...128
• 371d5-7 ...151
• 372e-374d... 124
• 373a 129
• 373b 128
• 380d1-6 98
• 382a4-b9 ...99
• 382e8-11... 348
• Book II-III ....196
• Book III
• 392c6-e1... 371
• 393b7-c10... 92
• 393c1-5 ...361
• 394d 104
• 401d-412a ...88
• 409b7-c1 ...270
• 410e1-3 ...141
• Book IV 118
• 427d 89
• 432b7-c2 ...120
• 434d6-8 ...114
• 444b 217
• Book V 87
• 453b-456c... 261
• 453d6-8 ...133
• 469d 232
• 470b 163
• 472c, sq . ...112
• 476c4-7 ...359
• 477a2-4 ...246
• 477a-479 ...199
• 477a6-b1... 199
• 477b-d ...123, 127
• 477c1-d4... 237
• 477c9-d5 ...309
• 478a10-b4... 199
• 478b-c 199
• 478e-480a ...200
• 479b-c 305
• 479e10-480a13 326
• 480a11 ...189
• Book VI 160
• init. 352
• 484d5 189
• 485b-e 203
• 486d10-11... 282
• 487b-d 95
• 488e 158
• 490b1-7 97
• 490e4-495b2. 203
• 493a6-9 ...144
• 493d 370
• 498a 107
• 500c9-d2 ...97
• 500e3 14
• 500e-501c... 112
• 501a1 14
• 503a 2 ...84, 285
• 507b5-7 ...273
• 508a1 273
• 508c4-509a5. 285
• 509e-510b ...354
• 510a9-10 ...358, 198
• 511a-d 256
• 511b3-4 ...268
• 511b3-c2 ... 268
• 511c4-6 ...268
• 511d4 247
• 511d8 247
• Books VI - VII ..269
• Book VII
• 514b6 183
• 515d4-6 ...187
• 524c3-8 ...281
• 529a-c ...117
• 530b6-7 ...328
• 531a 259
• 531c2-4 328
• 532b4 268
• 533c7 268
• 533d7-e2 ...94
• 533e8 247
• 534a6 160
• 534c3 167
• 534d8-535a1 269
• 534e3 ...125, 268
• 535e 211
• 536d6 ... 125, 268
• 537c6 268
• 537e1 262
• 539b 168
• 539b-c... 182, 324
• 539c6 262
• Book VIII
• 545a5 312
• 546a-b 280
• Book IX
• 558d7-9 ...280
• 582a-e 283
• 592b 112
• Book X
• 595c 183
• 596a-b 277
• 596c4-9 179
• 596c-e 360
• 596d-e 194
• 596e1 180
• 597a4-5 ...356
• 598a-608a... 186
• 598b1-3 ...184
• 598b2-5 ...360
• 598b3-5 195
• 598b-d 179
• 598d: 177
• Symposium 339
• 175a10-11 101
• 177d7-8 145
• 180d 349
• 190b5-c1 231
• 198b 330
• 198d1-2 145
• 201e6-202b5... 305
• 203d-204b ...121
• 203d7-8 111
• 205b8-c2 128
• 208c1 111
• 210a2-5 305
• 215b-216a ....197
• 219a2 284
• 220a6 167
• 222b 145
• Theaetetus 91, 94, 293, 296, 347
• 142d4-143a9 ... 91
• 143c1-5 102
• 143c4-5 92
• 144a-b 88
• 146c8-d3 230
• 146c-e 276
• 146e-148d ...193
• 147a-c 115
• 149a6-150b3 ...95
• 149d 177
• 150c4 171
• 150d6-151b6 ...96
• 151e 345
• 152a6-8 346
• 152b6-c3 348
• 152d 177
• 154e-155d 90
• 155e3-156a2 ...231
• 155e3-157c3 ...203
• 156a7-8 237
• 157a-b 318
• 157a-c 241
• 157e-158a ....167
• 160b 282
• 161e4-162a1... 348
• 161e7-162a2... 168
• 166c4-6 382
• 167a-b ....168, 171
• 167d-168e ...207
• 167d4-7 104
• 167e3-168c2 ...104
• 168b2-c2 324
• 168b3 107
• 169d10-170a1... 207
• 172c-d 265
• 173d-174d ...101
• 174b3-6 239
• 174b4-6 333
• 174d-e 101
• 178b 327
• 180c-181b... 206
• 180c7, sqq ...322
• 180e2 208
• 181b2-4 206
• 182b 241
• 182e2-183b5 ...302
• 183c7 90
• 183e 105
• 183e-184a ...208
• 187a1-6 93
• 187a1-7 268
• 187c 33
• 188d-189b ...201
• 189a-b 199
• 189e6-190a2... 340
• 190a2-6 343
• 190a-b 200
• 191c8-d5 347
• 191d7 347
• 192b3 and 4 347
• 193c1 347
• 193c6 347
• 193c-d 347
• 194d1 347
• 194d4 347
• 195b-c 158
• 196d11-e1 ...284
• 198a5-8 121
• 201b7-9 345
• 201c7-d3 94
• 203c6-8 272
• 203e3-5 272
• 205d4-5 273
• 206d 195, 198
• 209e 243
• 210c1-5 91
• 210c3 141
• 210d1-3 95
• 210d4 86
• Timaeus 92, 212
• 17a1-7 87
• 20b7-c2 88
• 28c 339
• 29a-c ...198, 358
• 33b4-c1 220
• 36c1 280
• 42b6-43c7 ...347
• 45a4-7 282
• 50c, sq. 195
• 51d-52a 237
• 64b6 241
• 67d-e 346
• 70e4 279
• 71a-72b 195
• 75d5 280
• 78e4 280
• 86b-87b ...163, 165
• 87c6-7 270
• 90a-92c 117
• 92c1-3 117
• Aeschylus
• Persians
• 424-426 134
• Prometheus Bound
• 447-471 376
• 944-47 376
• 1011-13 376
• Anonymous
• Twofold Arguments
• fr.VIII (DK 2.419) .177
• Antisthenes
• Orthoepeia 94
• Aristophanes
• Clouds
• 1480 159
• Lysistrata
• 572-586 162
• Wasps
• 1014 62
• Aristotle
• Categories
• 11b32-12a25... 303
• de Ideis
• fr. 3 Ross ...297
• Metaphysics
• 985b8 302
• 990b13 297
• 1017a28 332
• 1048a37 123
• 1056a22-24 ...302
• 1057a1-7 42
• 1057a33-b1 ...303
• 1089a2-6 227
• Physics
• 185b25-186a22.. 253
• 188a19-22 ...206
• Prior Analytics
• 51b13 332
• 51b8-10 301
• Topics 1.5
• 102a2 263
• Descartes, R.
• Discourse on the Method
• Part Three... 218
• Diogenes Laertius
• Lives
• II,65 151
• III,108-9 290
• III,37 177
• III,57 177
• IX,51 109
• Empedocles
• Katharmoi 285
• Euripides
• Herakles
• 157-203 132
• Gorgias
• Defense of Palamedes
• §22 336
• On Nature or On Non-Being
• 979a25-28 ...214, 377
• 979a29-31 ...192
• 980b2-3 194
• Praise of Helen
• §11 349
• §13 205, 249
• §13.7 214
• §14 168, 171
• Hegel, G.W.F.
• Science of Logic
• ch.1, r.1 189
• I, 1. §11 319
• Heraclitus
• fr. 89 (DK 1.171 )...346
• Herodotus
• VI, 31 184
• VI, 100-104 184
• VII, 167 232
• Hesiod
• Shield of Herakles
• 426 232
• Theogony
• 50, sq 231
• Works and Days ... 129
• Hippocrates
• On Ancient Medicine 124, 239
• On the Epidemics
• IV, 8.1 163
• The Art 124, 239
• Homer
• Iliad
• 3.172 209
• 3.23 232
• 5.211 370
• 6.153 370
• 6.211 84
• 7.79 232
• 18.161 232
• 18.424-31 123
• 18.468 123
• 22.342 232
• Odyssey
• 9.270-1 10
• 9.305, sq 231
• 11.53 232
• 12.12 232
• 12.55, sq 217
• 12.67 232
• 17.485 10
• 17.485-7 99
• 20.377 18
• 24.187 232
• Horace
• Ars Poetica
• 87-118 172
• Isocrates
• Against the Sophists 103
• 10 125
• 13.8 159
• Antidosis
• 268 205
• Kant, I.
• Critique of Pure Reason
• TA 1.1.§4 336
• Melissus
• fr. 8 (DK 1.273) ... 214
• Nietzsche, F.
• Beyond Good and Evil
• §213 285
• Dawn
• §544 230
• Ecce Homo 371
• Einleitung in das Studium der platonische Dialoge 371
• Parmenides (DK)
• fr. I 213
• vv.1-4 216
• vv.28-30 203
• fr. II 213
• v.1 212
• vv.5-8 191
• v.7 320
• vv.7-8 188
• fr. III 252
• fr. IX 206
• fr. V 219
• fr. VI
• vv.1-2 320
• vv.5-9 217
• fr. VII
• vv.1-2 ...40, 70, 188
• v.5 211, 283
• v.17 15
• fr. VIII 188
• v.1 212
• v.3 227
• vv.4-6 220
• vv.15-16 283
• vv.15-18 211
• v.16 283
• vv.22-25 224
• v.25 249
• v.27 217
• v.32 227
• v.33 225
• v.34 251, 252
• v.35 188
• vv.43-45 ...51, 208, 220
• v.50 212
• v.54 217
• v.55 283
• Pindar
• Olympian
• 9.34 ............232
• Plotinus
• Enneads
• V,2.43 246
• Plutarch
• Adversus Colotem
• 1109a 302
• 1119c-1120b ...254
• Proclus
• In Parmenidem
• 744 45
• In Timaeum
• 19.30 sq 87
• Protagoras
• DK 2.262.29 156
• DK 2.271.12 156
• On Truth 207
• Overturning Arguments 156
• Sextus Empiricus
• Adv. Math.
• VII,67.1-4 ..215, 377
• VII,67.6-8 .. 215, 377
• VII,84-5 194
• VII,122-141 211
• Simonides
• fr. 119 Bergk 232
• Simplicius
• in Phys. 25.15 206
• Sophocles
• Antigone
• 334-335 123
• Judgment of Paris...283
• Stilpo
• fr. 197 Muller 254
• fr. 27 Muller 253
• Thucydides
• 3.108 295
• 7.32 295
• Xenophon
• Cynegeticus
• §1 119
• §12 119
• §13, 4 122
• Memorabilia
• 1.2.60 151
• 1.6.2-10 146
• 1.6.13-14 147
• 2.6.33-9 147
• 3.11.7-8 147
• 4.3 124
• 5.6 255
• 6.11-14 146
• Oeconomicus
• 5.17 129
• 15.4 129
• Zeno of Elea
• A29, DK 1.254,sq... 169
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• Dixsaut, M. “Le non-être, l’autre et la négation dans le Sophiste” in Aubenque, Études sur le Sophiste, 167–213, modified in Platon et la question de la pensée, Études platoniciennes I (Paris Vrin 2000) 225–270.
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