Complete Works (84 page)

54
.
Petteia
was a board game, resembling draughts or checkers.

55
. 259b.

56
. Retaining
memim
ē
sthai
at e5.

57
. Reading
mentoi tina
at a6.

58
. Reading
kai to
at c5.

59
. Retaining
m
ē
sumphora
ē
at e1.

60
. Reading
arti rh
ē
then
at c5. The reference is to 293e.

61
. Cf. 293c–d.

62
.
Iliad
xi.514.

63
. Revolving columns on which the laws were traditionally inscribed at Athens.

64
. Reading
al
ē
thestata ge
at a8.

65
. Alternatively: “Well, wouldn’t those laws—written with the advice of people who know so far as is possible—be imitations of the truth on each subject?”

66
. See 292e.

67
. Reading
eniote kathaper
at a6.

68
. Reading
ephamen einai
at d2.

69
. See 291c.

70
. That is, the appellation
polis
or ‘city’ gives rise to that of ‘statesmanship’,
politik
ē
.

71
. Reading
echthra … echeton
at b10.

72
. The word translated ‘sharpness’ can also refer to high pitch in sound.

73
. Greek
andreia
, literally ‘manliness’. Bearing the literal meaning in mind helps to make more intelligible some of the applications of ‘courage’ suggested here and below.

74
. Reading
kai ta chr
ē
sta
at c5.

75
. Reading
en tais psuchais
at c7.

76
. Reading
apoklinei
at e2.

77
. Reading
phusei
at a5.

78
. I.e., between families, through marriage.

79
. Reading
toioutous
at d1.

80
. The final words are attributed by many editors to the younger Socrates, but they seem perhaps a little authoritative for him, and it was after all old Socrates himself who set up the whole discussion in the beginning—both in the
Sophist
and in the
Statesman
.

PARMENIDES

Translated by Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan.

The great philosopher Parmenides is the central figure of this dialogue. He, not
Socrates, directs the philosophical discussion—if Plato has a ‘spokesman’ here,
it is Parmenides. Socrates is portrayed as a very bright and promising young
philosopher—he is virtually a teenager, only just beginning his career in the
subject—who needs to think a lot harder and longer before he will have an adequate
grasp of the nature of reality: this Socrates is a budding metaphysician,
not the purely ethical thinker of
Apology
and other ‘Socratic’ dialogues.

Accompanied by his disciple Zeno (originator of Zeno’s paradoxes), Parmenides
has come on a visit to Athens. At Pythodorus’ house, after Zeno has read
out his book (now lost) attacking the intelligibility of any ‘plurality’ of real
things, Socrates questions Zeno and is then questioned by Parmenides about
his own conception of reality as consisting of nonphysical, nonperceptible
‘Forms’ in which perceptible, physical entities ‘participate’. Parmenides raises
six difficulties that Socrates’ view entails, including the celebrated ‘third man’
argument to which twentieth-century analytical philosophers have paid much
attention. Concluding the first part of the dialogue, he explains the method of
analysis which Socrates must now use in order to resolve them—Socrates’ efforts
to articulate a theory of Forms have been premature. One must consider
systematically not just the consequences of any hypothesis, but also those of its
denial, and the method involves other complexities as well: one must systematically
consider eight different trains of consequences, in order to decide finally
what the right way of putting one’s thesis will be. In the second part of the dialogue,
occupying more than two-thirds of its total length, Parmenides demonstrates
this new method, using as his respondent not Socrates but one of the
other young men present, Aristotle. (In choosing this name, Plato may have
been alluding to the philosopher Aristotle, who began his own metaphysical
work as a member of Plato’s Academy.) Considering the ‘hypothesis’ of ‘one being’,
he works out a series of eight conflicting ‘deductions’ (plus a ninth,
155e–157b, added as an appendix to the first two) as to its metaphysically significant
properties—its being, unity, sameness and difference, similarity and
dissimilarity, motion and rest, place, time, and so on. It is left to Socrates, and
to the reader, to infer just what use to make of these deductions in determining
how best to formulate an adequate theory of Forms. Since the theory that Socrates
presented at the beginning of the dialogue is plainly the one developed in
Symposium, Phaedo,
and
Republic,
this dialogue seems to be implying that
that theory of Forms needs refurbishing and that, in demonstrating his method,
Parmenides has shown us how to do that.
Parmenides
thus points forward to
Sophist, Statesman,
and
Philebus,
where Forms are further rethought.

The meeting of Socrates with the Eleatic philosophers (an invention of
Plato’s) is reported in a way unparalleled in the other dialogues. The narrator,
Cephalus—a different Cephalus from the one in whose house the
Republic’s
conversation takes place—speaks directly to the reader (as Socrates himself does
in
Republic
), telling of his visit to Athens from his home in Clazomenae, accompanied
by a group of Clazomenian philosophers. (Clazomenae was famous
as the birthplace of the pre-Socratic ‘physical’ philosopher Anaxagoras.) They
have come specially to hear Antiphon, in fact Plato’s younger half brother, recite
from memory the record of this conversation: he had heard it from Pythodorus.
Cephalus now reports what Antiphon said, in himself reporting what
Pythodorus had told him the various speakers on the original occasion had said
to one another: four levels of conversation, counting the one Cephalus is having
now with an undetermined group—us, the readers. The effect is twofold: to
emphasize the extraordinary philosophical value of this conversation and to put
us hearers at a great intellectual distance from it—as if to say that we could
barely be expected to assimilate and learn properly from it. The situation in
Symposium
is in some ways comparable—except that the meeting there is reported
at only two removes and its fame apparently extends only to those with
a personal interest in Socrates (one intimate of Socrates has just reported it to
a second and is now reporting it to another friend).
This
conversation is
marked as having truly universal significance.

J.M.C.

Cephalus

[126]
When we arrived in Athens from home in Clazomenae, we ran into Adeimantus and Glaucon in the marketplace. Adeimantus took me by the hand and said, “Welcome, Cephalus. If there is anything you want here that we can do for you, please tell us.”

“In fact that’s the very reason I’m here,” I replied, “to ask a favor of you.”

“Tell us what you want,” he said.

[b] And I replied, “Your half brother on your mother’s side – what was his name? I’ve forgotten. He would have been a child when I came here from Clazomenae to stay before – and that’s a long time ago now. I think his father’s name was Pyrilampes.”

“It was, indeed,” he said.

“And his?”

“Antiphon. But why do you ask?”

“These men are fellow citizens of mine,” I said, “keen philosophers, and they have heard that this Antiphon met many times with a friend of Zeno’s called Pythodorus and can recite from memory the discussion that Socrates [c] and Zeno and Parmenides once had, since he heard it often from Pythodorus.”

“That’s true,” he said.

“Well, we want to hear that discussion,” I replied.

“Nothing hard about that,” he said. “When Antiphon was a young man, he practiced it to perfection, although these days, just like the grandfather he’s named for, he devotes most of his time to horses. But if that’s what’s called for, let’s go to his house. He left here to go home just a short time ago, but he lives close by in Melite.”

After this exchange, we set off walking and found Antiphon at home
[127]
engaging a smith to work on a bit of some kind. When he had finished with the smith, and his brothers told him why we were there, he recognized me from my earlier visit and greeted me. We asked him to go through the discussion, and he balked at first – it was, he said, a lot of work. But finally he narrated it in detail.

Antiphon said that Pythodorus said that Zeno and Parmenides once came to the Great Panathenaea. Parmenides was already quite venerable, [b] very gray but of distinguished appearance, about sixty-five years old. Zeno was at that time close to forty, a tall, handsome man who had been, as rumor had it, the object of Parmenides’ affections when he was a boy. Antiphon said that the two of them were staying with Pythodorus, outside [c] the city wall in the Potters’ Quarter, and that Socrates had come there, along with a number of others, because they were eager to hear Zeno read his book, which he and Parmenides had just brought to Athens for the first time. Socrates was then quite young.

Zeno was reading to them in person; Parmenides happened to be out. Very little remained to be read when Pythodorus, as he related it, came [d] in, and with him Parmenides and Aristotle – the man who later became one of the Thirty. They listened to a little of the book at the very end. But not Pythodorus himself; he had heard Zeno read it before.

Then Socrates, after he had heard it, asked Zeno to read the first hypothesis of the first argument again; and when he had read it, Socrates said, [e] “Zeno, what do you mean by this: if things
¹
are many, they must then be both like and unlike, but that is impossible, because unlike things can’t be like or like things unlike? That’s what you say, isn’t it?”

“It is,” said Zeno.

“If it’s impossible for unlike things to be like and like things unlike, isn’t it then also impossible for them to be many? Because, if they were many, they would have incompatible properties. Is this the point of your arguments – simply to maintain, in opposition to everything that is commonly said, that things are not many? And do you suppose that each of your arguments is proof for this position, so that you think you give as many proofs that things are not many as your book has arguments? Is
[128]
that what you’re saying – or do I misunderstand?”

“No,” Zeno replied. “On the contrary, you grasp the general point of the book splendidly.”

“Parmenides,” Socrates said, “I understand that Zeno wants to be on intimate terms with you not only in friendship but also in his book. He has, in a way, written the same thing as you, but by changing it round he tries to fool us into thinking he is saying something different. You say in [b] your poem that the all is one, and you give splendid and excellent proofs for that; he, for his part, says that it is not many and gives a vast array of very grand proofs of his own. So, with one of you saying ‘one,’ and the other ‘not many,’ and with each of you speaking in a way that suggests that you’ve said nothing the same – although you mean practically the same thing – what you’ve said you appear to have said over the heads of the rest of us.”

“Yes, Socrates,” said Zeno. “Still, you haven’t completely discerned the truth about my book, even though you chase down its arguments and [c] follow their spoor as keenly as a young Spartan hound. First of all, you have missed this point: the book doesn’t at all preen itself on having been written with the intent you described, while disguising it from people, as if that were some great accomplishment. You have mentioned something that happened accidentally. The truth is that the book comes to the defense of Parmenides’ argument against those who try to make fun of it by [d] claiming that, if it
²
is one, many absurdities and self-contradictions result from that argument. Accordingly, my book speaks against those who assert the many and pays them back in kind with something for good measure, since it aims to make clear that their hypothesis, if it is many,
³
would, if someone examined the matter thoroughly, suffer consequences even more absurd than those suffered by the hypothesis of its being one. In that competitive spirit, then, I wrote the book when I was a young man. Someone made an unauthorized copy, so I didn’t even have a chance to decide [e] for myself whether or not it should see the light. So in this respect you missed the point, Socrates: you think it was written not out of a young man’s competitiveness, but out of a mature man’s vainglory. Still, as I said, your portrayal was not bad.”

“I take your point,” Socrates said, “and I believe it was as you say. But
[129]
tell me this: don’t you acknowledge that there is a form, itself by itself,
⁴
of likeness, and another form, opposite to this, which is what unlike is? Don’t you and I and the other things we call ‘many’ get a share of those two entities? And don’t things that get a share of likeness come to be like in that way and to the extent that they get a share, whereas things that get a share of unlikeness come to be unlike, and things that get a share of both come to be both? And even if all things get a share of both, though they are opposites, and by partaking of them are both like and unlike themselves, what’s astonishing about that?