The Ideas of Socrates 9781472598059, 9780826494511

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Acknowledgements This book represents the summation of the first phase of my life in philosophy. That I would have written this book I could not have foreseen ten years ago when I began studying philosophy at the New School for Social Research. While no one pushed me in any particular direction, my professors at the New School expected only the most rigorous of work, whether in the form of reading, writing or dialogue. This combination of openness and rigour in my education is, perhaps, responsible for what I have been able to accomplish. Three of my teachers deserve special mention. By their example of an inextricably serious, passionate and yet playful approach to philosophy, Richard Bernstein and Agnes Heller provided me with exemplary models of how to work in philosophy. I hope that this same spirit can be seen in my work. Special thanks also go to Claudia Baracchi. She arrived at the New School just as I was turning my attention to Ancient Greek philosophy, and it was her class on Plato’s Republic that drew me deeply into these texts. Her interest and attentiveness to my questions concerning the eidetic in Plato’s writings have been decisive. Most importantly, I must thank my wife, Natasha Guinan. Her support has been invaluable, and our conversations on Plato helped me frame many of the questions pursued in this book. I dedicate this book to Natasha and to my parents, Henry and Jo Ann Linck. Although only the final touches were put on this book after she arrived, I also dedicate it to Sylvie, certainly the best idea Natasha and I ever had.

Introduction Plato’s Republic begins with Socrates and Glaucon leaving the Piraeus and heading back to Athens. Polemarchus sees the pair in the distance and sends his slave to stop them. Socrates reports that ‘the boy took hold of my cloak from behind [µου πισθεν πα λαβµενο το µατου]’1 (Republic 327b). As the dialogue unfolds, questions of justice emerge, prompting the construction of a city in speech. It has been noted that this city requires a purging and suppression of desire, of eros.2 The Symposium, in which the participants devote themselves to praising eros, begins with a similar scene. Apollodorus narrates the dialogue; these are his first words: In my opinion, I am not unprepared for what you ask about;3 for just the other day – when I was on my way up to town from my home in Phaleron – one of my acquaintances spotted me a long way off from behind and called, playing with his call: ‘Phalerian,’ he said. ‘You there, Apollodorus, aren’t you going to wait?’ And I stopped and let him catch up.4 (Symposium 172a) The Republic and Symposium hail to each other. Justice and eros may be at odds, but their entanglement seems unavoidable. The coupling of the Symposium and the Republic is deepened when we learn a number of lines down that the person who has hailed Apollodorus is named Glaucon, the name of the principal interlocutor of Socrates in the Republic. In the middle books of the Republic, the mature Socrates ventures upon his most extensive account of the ideas, the eide. They are introduced simultaneously with the introduction of the philosopher, and are indispensable in articulating the programme of education that Socrates sketches in the ensuing books. We see the young Socrates discuss ideas for the first time in the Parmenides.5 This dialogue, the only dialogue classified as being ‘On Ideas’ in the ancient system, begins as follows: When we came to Athens from our home, from Clazomenae, we chanced upon both Adeimantus and Glaucon in the market. And Adeimantus took my hand [µου λαβµενο τ χειρ] and said,

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The Ideas of Socrates ‘Welcome Cephalus! If you need anything here that’s in our power, just say it.’6 (Parmenides 126a)

The echoes of the Republic are unmistakable. Again, we see the characters meeting on the roads, hailing to one another, and grabbing hold. The name Glaucon appears again, but this time it is indeed the Glaucon of the Republic, here with his brother, Adeimantus, the other principal interlocutor of the Republic. And while this Cephalus is a different one, his name echoes another character from the Republic, Cephalus the father of Polemarchus, (absentee) host (but crucial catalyst) of the conversation reported in the dialogue. The Republic appears here as the brightest star in a constellation that is coming into view. But if we return for a moment to the opening pages of the Symposium, we can glimpse another light in this constellation. This Glaucon that Apollodorus reports he encountered asks him, ‘Were you yourself present at this party or not [σ αυτ παρεγνου τ συνουσ τα!τ " ο#]?’ (Symposium 172b). This question echoes the opening of another dialogue, the Phaedo. The opening line is: ‘You yourself, Phaedo – were you present with Socrates on that day when he drank the potion in the prison?’7 [αυτ, % Φαδων, παρεγνου Σωκρα´τει ,κεν- τ .µρ / τ φα´ρµακον 1πιεν ,ν τ2 δεσµωτηρ4] (Phaedo 57a) Unlike Apollodorus, who was not present, Phaedo was. Yet the repetition indicates an affinity between the dialogues. Seth Benardete has proposed that the link can be discerned through a consideration of temporality.8 The Symposium begins in the evening and ends with the rising of the sun. The Phaedo begins in the early morning and ends at sunset. By putting the dialogues together one gets a full day. Furthermore, these dialogues share a theme. Each, at a certain juncture, makes a claim about the nature of philosophy: on the one hand that it is the practice of dying and being dead, on the other hand that it is eros. As with the temporal connection, the very thing that holds these dialogues together sets them in opposition. These are only some of the connections that can be drawn between these dialogues, and are scarcely an indication of the numerous connections that can be drawn to other dialogues.9 These few are enough, however, to suggest that Plato invites us to pursue such connections, to read dialogues with and against others, to ask how one dialogue can either question or supplement another.

Introduction

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Concerning the Phaedo, the Parmenides and the Symposium, however, there is another important feature that binds these three dialogues together. The Platonic dialogues can be divided into two types with respect to narrative mode: direct dialogue or narrated dialogue. The Phaedo, the Parmenides and the Symposium are all narrated dialogues.10 Furthermore, these three dialogues are not narrated by Socrates. This sets them apart from all of the other narrated dialogues. Such a device, entirely in the hands of the author, indicates a strong internal conjunction of these texts intended by Plato. Yet, another significant feature of these three dialogues doubles their linkage. In each of these dialogues we are presented with an account of the young Socrates. In the Phaedo Socrates recounts his earliest pursuits of wisdom and the trouble he encountered. In the Parmenides we see a young Socrates engaging in spirited conversation with Zeno and Parmenides in which Socrates presents his hypothesis of ideas. In the Symposium Socrates recounts lessons he undertook with a priestess named Diotima. Again, these are the only such accounts in the Platonic dialogues.11 Putting these accounts together, one assembles what could be called ‘The Education of Socrates’. This education revolves around logos, eros and eide. Each account, in its own way, has something to say about ideality. What follows is a reading of these passages with respect to Socrates and the ideas.

1.

A Note on Method and Intent

This project could be characterized as an inflected reading. I have taken a fairly small number of pages from Plato’s dialogues and provided a running commentary on them. Most of the passages I discuss are cited in full in the text, usually in the sequence they are found in each dialogue. Where the details were not crucial I have often summarized. Yet, this is not a reading that seeks to exhaust the implications of these passages. From the beginning I am interested principally in using the reading of these passages to discern an understanding of the ideas as they are presented in these texts. Thus I have attempted to focus upon this dimension of the passages, while simultaneously allowing the passages themselves to guide the path of the reading. In an effort to let the texts remain the principal catalyst of the project, I have limited references in the main body of the study to the Phaedo, the Parmenides and the Symposium. All references to other Platonic dialogues, other primary sources, and secondary sources have been placed in the notes (with a few exceptions). This methodology

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The Ideas of Socrates

has allowed me to construct an account of the eidetic in and through a reading of these specific passages. I have not attempted to construct a theory of ideas, Platonic or otherwise. While I begin with the supposition that these texts have definitive things to say about the eidetic, I do not presume that these things are organized systematically, nor that Plato had or intended to present a systematic theory of ideas. On the other hand, I am also not concerned with refuting the contention that there is a theory of ideas in Plato’s writings. Again, I begin with, and subsequently affirm, the claim that there is a deep effort to comprehend the eidetic in these texts. One could even say that this thinking is systematic; but this means neither that there is a system of the eidetic in the Platonic dialogues, nor in Plato’s mind.12 Let me make clear, however, that I am not opposed to such a refutation. This study could contribute to such a refutation, but it is not something I actively argue for in these pages.

2.

A Note on Ideas and Ideality

The goal of this study is twofold. First, I want to present a reading of a cluster of passages in Plato’s dialogues in order to better understand the notions of eidos and idea as found in the Platonic corpus. This reading is the first step in approaching such an understanding. Second, I want to use Plato’s texts to better understand what is entailed in investigating ideality as such. The second of these goals, however, ultimately is qualified by the first. The legacy of ideality in Western thought is a Platonic legacy. It will be shown in what follows that the encounter with ideality in these texts produces a double reflexivity. On the one hand, the passages studied demonstrate repeatedly that the proper understanding of the ideas, for us as well as for Socrates, requires that the positing of the notion itself must be part of what is thought. The ideas cannot be understood simply as apart from the economy of hypothesizing and inquiry. On the other hand, we are also returned repeatedly to the details of Plato’s texts. As soon as one would attempt to extract a decontextualized understanding of ideality from the dialogues, one comes into conflict with what the dialogues have to teach. Of course, there is a sense in which one gets caught up in a neverending cycle here. One will always be obliged to make comprehensive claims; but one will also always have to retreat back to the contingency of experience to reassess such claims. The bulk of the writing carried out here concerns the first of these goals; there are relatively few pages devoted to direct reflection on ideality. But

Introduction

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there are some, and I have tried to build on them successively throughout the study. Their number should not indicate a diminishment of importance. One mark of the inflection I spoke of above is the fact that the brief speculative claims I make in the course of this study affect and guide the readings that follow them. I have not attempted simply to distil a speculative account from a reading of Plato’s texts. Rather, the speculative reflections and the task of reading are dialectically co-constitutive. Because of this, I do not begin with an account of ideas or ideality. Concerning eide as they are mentioned in the texts, I simply take the references as they come, building up a textual account as the reading unfolds. However, notions of ideality appear long before the terms eidos and idea are encountered. Therefore, it is necessary that I begin with some minimal understanding of ideality. Let me briefly describe what could be called my pre-understanding of ideality that allows the reading to begin. I will take as an example something encountered early in Socrates’ autobiography in the Phaedo. In a discussion of explanations of growth and magnitude, Socrates presents some examples: growth occurs through the attachment of like to like in a body; one horse is bigger than another by a head; ten things are more than eight things by two things; ‘a two-foot length [is] larger than a one-foot length because it [exceeds] it by half of itself’ (Phaedo 96e–97a). In each case, some thing is posited as being the cause of something becoming (or being) larger (or smaller). The burden of the explanation is placed upon the thing, whether it is indeed the thing responsible. Each explanation, however, overlooks something crucial. The sense of such explanations is already oriented by notions of size, body, bulk, magnitude, multitude, number, relation and/or equality. The things said and thought exceed what the explanation purports to be its own proper terms and domain. Such explanations are blind to the fact that a framework of idealizations is already in place as soon as such questions are uttered. This, then, is the minimal understanding of ideality with which I begin.13 At the very least, such an understanding of ideality is one that begins with the fact of shared discourse. It is only through the employment of language that such ideality is initially made manifest.

3.

Plan of the Work

The core of this study consists of commentary on passages from the Phaedo, Parmenides and Symposium. The Phaedo passages contain Socrates’ autobiographical account of his early intellectual endeavours (Phaedo 96a–99d), which leads to his discussions of the second sailing (Phaedo 99d–100a) and

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his hypothetical method (Phaedo 100a–102a). The commentary on these passages is divided between Chapters 1 and 4. As I show, at the transitional point between Socrates’ accounts of his second sailing and his hypothetical method, his discourse moves from the past to the present tense. The commentaries on the Parmenides and the Symposium in Chapters 2 and 3 can be thought of as being inserted into the space of this shift of tense. Both the Parmenides and the Symposium show Socrates as a young man. It is my contention that Socrates’ account of his hypothetical method cannot be properly understood without considering what Socrates learns in these dialogues, as these two episodes complete the portrait of the philosopher as a young man. As a way of setting the stage for the central puzzle of Socrates’ ideas, I preface the main chapters of this book with a brief look at the Pythagorean conception of number, what I have called a ‘Pythagorean Overture’. There are a number of significant detours (as well as a few minor ones) within this otherwise simple structure. In Chapter 1, the most significant departure from the main passages is a discussion of the account of misology at the centre of the Phaedo. Socrates’ remarks in this portion of the dialogue are central for understanding his commitment to the ideas as outlined later in the dialogue. The central passages upon which I comment from the Parmenides are from the opening dramatic portion of the dialogue in which Socrates converses with Zeno and Parmenides about the ideas (Parmenides 127b–137c). This is followed by a reading of the first two arguments from Parmenides’ discourse on the One, including the discourse on the instant (Parmenides 137c–157b). A brief, but crucial, digression in this chapter will examine the dialectical relationship between limits and that which they limit through a consideration of Aristotle’s account of time in the Physics and Euclid’s definitions of points and lines in the Elements. The third chapter consists only of commentary on Socrates’ speech from the Symposium (199c–212a). I begin, however, with the final portion of this speech, that part concerning the erotic ascent. After discerning what is at issue in this teaching of Diotima’s, I show the necessity of situating it within the whole of Socrates’ lesson with the priestess. At the end of the chapter a more expansive interpretation of the ascent is offered in light of the preceding topics. The final chapter returns to the Phaedo and endeavours to interpret Socrates’ account of his hypothetical method in light of the readings carried out in the first three chapters. The major detour in this chapter concerns the account of recollection earlier in the Phaedo. Chapter 4 ends by considering the relationship between the ideas and the soul, raising the

Introduction

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question whether the ideas can truly be taken up as a topic amenable to separate investigation. At the close of the book, I offer a few brief, synoptic remarks on the main conclusions of the preceding commentary.

Pythagorean Overture It is well noted that Plato’s Phaedo has a particularly Pythagorean colouring. This is the case partly because the main interlocutors of Socrates in the dialogue, Simmias and Cebes, are named as students of a Pythagorean, Philolaus. But it is also, and more significantly, because the dialogue revolves around a distinctly Pythagorean theme, the immortality of the soul.1 Less apparent, but not irrelevant, is the Pythagorean concern for number as constitutive of cosmic order. We would be well served for an investigation of ideality in the Phaedo – and beyond – to briefly survey the ideas customarily ascribed to Pythagoras and Pythagoreans. This is true not because we can find there a firm doctrinal foundation upon which the dialogue is erected, but rather because in the reception and interpretation of Pythagorean thinking we can already see in outline some of the difficulties with which a study of ideality in Plato’s dialogues must contend. Scholars seem to agree that if anything about Pythagorean thinking is accurately known it is that he taught that the soul is immortal. This teaching was part of Pythagoras’ role as a religious thinker and leader and is not a purely philosophical doctrine.2 The mode of immortality that seems to have been taught by Pythagoras is that of transmigration, the passing of a soul of one who has died into the body of another animal then being born. The significance of this doctrine is that such a conception of the soul’s immortality dovetails easily with a certain kind of ethical teaching, one which is also found, for instance, in the fragments of Empedocles. This ethos is one which holds to certain practices of abstinence and purification in order to assist in the continued well-being of one’s soul. The general outlines of such ethical concerns are also to be found in Plato’s dialogues, but with some rather significant qualifications. Thus it seems that the entire discussion of the soul’s status would be of great interest to those steeped in Pythagorean ideas. The other strain of Pythagorean thought that is significant for a reading of the Phaedo is the status of number. It is commonplace to ascribe to Pythagorean thinking the notion that all things are numbers. This formulation of the doctrine can be found in Aristotle:

Pythagorean Overture

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The so-called Pythagoreans, the first to be absorbed in mathematics, not only advanced this particular science, but, having been brought up on it, they believed that its principles [αρχα] are the principles of all things. Now, of these principles, numbers are naturally the first. As a result, they seemed to see in numbers, rather than in fire, earth, and water, many similarities to things as they are and as they come to be: for one sort of modification of numbers, so to speak, is justice; another, soul and mind; still another, opportunity; and so forth. Musical modes and relations, too, they saw in terms of numbers. And all other numbers were for them the primary natures. In view of this, they took the elements of numbers to be the elements [στοιχεα] of things [ντα], and the whole heaven to be harmony and number.3 (Metaphysics 985b23–986a4) It is easy to see how a strong interpretation of Pythagorean thinking could claim that Pythagoreans believed numbers to be corporeal things that constitute the world as their bodily elements. In this sense, Pythagorean thinking would be close to atomism, with the (curious) distinction that numbers would be both external bodily elements and internal rational principles. And while it is now largely contested that such a doctrine was either taught by Pythagoras himself or professed by his followers,4 it is not hard to believe that someone could take a doctrine of the primacy of numbers to mean such a thing. In this sense, numbers in Pythagorean thinking would be vulnerable to the same fate as the ideas discussed in Plato’s writings – that they are straightaway taken to be like ‘things’. Consider, however, another way of interpreting Aristotle’s comments on the Pythagoreans. He begins his account by speaking not of elements, but rather of principles, αρχα. It is certainly not warranted from the direct evidence we possess simply to claim that Pythagoreans held numbers to be the bodily elements of things. Virtually the only basis we have for such a claim is the following sentence of Philolaus: ‘All things, at least those we know, have number; for it is evident that nothing whatever can either be thought or known, without number’.5 To have number does not mean the same as to be number. We can readily understand, for instance, the conception that everything can be explained through certain mathematical properties, such as ratios. From this it is also easy to understand how such thinking could see in numbers both the principles that constitute a thing’s being and the ground of our ability to know that thing. The question of how such constitution is to be understood is not immediately evident, but it need not be the case that it is through ‘corporeal numbers’.6 Finally, the contrast between so-called materialist philosophies and ones that would posit something ideal like numbers as the constituent principle

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of things misses a more fundamental affinity. For whether one posits a material substance such as water, fire or air, or instead something like numbers as the sole principle of being, one nonetheless posits that thing as a principle. In this sense all such positing is a positing of ideality. And the crucial mistake made by both would be not recognizing the meaning of such positing for the very thing posited. Concerning this point Hegel writes: A philosophy which ascribed veritable, ultimate, absolute being to finite existence as such, would not deserve the name philosophy; the principles of ancient or modern philosophies, water, or matter, or atoms are thoughts, universals, ideal entities, not things as they immediately present themselves to us, that is, in their sensuous individuality – not even the water of Thales. For although this is also empirical water, it is at the same time also the in-itself or essence of all other things, too, and these other things are not self-subsistent or grounded in themselves, but are posited [gesetzte] by, are derived from, an other, from water, that is they are ideal entities.7 To anticipate what will be at stake in this study, we can pause for a moment and consider the word ‘posit’ as used by Hegel and by me above. I spoke of the positing of a principle, be it air or number. I suggested that this positing, this putting forth and laying down of the principle, was somehow constitutive of the status of the principle itself. Hegel’s somewhat unusual usage of the term suggests that the principle itself posits the things. The question of the status of ideality in Plato’s writings, I believe, can be traced by trying to do justice to both of these claims, in fact, by trying to understand how both claims are inseparable.

Chapter 1

Phaedo Plato’s Phaedo portrays Socrates’ last day. Knowing that he will be executed that day, his friends agree amongst themselves to come as early as possible to the prison so as to have as much time as possible with Socrates. Not surprisingly, the conversation turns to matters of death and dying, particularly the question of what happens to the soul after one has died. Socrates, in an atypically lengthy discourse, says that he should not fear what is to come since he has attempted to live a life guided by philosophy. This discourse is premised on the claim that death is the separation of the soul from the body, and that this is what the philosopher is struggling to achieve at all times. Hence, it would be foolish for a philosopher to fear or resent that which he has been struggling to attain his entire life.1 Socrates’ main interlocutors, Simmias and Cebes, assent to Socrates’ characterization of death and philosophy, but are nevertheless not assured that fear is unwarranted. Only if the soul is deathless could such fear be assuaged. Thus the conversation turns to this question, and Socrates, along with Simmias and Cebes, pursues a series of arguments that would prove the deathlessness of the soul. At each crucial point in the argument, either Simmias or Cebes raises an objection to the logos that is developed. Socrates remains cheerful and resolute through the entire series of exchanges. It stands outside of the purpose of my investigation to examine these arguments in detail. However, it must be noted that in typical Socratic fashion and despite all appearances, the arguments that unfold cannot be attributed entirely to Socrates. The answers which Socrates receives are always the dialogic basis upon which he constructs his ensuing remarks. At the same time, however, it very well might be the case that Socrates expects to receive certain kinds of answers and thus asks his questions accordingly. This is not to say that he endorses the answers, but recognizes very early in the conversation that he wants to lead his interlocutors through a series of logoi in order then for these logoi to be called into question. In this way, dialogue and dialectic become nearly indistinguishable. Let me give just one example. Shortly after Socrates has claimed that philosophers devote themselves to ‘nothing else but dying and being dead’, he says:

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The Ideas of Socrates

‘And is [death] anything but the freeing of the soul from the body? And is this what it means to have died: for the body to have become separate, once it’s freed from the soul and is itself all by itself, and for the soul to be separate, once she’s freed from the body and is herself all by herself? Death couldn’t be anything other than this – could it?’2 (64c) To this question, Socrates receives a simple, ‘No, just that’. The nature of this response allows Socrates to construct his ensuing discourse without any limitation on the sense he gives to separation. It is possible that Simmias, or someone else, could have interjected here and asked what precisely Socrates means by separation. Furthermore, it could have been asked what precisely a soul is and how it stands in relation to the body. If such questions had been asked, Socrates could not have continued in quite the same way.3 Let me briefly point to something in the text that indicates that Socrates has had in mind the problematic status of separation prior to this moment in the conversation. His very first words of the dialogue are: ‘How absurd a thing this seems to be, gentlemen, which human beings call “pleasant.” How wondrously related it is by nature to its seeming contrary – the Painful – in that they’re not both willing to be present with a human being at the same time; but if someone chases the one and catches it, he’s pretty much compelled always to catch the other one too, just as if the pair of them – although they’re two – were fastened by one head!’ (60b–c) What it means for such a pair to be both distinct and inseparable will turn out to be the problem of the body and the soul. And how it is that such things might be separated is far from clear at the outset. However, Socrates never explicitly delimits the problem as such, and it remains unclear when the dialogue ends whether his companions have yet clearly grasped it as a problem.

1.

Blindness

The passages from Plato’s Phaedo with which we will be concerned4 stand at the beginning of what could be considered the last of the four major parts of the dialogue.5 The discussion immediately preceding this section contains the objections of Simmias and Cebes, the response to Simmias’

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suggestion that the soul is a tuning, and the warning against misology. The final part of the dialogue begins with Socrates’ response to Cebes’ objection to the arguments for the continued existence of the soul after death. Cebes’ objection runs as follows: even if it can be proved that the soul is before we are born, and even if the nature of our lives calls for such an account, this does not prove that the soul remains in existence after we die. Socrates begins his response: ‘What you are searching for is no trivial business, Cebes. For we must busy ourselves with the cause concerning generation and destruction as a whole. So I’ll go through my own experiences about them for you, if you want me to. Then, should something of what I have to say appear useful to you, you can use it for purposes of persuasion in the very matter you’re talking about.’ (95e–96a) It is immediately evident that Socrates is going to talk about his own experiences concerning such matters. Two brief notes on vocabulary. First, the word translated as ‘experiences’ here is πα´θη. This word covers notions of happening and occurrence, and is also linked to matters of sense reception. Πα´θο is also at the root of such words as passivity and passion, and can carry overtones of suffering. Thus we can expect that what Socrates is going to share is not a mere narration of events, but an account of undergoing something. Which brings us to the second term, α6τα. This is translated as ‘cause’. Socrates’ remarks will have to serve as a guide to what this notion entails, but we can make two preliminary observations. The first is that α6τα covers a rather broad range of meanings, all of which adhere around what it would mean to answer the question ‘Why?’ Thus α6τα does not simply refer to mechanistic (efficient) causes, but includes whatever would answer to the reason something is as it is.6 This makes sense of why α6τα also entails notions of responsibility. Something can be thought of as the cause of something else (especially in terms of its preservation) in the sense that it is responsible for it. Secondly, Socrates’ intimations of his suffering or undergoing already point to this expanded sense of cause. The story he is preparing to tell is one where notions of indifferent, merely external, causality are replaced by a self-reflective causality oriented toward the good.7 The first section of Socrates’ account concerns, on the one hand, the kinds of questions and answers with which he occupied himself in his early endeavours to obtain wisdom, and, on the other hand, the trouble in which he found himself. He calls this trouble blindness.

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The Ideas of Socrates

Before he was blinded, Socrates was filled with wonder and desire.8 Already, however, Socrates indicates that his pursuit is bound up with a tradition. He does not say that his wondrous desire was elicited by nature or the cosmos as such, but that the object of his desire was ‘that wisdom they call “inquiry into nature” [περ7 φ!σεω στοραν]’. Socrates seems to have been, from the start, at least implicitly concerned with those things which later marked his activities. That is, Socrates is, from the very beginning of his intellectual endeavours, concerned with logoi. The difference that marks these early concerns, perhaps, is that Socrates does not selfconsciously turn to logoi. He says: ‘This wisdom seemed to me grandiose – to know the causes of each thing, why each thing comes to be and why it perishes and why it is.’ (96a) Socrates, it seems, was in between two states. On the one hand, he was not directly inspired by the phenomena of earth and sky toward an investigation of nature. His desire was mediated by the promise presented by existing (discursive) wisdom. It is this wisdom of his predecessors that he desires to share. On the other hand, he seems not to distinguish between the two. He is not yet aware that looking into things is not the same as studying what has come of others looking into things. Below we will see that there seems to be a second stage where Socrates engages in direct investigation, but it is significant that he does not begin there. Socrates’ next remarks also seem to prefigure his mature concerns. ‘And very often I cast my thought to and fro looking first of all into questions like these: Is it when hot and cold bring about a certain fermentation, as some people say, that animals grow into organisms? And is the blood that by which we’re thoughtful? Or is it air or fire? Or is it none of these, and is it the brain that produces the senses of hearing and seeing and smelling; and would memory and opinion arise out of these, and in this way out of memory and opinion brought to a state of rest arises knowledge?’ (96a–b) Socrates’ questions are not about the earth, its form or constitution, nor about the heavens. Rather, Socrates inquires about life and thought. These remarks go by so quickly that one easily misses the fact that these have been the concerns of the Phaedo from the beginning. The various proofs of the immortality of the soul have been concerned with the soul as the source of life and the instrument of our knowledge. Furthermore, taken together, these two elements give us an image of human being, zoon echon logon, the

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thinking animal.9 Socrates, we should not be surprised, inquires about the human. However, the form of these questions are not yet distinctively Socratic. To ask about how and why we are alive and by what means we think and have knowledge in these ways is to set oneself outside of one’s own living and thinking.10 Socrates does say that he ‘then in turn . . . looked into the processes by which these things pass away and the affections that pertain to heaven and earth, until [he] ended up with the opinion that [his] natural fitness for “looking into things” was next to nothing [τελευτ8ν ο9τω ,µαυτ2 1δοξα πρ τα!την τ;ν σκψιν αφυ; ε=ναι > ουδ?ν χρµα]’. The details of this ‘looking’ remain obscure, but it seems that after surveying the accounts of his predecessors he then turned to the things themselves. The result of this turning was that he was blinded. ‘I’ll give you sufficient proof of [my lack of fitness]. It concerns what I had sure knowledge of even before, in my opinion at least and in the opinions of others – I was so intensely blinded by this “looking” that I unlearned even what I thought I knew before about many things and about why a human being grows. Before I used to think this was clear to everybody: that a human being grows because of eating and drinking. For when, from the foods he eats, amounts of flesh are attached to flesh and amounts of bone to bones, and so in this way by the same account what’s congenial to his other parts gets attached to them, then the bulk that’s little has later become a lot and in this way the small human being becomes big. That’s what I used to think then. Don’t I seem sensible to you?’11 (96b–d) It is still not entirely clear what Socrates is ‘looking’ at, but perhaps pausing to consider this question of growth can clarify what is at issue. Socrates cannot be speaking simply of looking without some kind of attendant thinking. For his account is still oriented toward answering a ‘why’ question; he is not passively observing things (if that were possible in any case). However, what he expresses are notions that seem so self-evident that the gap between observation and interpretation is scarcely noticed. It seems to be common sense that something gets bigger because more of what makes up that thing is added to it. And in the case of a complex being such as a human body, its various parts are added to separately, contributing to an overall increase in size. As Socrates says, this seems sensible. Nevertheless, this addition of like to like is not something seen. It is rather something inferred and proposed as a rational explanation for what is observed, the growth of the body as a whole.12

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The Ideas of Socrates

Socrates continues with more examples of the kinds of things that led to his blindness. ‘Then look at this further thing too. I used to think the following opinion of mine was sufficient: that whenever a big fellow appeared standing next to a small one, he was larger by just this, a head, and that one horse was bigger than another for the same reason. And to mention things more lucid, it seemed to me that ten things were more than eight because two were added to the eight; and it seemed to me that a two-foot length was larger than a one-foot length because it exceeded it by half of itself.’ (96d–e) The narrative aspect of Socrates’ discourse can obscure a movement which is just under the surface. As Socrates provides his examples, he enacts a movement of abstraction. He moves from bodies, to collections, to magnitudes. He also moves between becoming and being. The example of growth concerned a single body changing from smaller to larger. The next examples concern not the physical increase in size of a single thing, but rather that which would account for the difference in size between two things.13 Such an account is concerned not with something becoming larger or smaller, but rather with being larger or smaller. This signals a decisive opening in Socrates’ account, for it intimates that one cannot simply give accounts of processes, but must also be able to account for how things are. Socrates then moves to multitudes and magnitudes. It is suggestive that the two examples he gives here correspond to the two ways in which the Greeks understood quantity.14 There is, on the one hand, quantity viewed in terms of collections of items. Number is understood as corresponding to collections of units, whether corporeal or ideal. Here again Socrates says he held that addition would account for ten things being more than eight. When two are added to eight, the addition yields ten. On the other hand, Socrates speaks of magnitudes. Magnitude and body name the same kind of thing, but the term magnitude marks it specifically as something with a certain size. There is a suggestion here also of a corresponding dimension of ideality. For magnitude is mentioned here not simply in terms of bulk, but rather in terms of measure. The one- and two-foot lengths are related to each other not simply as two magnitudes, but also as embodying a mathematical ratio. Socrates says that he had previously thought that these ways of looking at things were sound, but has come to be dissatisfied with them. We are still not ready to understand exactly why this is the case, but one line of inference seems worth noting. Socrates’ account displays a subtle move-

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ment toward a self-reflective mode of inquiry. In the direct taking-up of the discourses of the physicists, one risks misunderstanding one’s own activity. The explanations given by these thinkers, if viewed like the common-sense notions of bodily growth, seem to be direct explanations of the various phenomena. The movement of Socrates’ account from growing bodies, to the being such-and-such of bodies, to collections of bodies, to the measure of bodies, suggests that one must attend to more than one ‘sees’. One must come to understand how and why we are able to see one thing (as one) in relation to another (as itself one). One must come to understand that it is not heads or feet that are of concern in the explanation of the large and the small, but size itself. Note that this is not a hypostatizing of bigness or smallness, but is only a making explicit of what has been implicit in the discourse from the beginning. One must have a pre-understanding of size in order to talk of things being larger or smaller. But one’s preunderstanding of size (for instance) might not be adequate. One might need to pause and investigate this notion itself before proffering explanations of why one thing is larger than another. Finally, these concerns open onto the question of number and its relation to the being of the bodies we see around us; and again, a certain pre-understanding of number and its properties is always already at play when one ventures upon, for instance, explanations of growth and decay.15 Socrates in fact makes these suggestions more evident in what follows. Following the above remarks, Cebes asks Socrates how he now sees these things. Socrates answers: ‘By Zeus! . . . I seem to be far from thinking, I suppose, that I know the cause concerning any of these things, I who don’t even allow myself to assert that whenever anyone adds a one to a one, the one added to or the one that was added has become two, or that the one that was added and the one to which it was added became two by the addition of the one to the other. Here’s what I wonder about: When each of the two was separate from the other, then each was one and the pair were not two, but when they came close to each other, this then became the cause of their becoming two – the concourse that comes from their being placed close to each other. Nor again can I yet be persuaded that if somebody splits a one apart, this – the splitting – has in turn become the cause of their having become two. For then this cause comes to be the contrary of the former cause of their becoming two. Then it was because they were led close to one another and were added, one to the other, but now it’s because they’re led away and separated one from the other. Nor do I any longer even persuade myself that I know why a one comes to be nor

18

The Ideas of Socrates

why, in a word, anything else comes to be or perishes or is by this way of proceeding. Instead, I’ve randomly jammed together another way myself, and that former one I don’t tolerate at all.’ (96e–97b) I will make four sets of remarks concerning this passage. (1) A further movement of abstraction is undertaken by Socrates. He suggests that if we are going to rely, for instance, on notions of addition to explain growth or being-greater-than, then perhaps we should look at addition itself. Perhaps what seems unproblematic (e.g., addition) is in fact not as self-evident as we believed. And this is precisely what Socrates says happened to him. He turned from the growth and being of specific things and began to look at the simplest example he could find – how ones can become a two and how a two can become ones.16 It will be through a direct investigation of addition itself that Socrates will be able to determine whether addition can be the cause of growth. (2) Unfortunately, this inquiry is disastrous. Finally, we can understand the source of Socrates’ blindness. He was no longer able to rely on the common-sense explanations of things because even in the simplest situations he could not use them to produce a coherent account. The fatal flaw of his examination of ones and twos is that the same state seems to result from contrary causes. This seems to be something that Socrates could not abide while still maintaining that his thinking was coherent. As a result he became unable to maintain any of his former opinions about why ‘anything . . . comes to be or perishes or is’. (Whether this wholesale doubt is warranted is up for debate.) (3) Socrates’ framing of the question of ones and twos foregrounds a necessary dimension of any investigation of phenomena. That dimension concerns the interdependence of parts and wholes, and the contribution of mind to the objects of inquiry. That is, what is brought out by the account of ones and twos is the way in which mind is always already involved in the constitution of the very things that are under investigation. Additionally, we can see in the problems raised here another way in which mechanistic explanations of change are insufficient. Mind is involved in the problem of ones and twos in the following sense: the posing of the problem produces the problem; or, there are no ones and twos without mind. What do I mean by this? Imagine a one and another one, standing outside of each other and absolutely indifferent to each other. Without any outside cause these ‘two’ ones will never make a two. Their proximity, however close, since it is not an issue for the ones themselves, cannot be what would make them two. They could both stand outside each other and be two only if something else held them together as

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two. Two indifferent ones become a two when they are brought into a relation with each other. This can happen in two ways. Either, as was just suggested, it can be an external bringing or holding together that makes them a two, or the two ones are in fact not indifferent to each other and come together for their own sake. In either case we see something rather extraordinary: there cannot be two unless it is a two, that is, unless it is also one. The being related or being brought into relation of the two ones necessitates that they either stand, or are held, as one. Only by being such a one (a whole) can there be two. What this means for the investigation of nature is twofold. First, it indicates that the discernment of what is to be explicated among natural phenomena are not things that are self-evidently present, but rather are things that are either isolated (separated from the whole) or gathered together (made into a whole) by the mind that would carry out the investigation. Thus I think one can interpret Socrates’ claim of being blinded in the following way: as long as the preconditions of the everyday understanding of the world are left undisturbed, one can see without being troubled; but if one begins to investigate that which allows one to take in the world in the first place, one becomes blinded to the world. That is, once one sees that one’s being present to phenomena is not a presentness of immediacy, one can no longer unreflectively trust what one sees. (4) Finally, it seems worth noting that while the operation of mind seems to be announced in this discourse about ones and twos, there also seems to be here (and not accidentally) an image of logos. The picture of logos can be seen in the movements of combination and separation. The word λογ comes from λεγεν. Λεγεν has a large cluster of usages that adhere around acts of gathering, and gathering presents a twofold aspect. It is on the one hand a bringing together of things which are at some distance from one another. It is an act of bringing into relation what otherwise might remain indifferent. On the other hand, it is a picking out of the things to be gathered. It is a discernment, a cutting. There is thus in gathering both a combining of things and a separating. One and the same activity entails contrary movements.17

2.

Anaxagoras

Before Socrates goes on to speak of the new way of inquiry that he has ‘jammed together’, he embarks upon a lengthy digression concerning his

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The Ideas of Socrates

encounter with some writings of Anaxagoras. This account is oddly, but perspicuously, arranged. First, Socrates tells Cebes what he hoped to learn from Anaxagoras after hearing that Anaxagoras had an account of how νο (mind) is the cause of all things. Only then does Socrates say what he actually found in the writings of Anaxagoras. The account of his reading of Anaxagoras in turn becomes a critique of what he found there. I will discuss this section of the Phaedo in four sections. First, I will give a brief account of some issues that arise from one of the extant fragments of Anaxagoras. Next, I will consider the nature and implications of Socrates’ anticipations of Anaxagorean thinking. I will then analyse the portion of the Phaedo containing Socrates’ reading and critique of Anaxagoras. Finally, I will make some comments regarding the continuity of this section with the previous one and consider the ways in which Socrates’ encounter with Anaxagoras once again foreshadows the practices of the mature Socrates. (1) We noted above that there seemed to be an implicit evocation of mind in Socrates’ account of ones and twos. It should not be surprising then that Socrates’ next statement is: ‘I heard somebody reading from a book he said was by Anaxagoras and which said that it is in fact Mind that puts the world in order and is responsible for all things’ (97c). The confrontation with this theme seems to have been necessitated by the preceding remarks. It is in fact mind which is the theme of the longest extant fragment of Anaxagoras’ writing. Even if we cannot be assured that this is from the work that Socrates claims to have read, it is instructive, given what we have already seen, to briefly consider what is contained in this fragment. It runs as follows: All other things have [µετχει] a portion [µοραν] of everything, but Mind [νο] is infinite and self-ruled [αυτοκρατ?], and is mixed with nothing but is all alone by itself. For if it was not by itself, but was mixed with anything else, it would have a share of all things if it were mixed with any; for in everything there is a portion of everything, as I said earlier; and the things that were mingled with it would hinder it so that it could control nothing in the same way as it does now being alone by itself. For it is the finest of all things and the purest, it has all knowledge about everything and the greatest power; and Mind controls all things, both the greater and the smaller, that have life. Mind controlled also the whole rotation, so that it began to rotate in the beginning. And it began to rotate first from a small area, but it now rotates over a wider and will rotate over a wider area still. And the things that were and those that are

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mingled and separated and divided off, all are known by Mind. And all things that were to be – those that were and those that are now and those that shall be – Mind arranged them all, including this rotation in which are now rotating the stars, the sun and moon, the air and the aither that are being separated off. And this rotation caused the separating off. And the dense is separated off from the rare, the hot from the cold, the bright from the dark and the dry from the moist. But there are many portions of many things, and nothing is altogether separated off nor divided one from the other except Mind. Mind is all alike, both the greater and the smaller quantities of it, while nothing else is like anything else, but each single body is and was most plainly those things of which it contains most.18 I do not want to enter into an analysis of this passage on its own account. Rather, I want to consider the ways in which it resonates with what we have considered above. In a broad sense, this passage gives the kind of account that Socrates had wanted from the very beginning of his pursuit of wisdom. That is, it gives an account of the cause for both the coming-into-being and the being of the things that are. At first glance, this cause seems to be one – mind. Mind is described as being both infinite and self-ruled and as being absolutely separate from everything else. The nature of this separation is, however, ambiguous. One might expect that this separation, or solitude, of mind indicates a difference of kind, that there is on the one hand some kind of primordial matter, and on the other hand mind which is incorporeal.19 Instead, mind seems to be a special kind of that-which-is – it is ‘the finest of all things and the purest’. Again, this indicates that mind is distinguished qualitatively from everything else and not categorically. However, the absolute separation from, and control over, everything else seems to be in tension with this manner of distinguishing mind from the other things. On closer inspection, however, the assertion that mind is the cause of all things (or, everything but mind) seems to be redundant. For while mind is claimed to control the rotation that separated things out, the more immediate cause of the separation and sorting is the rotation itself. Thus the proposition that mind is the cause is really only another way of saying that the rotation is the cause. Furthermore, the account of rotation as cause is at bottom a mechanistic account of causation, one which does not seem to need to be grounded in mind. This seems to be the essence of Socrates’ coming critique. The positing of mind as cause is intelligible only on the condition that you can also identify the reason for

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The Ideas of Socrates

which mind causes the things to be as they are. Thus Anaxagoras’ account of mind can be reduced to yet another account of external, mechanistic causality. However, the role of separation in this account should give us some pause. Socrates’ discourse on ones and twos was about the problems entailed in understanding collection and division. Now, while Anaxagoras’ fragment foregrounds division, that is, separation, we should not be surprised that collection is implicitly contained therein as well. The basic nature of the account is that through mind the rotation of what-is began to cause differentiation: certain things began to separate from other things. What is implicit here is that such separation out of the whole entails a multitude of collections into wholes. As was noted above, this phenomenon can be viewed in one of two ways – either mind chooses the things to be separated and collected in these ways, or the things themselves strive toward this state. In both cases, the mechanism of rotation would not be enough to explain why things are as they are. The double positing of mind and rotation seems to indicate a recognition of this problem by Anaxagoras. This brief consideration of Anaxagoras’ fragment suggests that by venturing into this digression Socrates will be able to both recapitulate what he has already said and at the same time make explicit that mind is an issue that must be broached. Let us turn now to Socrates’ account of why he was so eager to read this book by Anaxagoras. (2) Socrates says: ‘Now I was pleased with this sort of cause, and it seemed to me in some way good that Mind should be responsible for all things. And I considered that if this is the case, then Mind at least, in ordering the world, would order all things and position each thing in just that way which was best. So if somebody should want to discover the cause concerning each thing – in what way it comes into being or perishes or is – he’d have to discover this concerning it: in what way it’s best for it either to be or to undergo or do anything whatsoever. Now by this account, it befits a human being, in this matter and in all others, to look to nothing but what’s most excellent and best. And then this same human being necessarily knows what’s worse as well; for the knowledge concerning these is the same.’ (97c–d) These remarks immediately indicate something that was seen above – in order for the operation of mind to be meaningful it must have something by which it orients itself. That is, there must be some end, some

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that-for-the-sake-of-which. Ultimately, such ends entail an orientation to the good20 or, as Socrates says here, toward that which is best. In one stroke Socrates explodes the entire (explicit) framework of his discourse up to this point. On the one hand, his anticipation of the need to inquire about the good introduces a notion of causality that has not yet been broached in his account. In one way or another the candidates for cause of being and becoming have thus far been reducible to some kind of mechanism. Think again of the claim that eating and the additive build-up of like to like explains growth. Such a claim, while minimally explanatory, is largely descriptive; and as was argued above, it fails to recognize that such an explanation makes too quick a move from visible additive processes to something that is, for us, invisible. Furthermore, such explanations are oriented completely from an external standpoint. That is, there is no account of the nature of the thing itself in explaining its growth. Or to put it yet another way, additive accumulation may explain how a body gets bigger, but it cannot explain why we grow, nor why it is good for us to grow (and then stop growing). All of this goes to show that describing how things happen is not enough to enable us to comprehend either their becoming or their being. On the other hand, the introduction of the good also requires that one attempt to understand not simply how things happen, but also how things fit together. Being oriented toward the good means being oriented toward the whole. As we have seen, however, parts and wholes are relative. What is taken from one standpoint as a whole can be taken from another standpoint as a part. Thus giving an account of why it is good for this or that thing to be as it is would require on the one hand to say why it is good for that thing and on the other hand to say why it is good for everything else that that thing be as it is. This, as we will see, is a tall order. Socrates continues his account of his anticipations of Anaxagoras’ doctrines. ‘As I reasoned these things out, I thought I had discovered, to my great pleasure, a teacher after my own mind [κατα` νον], a teacher of the cause concerning the things that are – Anaxagoras. I thought he’d tell me first whether the earth was flat or round, and when he told me that, he’d go on to take me through the cause and necessity of it [τ;ν α6ταν κα7 τ;ν ανα´γκην], saying what’s better and why in particular it is better for the earth to be such as it is. And if he claimed that it was in the middle, he’d go on to take me through how it was better for it to be in the middle. And if he could make these things apparent [αποφανοι] to me, I was prepared to yearn no longer for any other form of cause

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The Ideas of Socrates

[α6τα αBλλο ε=δο]. What’s more, I was prepared to find out about the sun in just the same way and about the moon and the rest of the heavenly bodies, both about their speeds relative to one another and their turning points and their affections, too – in what way it’s better for each to do and undergo what it undergoes. For I’d never have supposed – when he alleged they’d been ordered by Mind – that he’d impute to them any other cause than that it’s best for them to be in just the condition they’re in. Thus, once he’d given the cause for each one and for all of them in common, I thought he’d go on to take me through the best for each and the good common to all. I wouldn’t have given up my hopes for anything. Instead, after getting hold of the books with all haste, I read them as speedily as I could so that I might know as speedily as possible the best and the worse.’ (97d–98b) Socrates here makes explicit the distinction between knowing how something happens and knowing why something happens. This seems to be the point in speaking of both cause and necessity. He thought that Anaxagoras would teach him about both; and even if one were to claim that the cause and the necessity are the same, one would nevertheless recognize a difference within the same thing, a difference by which it could answer questions of both how and why. Socrates intimates something along these lines. He says he was prepared to no longer desire any other kind of cause and that knowing the good for each thing would be enough to know how and why each thing is as it is. Finally, Socrates broaches the issue of the interrelatedness of all things. He anticipated that he would first learn the cause/necessity of each thing itself. But after learning this he thought he would also learn what the good for the whole is, why it is best for everything, all together, to be as it is. (3) Socrates, however, is immediately disappointed upon his reading of Anaxagoras’ book. ‘From this wonderful hope, my comrade, I was swept away, since, as I went on with my reading, I saw a man who didn’t employ Mind at all and didn’t hold any causes responsible for putting things in order [διακοσµεν τα` πρα´γµατα], but instead put the blame on air and ether and water and other things many and absurd. And to me his condition seemed most similar to that of somebody who – after saying that Socrates does everything by mind and venturing to assign the causes of each of the things I do – should first say that I’m now sitting here because my body’s composed of bones and sinews, and because bones are solid and have joints keeping them separate from one another, while sinews are

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such as to tense and relax and also wrap the bones all around along with the flesh and skin that holds them together. Then since the bones swing in their sockets, the sinews, by relaxing and tensing, make me able, I suppose, to bend my limbs right now – and it’s through this cause that I’m sitting here with my legs bent.’ (98b–d) Let us first note something peculiar about Socrates’ remarks at the end of the last passage and the beginning of this one. Socrates suggests that he did not yet see his pursuits as a project of self-knowledge. He seems to place the entire burden of becoming wise upon the shoulders of others, first the physicists and then Anaxagoras. What is strange is that he seems already to have a strong grasp of the kind of knowledge for which he is searching, but somehow continues to disavow his own thoughts in deference to authority. I would suggest again that this feature of Socrates’ story constitutes an important thread that runs through this entire section of the dialogue, namely, the difficult, but necessary, process by which one comes to understand that it is not enough to read the books of wise men, but that one must, at the same time, investigate the very practices by which one might become wise. In other words, Socrates is telling a story in which he slowly becomes aware that his own desire for and pursuit of wisdom is bound up with the object of his search; he cannot extract his own striving from that for which he strives. This would be one way of understanding what it would mean to know oneself. As to Socrates’ basic point of criticism, it should be clear from both his remarks above and our brief look at Anaxagoras’ fragment. There is contained in Anaxagoras’ doctrine no principle of the kind Socrates both expected and hoped for, namely, a principle of the good. Instead he claims to have found just another account of ‘air and ether and water and other things’. But as usual, there seems to be much more to Socrates’ remarks than he makes explicit. There is an echo of the scene in the Phaedo when we first see Socrates. Phaedo and the others have been waiting to be let in to Socrates’ cell. The guard tells them that Socrates is being released from his bonds and is also being told that today is to be the day of his execution. After they enter and Xanthippe has been taken away, Phaedo says that ‘Socrates sat up on the bed, bent his leg and gave it a good rub with his hand’ (60b). This is followed by Socrates’ remarks concerning the nature of pleasure and pain. The context of these remarks shows that in that earlier case Socrates’ bending of his leg was connected to his wish to relieve his pain, the pain caused by his bonds. Thus his reason for bending his leg was connected to something undergone by the body. But additionally, this undergoing of

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The Ideas of Socrates

the body is also an issue for the soul. The pain is not simply a bodily condition, but is at the same time something felt. One can already see here the problems inherent in trying to separate body and soul, the very problems Socrates and his interlocutors will encounter in the dialogue itself. Stated plainly, there is a problem here in terms of locating Socrates’ pain and pleasure – are they in the body or the soul? Furthermore, in terms of the context of Socrates’ discourse on Anaxagoras, we now have a problem of accounting for the relationship between mind and soul. But this is not why Socrates has his legs bent at this point in the conversation. We are told that shortly after he was rubbing his leg Socrates ‘put his feet down on the earth and for the rest of the time conversed sitting in this way’ (61d). Thus the reason his legs are bent now is in order to sit upright and face his friends in conversation; it is for the sake of logos. Would this then be a proper instance of mind as cause? We will have to read further to answer this question. Before doing so, note the intricate detail of Socrates’ physiological description. Two things seem to be significant. First, his account is not monolithic. It is not because of some ultimate principle (say, rotation) that his legs are bent, but rather through a very specific set of elements and relations. This account requires one to attend to the specific attributes of bone and sinew, their manner of construction, and the way in which they fit together. Second, this is essentially just description. Socrates’ remarks show that through careful observation one can in fact say a lot about how things work. But, as he emphasizes, this is not yet an account of why. He says explicitly that the construction of his body makes him able to bend his leg, but it does not explain why he would do so. Socrates himself gives the answer as he continues his account. ‘And again, as regards my conversing with you, he might assign other causes of this sort, holding voices and air and sounds and a thousand other such things responsible, and not taking care to assign the true causes – that since Athenians judged it better to condemn me, so I for my part have judged it better to sit here and more just to stay put and endure whatever penalty they order. Since – by the Dog! – these sinews and bones of mine would, I think, long ago have been in Megara or Boeotia, swept off by an opinion about what’s best, if I didn’t think it more just and more beautiful, rather than fleeing and playing the runaway, to endure whatever penalty the city should order.’ (98d–99a) We saw above that the most immediate reason for Socrates’ bent legs was because of his placing his feet on the ground in order to face his friends

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for a discussion. Now we are told why Socrates is here engaged in conversation at all. This indicates that even when the proximate cause of some state of affairs is given, that does not exhaust the causal account. Socrates sits with his legs bent in order to have a conversation; but there must be some reason that he is conversing here and now. Socrates gives two reasons. The first concerns the citizens of Athens. They have decided that Socrates should be put to death and therefore Socrates sits in prison. Additionally, Socrates thinks it best that he endure whatever penalty has been ordered. Both causes are required to keep Socrates in prison. It is only by means of Socrates’ acceptance of the penalty, and only because there is a penalty, that he remains in Athens. If he had thought it better to flee, he had both the means and the opportunity to do so.21 However, as we continue to read Socrates’ remarks we will see that this is also not a complete account of why Socrates is engaged in conversation. Instead, it only tells us why he is able to be conversing here and now with his friends. Socrates continues: ‘But to call such things causes is too absurd. If somebody should say that I wouldn’t be able to do what seemed best to me without having such things as bones and sinews and whatever else I’ve got, he’d be speaking the truth. If, however, he should say it was through these things that I’m doing what I’m doing, engaging in these acts by mind but not by the choice of what’s best, why the slackness of his speech would be abundant and tedious. Imagine not being able to distinguish that it’s one thing to be genuinely the cause, and another to be that without which the cause wouldn’t be a cause! In this respect it’s apparent to me that the many are groping around as if in the dark when they apply to the latter an improper name and address it as cause.’ (99a–b) Socrates’ remarks suggest that the same thing can in one case be a cause in the proper sense and in another case be only that by which a cause can act. It is clear that Socrates’ presence in the prison is the combined result of both his and the Athenians’ decisions about what is best.22 In this regard they seem to comply with Socrates’ assessment of causation, that is, they are oriented toward some good. However, this does not mean that they can then be taken to explain the fact that Socrates is engaged in conversation. Rather, they only explain the reason that he is able to be conversing in the present conditions. Actually conversing would seem to require a different cause. This Socrates does not give at this moment, but the dialogue as a whole can give us the answer. It is Socrates’ commitment to dialogue and mutual investigation on the one hand, and his friends’ fear of death on the

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The Ideas of Socrates

other, that motivate him to carry on the present discussion. And it would not be out of place to then ask why Socrates is committed to these things. For surely the causal account in terms of the good would not end with the present circumstances, but rather would have to account for the guiding principles of Socrates’ life as a whole. One consequence of this turn in Socrates’ account is that questions of human action and purpose have been foregrounded in place of the cosmological and physical questions that have so far been broached. This is not accidental. Praxis seems to be that which would allow one to understand causation in terms of the good. This does not mean that there could not be some kind of cosmic, divine, or natural teleology, only that the understanding of this kind of causation would be grounded in one’s own experience. Something along these lines is suggested by the culmination of Socrates’ discussion of his reading of Anaxagoras. ‘And this is also why one man makes the earth stay put under the heaven by placing a vortex around the earth, and why another props it up on a pedestal of air, as though it were on a wide kneading-trough. But as for the power of placing things as they are now situated – in the best way possible – this power they don’t search for, nor do they think it’s got any superhuman strength; but they believe that some day they’ll discover an Atlas stronger and more deathless than this one, one who’d do a better job of holding all things together. And they don’t at all suppose it’s the Good-and-Binding that truly binds and holds things together. Now for that sort of cause – how it works – it’d be a pleasure to become anybody’s student. But since I was robbed of this and never became capable of discovering it myself or learning it from another, do you want me to make a display, Cebes . . . of the way by which I’ve busied myself with the second sailing in search of the cause?’ (99b–d) The failure to distinguish the good as cause from that through which the cause operates results in contradictory accounts. Socrates sees that one must attempt to understand the reasons for being and becoming in terms of the good, but has not yet been able to actually find such a cause. Socrates claims that his early pursuits have left him at a dead end. The kind of cause that seems to be required to explain ‘generation and destruction as a whole’ seems at the same time to be unknowable, or at least impossible to discover.23 Socrates is forced to find a new path. (4) Socrates’ entire autobiography up to this point can be placed in the context of the warning against misology that is at the centre of the Phaedo. Furthermore, the warning against misology can be placed within the larger

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horizon of the spectre of sophistry. I would like to isolate a few strands of argument in the passages analysed thus far that suggest that Socrates’ account of his early endeavours is not simply an account of what is entailed in ‘inquiry into nature’, but is also implicitly an account of why such methods are not suitable for what Socrates takes to be the proper end of philosophical inquiry. At the end of the first series of arguments for the immortality of the soul, Socrates and his comrades go silent, except for Simmias and Cebes, who continue to quietly converse with each other. Socrates suspects that they are not entirely satisfied with the discussion, and urges them to speak up if that is the case. Simmias and Cebes are reluctant, thinking they will upset Socrates under the present circumstances, but Socrates convinces them to voice their objections. After they have done so, Phaedo breaks his narration and says to Echecrates: Now once we’d heard what [Simmias and Cebes] said, all of us felt ill at ease (as we told one another later) because, after we’d been so powerfully persuaded by the previous argument, they now seemed to shake us up again and to cast us back into distrust, concerning not only the arguments that came before but even what would be said later on. Who knows, we might be worthless judges, or these matters themselves might even be beyond trust! (88c) Echecrates confesses to feeling the same way listening to Phaedo’s narration. Just as he was feeling convinced of the truth of the arguments, he was unsettled by Simmias’ suggestion that the soul is a harmony – an argument that has, he says, ‘now, as ever, a wonderful hold on me’ (88d). Socrates summons Phaedo’s help in confronting these objections, but first issues a warning. Socrates says that they should be on guard: ‘So that we don’t become . . . haters of logoi’ (89d). Socrates likens this to becoming a misanthrope, one who comes to hate people after numerous bad encounters. This hatred, he maintains, follows from unwarranted expectations about how people should behave. Regarding logoi, Socrates says they are akin to human beings: ‘When somebody trusts some logos to be true without the art of logoi [το λγου τχνη], and then a little later the logos seems to him to be false, as it sometimes is and sometimes isn’t, and this happens again and again with one logos after another. And, as you know, those especially who’ve spent their days in debate-arguments end up thinking they’ve become the wisest of men and that they alone have detected that

30

The Ideas of Socrates

there’s nothing sound or stable – not in the realm of either practical matters or logoi – but all the things that are simply toss to and fro, as happens in the Euripus, and don’t stay put anywhere for any length of time.’ (90b–c) Without specifying what this art of logoi is, Socrates indicates what can occur when one does not possess it – namely, becoming convinced that nothing is ‘sound or stable’. His remarks suggest that this conviction comes from the inconstancy of logoi, that because the logoi have not remained fixed and sure, nothing is in fact fixed and sure. The art of logoi, it seems, allows one to confront the inconstancy of logoi without losing trust in the apparent order and intelligibility of the world. Socrates’ account of his early endeavours shows that he easily could have ended up in just such a condition. No account of the cause of being and becoming was satisfactory. As a result, Socrates could have turned away from such questions altogether, thinking that since no account seems possible, the questions themselves are ill-formed. He could have come to believe that there is in fact no cause of things, that they cannot be known in the way he desired to know them. Instead, Socrates claims that he created a new way. I would suggest that Socrates’ new way is precisely what he refers to as the art of logoi. If this is correct, then the art of logoi, Socrates’ second sailing, is to a great extent an ethical and practical endeavour. Let us read a little more of Socrates’ remarks concerning misology at the centre of the Phaedo to better understand this claim. Socrates wants to convey why it is important that he and his comrades do not fall into this hatred of arguments – a hatred that can result in one becoming unable to recognize a true logos when it (finally) arrives. He says: ‘Then first of all . . . let’s be on guard against this condition and not admit into the soul that the realm of arguments risks having nothing sound in it. Instead let’s far rather admit that we’re not yet sound but must act like men and put our hearts into being sound – you and the others for the sake of your whole life hereafter, and I for the sake of death itself. For at present, as far as that goes, I run the risk of being in a mood not to love wisdom but to love victory, as do altogether uneducated people. These people, whenever they dispute about something, don’t give a thought to the way it is with the things the argument’s about, but put their hearts into this: that what they themselves put forward should seem to be the case to those present. And at present I seem to myself to differ from those people in this way only: I won’t put

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my heart into making what I say seem to be true to those present, except as a side effect, but into making it seem to be the case to me myself as much as possible.’ (90e–91a) This passage contains a number of remarks that are helpful in orienting the significance of Socrates’ art of logoi, the hypothetical method that we will examine at the end of this study. First, Socrates makes it very clear that the art of logoi that would enable one to avoid misology is a project that entails working on oneself. He intimates that this requires making a commitment to both acknowledging one’s unsoundness and attempting to make oneself sound. The failure of logos must be seen as a failure of one’s own efforts and abilities. This indicates that Socrates’ method is one that is enacted in light of both ignorance and self-transformation. Secondly, one must resist the inclination to turn investigation through logos into occasions for victory. Socrates suggests that this is a natural and powerful urge. The problem with valuing victory over anything else24 is that it blinds one to that which the logos is about. We will see later that Socrates is going to outline a method of investigation that explicitly foregrounds logoi. The passage above, however, helps make clear that a turn to logoi does not mean a turning away from things. To the contrary, it is the love of victory that blinds one to the things themselves. Thirdly, Socrates’ art of logoi is not devoid of a dimension of persuasion. It differs from the ways of others in that it is concerned first of all with self-persuasion. This brings the account full-circle. The manner in which one will be able to endure the inconstancy of logoi and sustain the efforts of self-transformation will be to bring in line oneself and one’s own logoi. This account echoes Socrates’ claims elsewhere that he would rather be out of harmony with everyone else before being out of harmony with himself.25 Socrates’ art of logoi is at bottom an art of ethics.26

3.

Socrates’ Second Sailing

Two points deserve emphasis before moving on. The first is the way in which Socrates’ account of his first path to wisdom is more than simply a narration of events. Contained in that narration are some indications of what Socrates is going to require in his art of logos. The fundamental feature that is anticipated is self-awareness. The ways of the physicists lacked the necessary accounting of how one’s own discourse is bound up with that which the discourse is about. This was followed by an implicit suggestion that a proper method of inquiry must recognize the fact that

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The Ideas of Socrates

there are different levels of discourse in an inquiry. This was seen in the movement from the growth of bodies, to the comparisons of bodies, to the measurement of bodies, to the nature of addition and division. Socrates’ story contains within it a recognition that methodological reflection is a necessary part of method itself. The second point is that there is an ambiguity in the needfulness of Socrates’ second sailing. Socrates suggests that he would have liked nothing better than to have learned why things are as they are by an accounting of causes. In the course of his attempts to acquire such knowledge, however, he finds that natural causes cannot explain things in the way he requires and that knowledge of the good as cause cannot be obtained. It is nevertheless significant that if such an accounting of cause were available, it would undercut the very nature of Socratic practice as we know it. Taken as a whole, it seems that what Socrates values most is necessary only in the light of the failure of these other ways.27 Both of these points should be kept in mind throughout the subsequent reading of Socrates’ account. Cebes is very eager to hear of Socrates’ second sailing, and Socrates continues: ‘Well then after these experiences . . . since I had had it with this looking into beings [τα` ντα σκοπ8ν], it seemed to me I had to be on my guard so as not to suffer the very thing those people do who behold and look at the sun during an eclipse. For surely some of them have their eyes destroyed if they don’t look at the sun’s likeness in water or in some other such thing. I thought this sort of thing over and feared I might be totally soul-blinded [ψυκ;ν τυφλωθεην] if I looked at things with my eyes and attempted to grasp them by each of the senses.’ (99d–e) The theme of blindness is once again introduced by Socrates. We saw before that Socrates had become blinded by his pursuits in physics and cosmology. He was, he said, blinded to that which had previously been selfevident to him. So here Socrates restates his efforts to avoid such blindness. I argued above that this blindness was essentially not a blindness to how things are but rather a blindness that follows from the incipient steps of self-reflexive inquiry. Socrates was blinded to things which seemed elementary when he began to reflect upon that which was implicit in the accounts of causation. It seems that the way to avoid such blindness is not to retreat back to a naïve standpoint (such innocence is perhaps irrevocable)28 but to push through to an understanding of what the cause

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of blindness is. That is, the overcoming of blindness might perhaps come in the form of more self-reflection, not less. This allows us to make sense of the imagery of the eclipsed sun. It would seem that the looking into things would be more akin to looking directly at the sun itself, not a sun which is obscured. I have argued above, however, that one of Socrates’ implicit contentions is that human beings never have direct access to things (onta/pragmata). Inasmuch as we approach things through logos, our relations to things are always mediated. We experience things as eclipsed without knowing they are eclipsed. The blindness we suffer is not a blindness to the things, but is rather a blindness to the way in which we are always already separated from things. We are blind to the fact that we, ourselves, stand between ourselves and the things. And we cannot step out of the way.29 On this reading, ‘soul-blinded’ could mean a blindness to soul, a blindness to the way in which soul is involved in our relations to things. Thus when Socrates says that he feared becoming soul-blinded ‘if [he] looked at things with [his] eyes and attempted to grasp them by each of the senses’, it can be taken to mean that if one has a self-understanding of one’s relation to things such that one can have direct contact with the truth of things immediately through the senses, one is indeed blind to the truth of one’s actual manner of relation to things. I would also suggest that the crucial element of the analogy of the reflected eclipse is not its status as an image, but rather the indirection that is contained in the analogy. When viewing an eclipse in a reflection, we must look away from the thing itself in order to safely see that thing. Socrates is about to announce his turn to logoi. Based upon what we have read so far, I would argue that this turn must be seen primarily in two respects. The first is that this turn to logoi is a turning toward and transcending of the self. It makes explicit what was only hinted at above – that one will never understand sensible things unless one understands how one is able to be thoughtfully engaged with such things in the first place. This involves the recognition that one holds within oneself certain notions that reach out to and participate in the constitution of the objects of investigation. Furthermore, inasmuch as such notions operate in and through the use of language, one must recognize that such notions are not a private possession, but are rather things held in common.30 They are, in fact, the common ground of shared meaning. Secondly, Socrates clearly emphasizes a need for keeping safe from certain dangers. The turn to logoi aids in such safety. We will see in the final chapter that this is perhaps the primary burden of what Socrates calls his second sailing. Socrates next says:

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The Ideas of Socrates

‘So it seemed to me31 that I should take refuge in logoi and look in them for the truth of beings [τ8ν ντων τ;ν αλCθειαν]. Now perhaps in a certain way it isn’t quite like what I am likening it to. For I don’t at all concede that somebody who looks into beings in logoi looks at them in likenesses to a greater extent than one who does so in ergoi.’ (99e–100a) I have anticipated the explicit announcement of Socrates’ turn to logoi and their relation to safety. Let me only make two provisional remarks regarding this difficult passage.32 The first concerns the word ‘truth’, αλCθεια. A full consideration of this term would take us very far afield,33 but if we limit ourselves to the Phaedo certain insights can be delimited. Outside of this occurrence of αλCθεια there are two other clusters of usage of this word in the dialogue; I will look only at the first. These first uses occur early in the dialogue at the beginning of Socrates’ comments on the nature of death and dying. At this juncture Socrates pursues a line of questioning in which he elicits consent that the body and its senses are not a source of truth. He says: ‘And what about the very attainment of thoughtfulness [φρονCσεω]? Is the body an impediment or not when somebody takes it along as a companion in his search? Here’s the sort of thing I mean. Do sight and hearing possess any truth for human beings, or is it the case that we neither hear nor see anything precise – the sort of thing even the poets are always babbling about to us?’ (65a–b) While I have already indicated that one should not take Socrates’ bifurcations in this section of the dialogue as doctrinal, it is nonetheless significant that truth is aligned here with thought. Socrates’ autobiography itself has slowly revealed that the receptivity of sensibility cannot be taken as the sole ground of knowing. The operations of thought itself are bound up with the objects of knowledge. Some lines later Socrates says: ‘But did you lay hold of them [the just itself, the beautiful, the good] by any other sense that comes through the body? And I’m speaking about the Being of all such things, about Bigness and Health and Strength and, in a word, all the rest – whatever happens to be. Is what’s truest about them beheld through the body? Or does it work this way: He among us who best prepares himself to think through most precisely each thing he investigates – that man would come closest to recognizing each thing.’ (66d–e)

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Truth is here aligned with being, and being as it is mentioned here is already being that is aligned with thought. Those things which we encounter in thought alone are the things that are properly said to be. Nevertheless, many of Socrates’ examples here are decidedly physical. Bigness, health or strength as idealities presume a phenomenological understanding of bodies and their powers and conditions. That such things are things of thought is not to say that they make sense without reference to a physical world. Thus the claim that what is truest about health is known through thoughtfulness is not to say that health is not a concern of the body. To know what health is is different than to know that this or that person is healthy. Both are cases in which it can be said that something true is known, but in the first case the truth that is known is known irrespective of contingent circumstances. Yet in neither case is health grasped irrespective of bodiliness in general. Truth is not something that comes to us through the senses in the same way that light or sound come to us. Truth comes to us through the thoughtful apprehension of phenomena. Even when we assess a particular, phenomenal, spatiotemporal situation – e.g., whether this particular person is healthy – the truth comes through the thoughtful assessment of the situation, not the situation as such. Thus when Socrates says that he turned to logoi in order to look for the truth of beings, it suggests that somehow thought and logoi are bound up together, that somehow there are thoughts in logoi. My second remark concerns Socrates’ qualification of his analogy. I am inclined to read this qualification not as an attempt to render both logoi and ergoi as equally imagistic, but rather to downplay the imagistic dimension of the analogy altogether. I suggested this above, but it is strengthened here and in what follows. Socrates’ account has been about ‘looking’ from the very beginning.34 He has slowly shown that he has not been able to achieve wisdom using ‘looking’ as a model. In what follows he will outline a method that uses a certain kind of speaking to pursue wisdom. Thus the difficulties of reconciling all of the elements of Socrates’ analogy seem to spring from the difficulty of moving from sight to speech.35 Up to this point, Socrates has been narrating his experiences, his pathe. Like the narrative of his early pursuits, the beginning of his discussion of the second sailing is in the past tense. ‘After’ what he had undergone at the hands of his predecessors, he ‘had had it’ with those methods. In light of this, ‘it seemed to [him] that [he] should take refuge in logoi and look in them for the truth of beings’. At this point in the text, however, a strange temporal compression occurs. Once Socrates begins his explicit exposition of his method, he places his account in the present tense.

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The Ideas of Socrates

‘In any case, that’s how I set out: On each occasion I put down as hypothesis whatever account I judge to be mightiest; and what seems to me to be consonant with this, I put down as being true, both about cause and all the rest, while what isn’t, I put down as not true. But I want to tell you more plainly what I mean, because I think that right now you don’t understand.’ (100a) Socrates has shifted from his becoming to his being. The implication in his statements here is that while his second sailing began long ago, he is still undertaking it. He has never stopped practising the art of logos that he was forced to ‘jam together’ as a result of his early failures. The significance of this temporal shift is twofold. First, it indicates that what Socrates is about to say concerning the relationship between the method of hypothesis and ideas cannot be taken as a formulation of his early understanding of that relation. This is what he still practises; he is no longer giving an account of his coming to his practice, but rather is giving an account of that practice itself – a practice Socrates is continually working at. Second, since this is the case, we are immediately pointed toward those two other accounts of the young Socrates in the Platonic texts – the Parmenides and Socrates’ account of his lessons with Diotima in the Symposium. My proposal is that these two texts need to be read at this juncture in the Phaedo in order to fully understand what Socrates intends to present to his companions during the remainder of his time with them.36

Chapter 2

Parmenides The analysis of Socrates’ autobiography in the Phaedo revealed an underlying attentiveness to ideality. This attentiveness was disclosed in two complementary ways. The first was in Socrates’ digression concerning growth, magnitude, multitude and number. There was implicit in his account a suggestion that in order to investigate things as they are, we must also investigate that which allows us to be in relation to things in the first place. The physicists and cosmologists seemed to take their discourses as transparent media which allow direct contact with things as they are. Socrates’ conundrums revealed that to investigate growth, for instance, one must already have a certain understanding of magnitude, and that magnitude as such cannot simply be identified with the bulk of bodies. Rather, being able to talk about size, to think about size, indicates a pre-understanding of a certain kind of ideality. The second way in which ideality is revealed in Socrates’ narrative springs from the problems above – the implicit operations of mind in even the most elementary accounts of generation and destruction. This implicitness was made explicit in the account of Anaxagoras’ writings, only to reveal that the understanding of how mind can be cause is not easily accomplished. Nevertheless, the power of mind as a power of separation and collection was brought out as a theme worthy of reflection. Let us now turn to Plato’s Parmenides.

1.

Socrates and Zeno

Socrates describes his second sailing in the Phaedo as a turn toward logoi. In the continuation of that account, Socrates does not discuss the nature of the ideas, but rather outlines the way in which he uses the ideas as hypotheses. Before being able to understand what is entailed in the hypothetical method, we must better understand how Socrates stands in relation to the ideas. This understanding will come from undertaking an investigation of how Socrates comes to be in relation to the ideas – or rather, how Socrates’ relation to the ideas comes to be what it is. I want to make it clear that the

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The Ideas of Socrates

analyses carried out in what follows are not intended to be an exhaustive account of the problem of the eidetic. Instead, I wish to gain some insight into the ideas as they are related to Socrates and his practices. What I hope is revealed by this undertaking is that an attempt to understand the eidetic in Plato in the absence of this relation is destined to miss its mark. We will begin with Socrates’ exchanges with Zeno in the Parmenides. The manner in which these exchanges are introduced is rather curious. The Parmenides has a very intricate set of frames. The immediate narrator of the dialogue is a certain Cephalus from Clazomenae. Cephalus tells how he went in search of and received an account of the discussions between Socrates, Zeno and Parmenides from Antiphon. Antiphon in turn had heard it many times (and subsequently memorized it) from Pythodorus, who was present at the conversation itself. However, Pythodorus was not present for the entirety of Zeno’s presentation, but only came in at the end. (He nevertheless makes it clear that he had heard these same speeches on a previous occasion.) So the narration begins in the middle of things with a certain request from Socrates: After listening [to Zeno], Socrates asked him to re-read the first hypothesis of the first speech. Once it was read he said, ‘Zeno, how do you mean that? If the things that are, are many, then, according to you, they must be both like and unlike. But this is clearly impossible, since the unlike cannot be like nor the like unlike. Isn’t that what you mean?’ – ‘That’s so,’ replied Zeno.1 (127c) It is evident from the outset of this account that Socrates is engaged here both with a different kind of interlocutor and a different kind of discourse than those presented in his autobiographical account in the Phaedo. The difference in interlocutor is twofold. Socrates was clearly engaged with the thoughts of others in his early intellectual pursuits, but those thoughts were encountered through writing.2 Here Socrates is engaged in dialogue. It is perhaps significant that this dialogue is initiated by the recitation of a piece of writing. Socrates is not yet in command of that self-generating dialogic mode that we find in the Socratic dialogues, but neither is he thinking through the implications of written works in isolation. Furthermore, the thinkers with whom Socrates was engaged in the Phaedo account can generally be classed as physicists or cosmologists, that is, thinkers who are directly concerned with giving causal explanations of the states and operations of nature, life and cosmos. Zeno (and Parmenides, in turn) are of a different kind. They robustly engage in the kind of thinking that was fleetingly indicated in Socrates’ wrestling with addition and division – thus

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the difference in discourse as well. Zeno’s discourse, and the exchange it gives rise to, is one that is much more abstract than what Socrates encountered in the Phaedo, and is in fact more akin to his own speculations on ones and twos. Socrates, it seems, has found the teachers he was seeking. We are not told whether Socrates is supposed to have had prior acquaintance with either Zeno or Parmenides, but he takes to Zeno’s mode of discourse quite readily. Socrates is not overwhelmed by what seems could have been a rather lengthy presentation, and requests a repetition of the beginning.3 Whatever the exact nature of this discourse was, two things are clear. (1) It consisted of multiple hypotheses. (2) It was concerned with the question of the manyness of things. Regarding the second point, it seems significant that while Zeno’s writings are not in the mode of the physicists, they are also not exclusively logical. That is, there is in his discourse an attendance to the way things are, or even something resembling the logical implications of being. This again seems to instantiate what Socrates was groping toward with the problem of ones and twos – a mode of discourse that foregrounds the more abstract dimensions of phenomena. As to the first point, Socrates’ manner of response to the re-reading of the first hypothesis is noteworthy. Rather than relying on the remainder of Zeno’s discourse, Socrates begins to spin out the implications of Zeno’s first hypothesis himself. This is significant in light of what we have seen from the Phaedo. By implication, Socrates’ nature does not seem to allow him to passively take in the doctrines of others. When he had heard about Anaxagoras’ doctrine of mind, Socrates first carried through the reasoning implicit in such a hypothesis and then read Anaxagoras’ book. We see here much the same thing. Socrates works through the implications of the hypothesis himself, first drawing out the inference that the hypothesis indicates something that is impossible, namely that things will be both like and unlike. From this inference Socrates goes on to make a series of remarks concerning Zeno’s speech. ‘And so if it is impossible4 for the unlike to be like and the like unlike, it’s also impossible for there to be many things? For if there should be many, they would suffer these impossibilities. Is this, then, what your speeches [λγοι] seek [desire, wish for] – nothing else than to battle against everything that is commonly said by maintaining that there is no many? And do you think that each of your speeches is proof of this very thing – so that the supposed proofs that “There is no many” are as many as the speeches you have written? Is that what you mean, or don’t I understand

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The Ideas of Socrates

you right?’ – ‘No,’ said Zeno, ‘on the contrary, you have beautifully grasped the whole of what my writing seeks.’ (127e–128a) Socrates’ remarks pertain not only to the logical and ontological dimensions of Zeno’s speech, but also to its rhetorical dimension. In fact, it seems that the rhetorical dimension cannot be separated from the ontological dimension. The first two sentences of Socrates’ reply do pertain to things. The reasoning has two steps: (1) from the impossibility of the same thing(s) being both like and unlike, the many (things) is (are) denied, since (2) that would mean that something impossible comes to pass. Zeno confirms this reasoning. But he also confirms what follows. Socrates is not concerned simply with the ontological implications of Zeno’s speech(es), but also speculates about how and to what end they operate. Firstly, the speeches are not simply a kind of sober philosophical reflection on being, but are an engagement in battle – a battle with other speeches. These other speeches concern the things that follow from holding that things are not many. The context here is thus one which is antagonistic. Secondly, each speech separately (and, by implication, all of them together) refutes those speeches which attempt to discredit speeches that argue for the impossibility of the many. Zeno’s reply that Socrates has grasped the ‘whole [Dλον] of what [his] writing seeks’ confirms the intertwinement of these dimensions. Making speeches about the logic of things is part of an undertaking that is self-consciously made in speech and with reference to speech(es). Socrates will go on to deepen his speculations about what Zeno’s speeches are seeking. ‘I’m coming to understand, Parmenides,’ Socrates said, ‘that Zeno here seeks to be your partner not only in friendship but in writing! For he has written, in a certain way, the very same thing as you, but by changing it around he tries to trick us into thinking that he is saying some other thing. You in your poems say the All is one, and you do a both beautiful and good [εE] job of proving that; but this fellow, in turn, says that it’s not many, and he offers proofs that are very many and very great. One says “The One” and one says “Not Many,” and so each speaks so as to seem to say nothing the same, while you are saying nearly the same thing. That’s why what you say appears to be over the heads of the rest of us.’ (128a–b) That Socrates believes Zeno’s speeches to entail more than just the establishment of certain ontological propositions is underlined and extended in this passage. Socrates suggests that Zeno’s speeches are not

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only antagonistic but also friendly, namely toward Parmenides. Thus one and the same speech can be an instrument of battle and an extension of friendship. Or it becomes a gesture of friendship precisely in its antagonism – it all depends on who one’s allies are. Zeno’s speeches are able to do this because they endeavour to say the same as Parmenides by means of a different path. As Socrates points out, Zeno’s words are the opposite of Parmenides’ (not many – one is), but the meaning is ‘nearly’ the same. From this aspect Socrates speculates about a yet deeper dimension of Zeno’s speeches. Socrates suggests that Zeno has tried to trick his listeners into thinking that he is saying something different than Parmenides at the same time that he is supporting Parmenides. Zeno gives a rather lengthy reply to Socrates’ remarks. The crux of this reply is that while Socrates has grasped the target of the speech, he is mistaken about its motivation. Zeno states that he never intended to trick others into praising him, but was motivated by a ‘youth’s love for fighting’. This is consistent with Socrates’ initial remarks; and, if one looks closely at what Socrates says later about Zeno’s apparent trickery, Socrates’ remarks do not quite add up. Socrates would have us believe that Zeno is trying to point to a connection with Parmenides and obscure that connection at the same time and in the same respect. Zeno’s clarification simply removes the last of Socrates’ implications and confirms the earlier ones. His motivation was a combination of a love of fighting and a desire to reinforce Parmenides’ own logos. Furthermore, it is suggested that Socrates’ mistake is caused by his ignorance of two facts: (1) that Zeno wrote this speech a long time ago, and (2) that it was made public against Zeno’s wishes. The first fact relates to the confusion over fighting versus honour. The second underscores that Zeno was not looking for praise through this speech since he was not the one who chose to have it circulated. Let me summarize some of the things revealed by Socrates’ exchanges with Zeno. (1) Socrates is presented to us in a substantially different context from the one we find in his own account from the Phaedo. Two differences are noteworthy: (a) he is engaged directly in dialogue with other philosophers, and (b) the nature of the dialogue is markedly abstract in contrast to the physical and cosmological discourses of his first investigations. (2) Socrates is eager and able to meet these new interlocutors on their own ground; he in presented as both a deft and fearless combatant. (3) Socrates is highly attuned to both the ontological and rhetorical dimensions of this new discourse. (4) Despite his talents, Socrates’ judgment is somewhat blunted by his youthful impetuousness. Zeno is perhaps hinting at this when he indicates that he too was motivated by a

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The Ideas of Socrates

love of victory in his youth. This last point will remain important as we move into Socrates’ presentation of the ideas.

2.

Socrates’ Ideas

The next section of the text contains Socrates’ proposal to Zeno concerning εFδη. This marks the explicit introduction into this study of Socrates speaking directly about ideas.5 My aim will be to attend to what is said with as little presupposition as possible. As I have said above, however, the focus will be on the relationship that is presented between Socrates and the ideas. This means that we will have to pay close attention to the manner in which the topic is broached and then carried through. This will hold for the remainder of this chapter on the Parmenides, since much of what is revealed about Socrates and the ideas, through both his own presentation and the questions posed by Parmenides, pertains to the interplay between Socrates and the ideas, not simply the notion of ideas as such. Socrates’ impetuousness is highlighted by his response to Zeno’s clarification about the motivation behind his speech. Socrates quickly accepts what Zeno says. It seems that Socrates has been waiting to say something else and is eager to get it out. He says: ‘But tell me this: don’t you think [νοµζει] that there exists [ε=ναι], in itself [αυτ καθ’ αHτ], some form [ε=δ] of Likeness, to which is opposed a different one, which is unlike, and that both you and I and the different things which we do in fact call “many” come to partake [have a share/µεταλαµβα´νειν] of these two things which are?’6 (128e–129a) These lines warrant a number of observations. (1) Socrates does not present the eide as a hypothesis. That is, he does not ask whether he and Zeno should posit the existence of eide, but simply asks whether Zeno (and seems to suggest he should) thinks eide of likeness and unlikeness exist. The directness of this proposal and its apparent independence of logos will be significant. Whether ideas are, and if so, how they are, will be a central concern of Parmenides’ challenges to Socrates. Here Socrates seems to take their independent being as unproblematic. (2) Socrates’ use of νοµζω suggests that Zeno’s acceptance of such beings should be on the order of custom. Even if this would be a special kind of custom peculiar to philosophers, it is nevertheless a different question than it would be if put in terms of noesis or episteme. Socrates’ question is not whether Zeno has

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knowledge of ideas, but simply whether he accepts that they are. (3) The being of the eidos is presented as αυτ καθ’ α!τ – itself just as itself. In relation to itself, the eidos is simply itself. Or perhaps, as itself, it is simply what it is and nothing else.7 This is easy enough to say, but what it in fact might mean is hard to fathom since the other things that Socrates says here make such self-identity problematic. Firstly, the eidos of likeness, while simply itself, is also an other; it stands in opposition to the eidos of unlikeness.8 (What it might mean for an eidos to be in relation to another eidos remains to be seen.) Secondly, each eidos is able to be partaken of. The things which we call many are many because they partake severally of those things which are one. Which brings us to the last point. (4) If there is an aspect of discursive reflexivity in the opening of Socrates’ proposal it is to be found in the way in which we speak of things as many. If we return for a moment to Socrates’ questions concerning Zeno’s hypothesis, we see something rather curious. Socrates asked Zeno, ‘And do you think that each of your speeches is a proof of this very thing – so that the supposed proof that “There is no many” are as many as the speeches you have written?’ How can Zeno accept that there are many proofs denying manyness? Socrates seems to have Zeno in a performative contradiction. The manyness of Zeno’s discourse undercuts the very point it attempts to make. Strangely, Socrates did not make it an issue at that point. But now it seems that he does. In his proposal that there are eide and that things partake of them, precisely in terms of their manyness, Socrates suggests that we accept manyness in our everyday discourse and dealings with things. Despite the logical power of any proofs to the contrary, we nevertheless speak and act as if there is/are many. In the development of his proposal we see that Socrates is in no way troubled by the manyness of things. He continues: ‘And the things that come to partake of Likeness become like in both the manner and extent that they partake, but those of Unlikeness unlike, and those of both, both? And even if all things come to partake of both these opposing things and are, by partaking in both, both like and unlike in themselves – why wonder? For if someone were to show that the like things themselves become unlike or the unlike like, I’d think that a marvel. But if he shows that whatever partakes of both of these has experienced both, then, Zeno, it doesn’t seem at all out of place to me. No, not even if he were to show that all things are one by partaking of the One and that these same things are many, in turn, by partaking in Multitude! But if he demonstrates that whatever one is, this very thing, is many and that the Many, in turn, are one – of course I’ll wonder at that.’ (129a–c)

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Socrates continues in this manner, repeating in various ways that the manyness of things is not to be wondered at – only if someone could show the likeness of the unlike, or the manyness of the one, or, in general, the non-self-identity of any eidos, would Socrates be in wonder. The outlines of Socrates’ proposal are thus clear. He takes as given that things are many, but he also accepts that they are one. Because eide exist, and because things partake of them, this is unproblematic. The thrust of the account here (as far as Socrates is concerned) is that once one accepts the being of ideas, the phenomenal encountering of unity and multiplicity, sameness and difference, is no longer something to be wondered at. Socrates seems eager to expel this wonder, so eager that he appears to accept the being of ideas simply because their existence would apparently allow such wonder to be expelled. Thus his numerous examples display the way in which he believes these problems to be settled straightaway. After stating that if someone were to show how he, Socrates, is one among many men, but many within himself (having a front, back, top, bottom, etc.), this would be no marvel, he goes on to say: ‘If, then, someone shall try to show that for things such as stones and wood and the like, the same things are many and one, then we will say that he’s demonstrated that some thing is many and one, not that the One is many of the Many’s one. He’s not said anything wondrous, but only what in fact all of us should readily agree upon.’ (129d) Socrates’ desire to shut out the wondrousness of phenomena, the puzzle presented by the world as it opens itself to view, requires a ready and swift agreement on the relationship between eide and things. Things share in eide, and this sharing accounts for their being the way we encounter them.9 Now, with this settled (as far as Socrates is concerned) there is still a space for wonder. It is not things and their modes of being that are wondrous, but (maybe) the modes of being of the eide themselves. Implicit in this stance is the fact that Socrates believes he can separate questions concerning the being of ideas in relation to themselves and questions concerning the relationship between ideas and things. We can go on and think about ideas, and perhaps wonder at their being, but this will be separate from, and without any affect upon, the being of things.10 Finally, Socrates indicates at the culmination of his presentation of the eide how we come to think that there are ideas. In the midst of stating for the final time that he would be in wonder of anyone who could show how the eide themselves entail problems of unity and multiplicity, sameness and difference, Socrates says in passing that the eide are grasped by λογισµ

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(130a). The implications of this statement are twofold. On the one hand, Socrates’ remark suggests that we come to see that there must be ideas through a calculative reasoning.11 The movement of Socrates’ reasoning preceding this statement seems to support this. From the (apparent) fact of manyness and oneness in phenomena, the needfulness of eide is discerned. One can calculate that without the being of ideas the sense of phenomena will be lost. Socrates seems to be saying that there must be ideas because if there are not we cannot explain the way things are. On the other hand, the dimension of logos is unwittingly foregrounded in Socrates’ remark by his use of the word logismos. There is a sense in which the distance between the Socrates presented here and the Socrates of the Phaedo is the distance Socrates had to cover in order to catch up with himself. For it will only be when Socrates understands how logos and eidos are related that he will understand his own relation to the eide.

3.

The Challenge of Parmenides

In light of the analyses above, our main interpretive goal with respect to Socrates’ conversation with Parmenides will be to think through the implications of Parmenides’ remarks as they pertain to the relationships between ideas, logos and soul. As I will argue, the question of the being of ideas cannot be answered in advance of such considerations, but neither will they be answered simply afterward. Pythodorus expects Parmenides and Zeno to be angry with Socrates over his impetuous provocations. Instead, they show great admiration for Socrates. Parmenides says: ‘Socrates . . . you ought to be admired for your zeal for speeches [λγου]! And tell me, did you, on your own, come up with this division that you speak of between these forms, separate unto themselves [χωρ7 µ?ν εFδη αυτα` αBττα], and, separated from them, the things that partake of them [χωρ7 δ? τα` το!των αE µετχοντα]? And does it seem to you that Likeness itself is separate from the likeness that we possess? And so on with one and many and everything that you heard of just now from Zeno?’ (130b) Socrates never answers the first question. But Parmenides’ brief account of Socrates’ proposed ‘division’ is worth noting. It is really a double division. On the one hand, there is a division between the eide themselves. This is what it means for them to be ‘separate unto themselves’. This was already

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suggested by Socrates’ characterization of the eide as αυτ καθ’ αHτ. This will be the first node of Parmenides’ challenges to Socrates. On the other hand, the eide as a whole are separated from the ‘things that partake of them’, that have a share of them. This proposition itself seems incoherent. How can something both be partaken of and be separate from the things that partake of it? This will be the second node of Parmenides’ questions. The next series of exchanges concerns that of which Socrates thinks there are ideas.12 His hesitation over things such as hair, mud and dirt prompts Parmenides to claim that Socrates hesitates because he is young and still swayed by opinion. He does not dwell on this point, but turns immediately to the problem of participation. Parmenides’ precise question is: ‘Does it seem to you that, as you say, there are these forms from which the different things here, by partaking in them, get their names? For example, the things that partake in Likeness become like, but those in Greatness great, and those in Beauty and Justice both just and beautiful?’ (130e–131a) Parmenides’ question raises a number of issues. First, as is so often the case with Socrates’ own interrogations in the Platonic texts, Parmenides situates his questions in relation to opinion. He does not ask whether Socrates has knowledge of the partaking of ideas, only whether he has a certain opinion about it. Parmenides’ question stands in contrast to Socrates’ earlier question to Zeno, ‘don’t you think [νοµζει] there exists, in itself, some eide of Likeness?’ Second, Parmenides does not begin by asking whether things are as they are because they share in eide, but rather whether Socrates thinks things are named because of such sharing. Seeming, saying and naming take prominent place in this initial question. In the subsequent example the question is posed in terms of a direct relationship between things and ideas. Parmenides’ questions suggest a correspondence between the way things are and what we say about them. The idea/thing relationship, however, is not presented simply as one of something being like in relation to the idea of likeness, but is put in terms of becoming. This suggests that something can come-to-be-like through a partaking in the idea of likeness. The idea of likeness will explain something being like only inasmuch as that thing has become like. Socrates simply answers, ‘Of course’. The ensuing set of questions and answers revolves around the question of how something partaking of an idea is to be understood. It is significant that Parmenides does not bring seeming, saying and naming into the

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discussion at this point. His questions all presume that it makes sense to speak of things partaking of ideas in a way that sets the partaking at a distance from the discourse about the partaking. * * * * * It is clear that the questioning which Socrates undergoes at the hands of Parmenides is a critique of Socrates’ understanding of the ideas. But it is also clear that Parmenides’ critique is not a dismissal, nor a dissolution, of the notion of ideas altogether.13 This becomes apparent at the end of the exchange when Parmenides says: ‘And yet . . . if someone, in turn, Socrates, after focusing on all these problems and others still, shall deny that there are eide of the beings and will not distinguish a certain eidos of each single thing, wherever he turns he’ll understand nothing, since he does not allow that there is an ever-same idea for each of the beings [6δαν τ8ν ντων Iκα´στου τ;ν αυτ;ν αε7 ε=ναι]. And so he will entirely destroy the power of dialogue [διαλγεσθαι]. But you seem to me only too aware of this.’ (135b–c) Our goal will be to cover the distance between critique and necessity, to understand why Parmenides sees a need to challenge Socrates’ understanding of the ideas at the same time that he asserts that the ideas entail a certain necessity. Parmenides’ questioning of Socrates can be divided into four sections. The transitions are in each case initiated by attempts by Socrates to save the integrity of ‘his’ ideas. The exchange begins, as was noted above, by Parmenides’ broaching of the problem of participation. After gaining Socrates’ assent that things become what they are by means of partaking of eide, Parmenides asks: ‘And so each thing that partakes comes to partake either of the whole eidos or a part? Or could there be some way of partaking separate from these?’ (131a) Socrates’ answer is: ‘How could there be?’ These questions and Socrates’ answer set up the entire scope of the discussion that follows. It is going to be this problem of the wholeness of the idea in relation to the many things which would partake of it that gives Socrates such trouble. There is a question for the reader at this initial point, however, regarding whether Socrates needs to have answered in the way that he does. An underlying dimension of Parmenides’ discourse points to the possibility that there is another way of understanding participation.

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The Ideas of Socrates

Parmenides immediately sets up the conversation in a way that construes the ideas as spatial entities. His characterization of things partaking of an idea is that each thing takes a part of it for itself. It is implied that the idea is partitioned and divided just as a bodily magnitude would be if it were physically divided and dispersed. Socrates appears to resist this move but cannot hold off the insistence of Parmenides’ questions. This is evident in the next series of questions and replies. ‘Then does it seem to you that the whole eidos is in each of the many things, while still being one, or how?’ – ‘What prevents it, Parmenides,’ said Socrates, ‘from being one?’ – ‘Although one and the same, then, its whole will be in many separate beings at the same time, and so it would be separated from itself.’ – ‘Not if it is like a day,’ he said, ‘which, although one and the same, is in many places at once and is not at all separate from itself. In this way each of the forms could be one, the same and in all things at once.’ – ‘Socrates,’ he replied, ‘how nicely you make one and the same thing many places at once! It is as if after covering many men with a sail you would say that it is one whole over many. Or is this not what you mean to say?’ – ‘That’s fair,’ he answered. – ‘Well then would the whole sail be over each man, or a different part of it over each different man?’ – ‘A part.’ – ‘Then, Socrates,’ he said, ‘the forms themselves can be partitioned and the things that partake of them would partake of a part. The whole would no longer be in each, but each would possess a part.’ – ‘So it appears.’ – ‘Well then Socrates, are you willing to say that one eidos can, in truth, be partitioned by us and still be one?’ – ‘No way,’ he replied. (131a–c) Socrates’ suggestion that an eidos is like a day, self-same but in many places at once, is certainly not a sufficiently exhaustive account of what must obtain in the relationship between ideas and particulars, but it is not as grossly spatial as Parmenides’ characterizations. That Parmenides pushes this line of questioning may have a significance that is not yet evident. What is evident is that Parmenides has forced Socrates to talk about ideas in a particular way. The consequence of Parmenides’ spatialization of the eide comes out clearly in his next question. ‘Try to see then . . . if you’ll partition Greatness itself, then each of the many great things will be great by means of a part that’s smaller than Greatness itself – doesn’t that appear illogical?’ – ‘Of course.’ (131c–d) If one treats ideas as spatial things, then this conclusion is unavoidable.

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Socrates would seem to have a way out of Parmenides’ line of questioning by challenging its assumptions, but he does not do this. If he said, ‘Ideas do not have size, they exist otherwise’, Socrates would at least be pushing the conversation in a different direction. He eventually gets around to something like this, but some important moves in the conversation occur before this happens. Parmenides continues to ask some variations on the question above about greatness, speaking of the idea of the small being larger than its parts and the part of the equal being unequal to its whole. He then asks Socrates directly whether there is another way to speak of participation. Socrates answers that he cannot think of one. Here Parmenides introduces a version of what has come to be called the ‘third-man’ argument. The exchange runs as follows: ‘But what then? How do you feel about this?’ – ‘What’s that?’ – ‘I think that you think that each eidos is one because of this: whenever many things seem to you to be great, it seems probable to you, as you look over them all, that there is some one and the same idea. From this you conclude that the Great is one.’ – ‘That’s the truth,’ [Socrates] replied. – ‘But what about the Great itself and the different great things – if, in the same way, you look over them all with your soul, will there not appear, in turn, some great thing that makes all of them, by necessity, appear great?’ – ‘It looks that way.’ – ‘A different eidos of Greatness, then, will be revealed, in addition to that Greatness itself and the things that partake of it. And above all of these, in turn, another, that makes them all great. And so each of your eide will no longer be one, but will be boundless in multitude.’ (131e–132b) The weight of this (so-called) argument is usually placed on the conclusion of infinite multiplicity. The conclusion is taken to indicate that the point of Parmenides’ remarks is to show the impossibility of ideas. Such an interpretation, however, ignores important elements of Parmenides’ path to this conclusion – and there may be more to the path than the end point.14 Firstly, Parmenides is particularly concerned with why Socrates takes each idea to be one. He suggests that it is because of a certain relationship that Socrates has to the multiplicity of things in the world that he takes each idea to be one.15 His account of this involves three steps. (1) Many things are present to Socrates and each appears as great. (2) Looking over them and recognizing the way in which they are the same (as great), Socrates thinks that there is some idea that accounts for this commonality.

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The Ideas of Socrates

(3) The oneness of the idea (greatness) is affirmed in light of step 2. It is crucial to recognize that the positing of the oneness of the idea comes only after the idea is glimpsed within the many. The idea’s appearance comes as a result of the relation between Socrates and the many things. The final moment of the process is the one which, as it were, sets the idea apart from its own appearing. The oneness of the idea is not something seen or known; rather, it is something that is asserted.16 Only with this in view can we assess Parmenides’ next remarks. He begins his question by placing the idea of greatness alongside the great things. This is made possible not because of Parmenides’ former insistence on the thinglyness of ideas, but now on this new outline of the cominginto-view of the oneness of the idea. It is only after the oneness of the idea has been asserted that it can then be set alongside the things. Once this is done, Parmenides can speculate about Socrates’ soul looking over them all – idea and things. Implicit in the final part of his question is a repetition of the situation of the initial appearance of the idea of greatness. Socrates, by means of his soul, looks over a many and discerns there a one that allows each to be seen as, in some respect, the same. Parmenides, however, stresses the duplication of the idea in its oneness, not the repetition of the appearance of a one out of a many. He asserts that this new idea is different than the first, but in so doing elides a different difference. The first idea, once it is posited as one and then set alongside the things, is no longer an idea as a moment in a relational structure between soul and world. It is now simply another thing. Parmenides’ construction of the third-man argument requires a subtle suppression of the moment-of-appearing of the idea out of the many things. Only on the basis of a prior reification does the thirdman argument have any cogency. What is beginning to become evident through the path of this conversation is that the relationship between Socrates and the ideas is being subtly addressed. Parmenides’ gross characterization of the ideas as spatial entities can be seen as a provocation to Socrates to assert that the ideas cannot exist in that way. When these provocations result in Socrates’ admission that he is lost, Parmenides provides Socrates with a picture of his own activity. He brings out the fact that Socrates turns to the ideas not in order to know them as separate, but rather as a moment in his apprehension of how the many things he apprehends are. As we continue with Socrates’ and Parmenides’ discussion, we will see the extent to which Socrates is unable to correct this problematic setting apart of the ideas. Socrates attempts to overcome Parmenides’ invocation of an infinite multiplication of each idea with the following suggestion:

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‘But Parmenides . . . couldn’t it be that each of these eide is a thought [νηµα] and properly comes to be nowhere but in souls? Then each could in fact be one and would still not suffer the things you just mentioned.’ (132b) Up to this point, Socrates has not attempted to say what an idea is. When he initially introduces the ideas, Socrates simply asks Zeno whether he agrees that there are ideas. What they are was implied in Socrates’ account of what they do. Ideas are what are responsible for the many things having their various qualities and attributes. Ideas, on this view, stand in relation to the being of the many things, and are said to be because of the manner of being of the many things. This, however, casts some doubt on whether a separate account of the being of ideas is possible, or even intelligible.17 Here, however, Socrates proposes that ideas are thoughts and claims that if they are, the problem of infinite multiplicity is avoided. Socrates’ thinking seems to be that by placing the idea in the soul as a thought, the problem of its being-placed-alongside the many things will be avoided. The idea would perhaps be applied each time to the many things, but never come to reside among them. This suggestion does sidestep the explicit reification of ideas as being like the many things, but it fails on two levels. First, even though the positing of ideas as thoughts seems to avoid reification, it nevertheless (and ironically) fails to avoid the simple externalization of the ideas. Positing that ideas are in us is not the same as positing them as a moment within a dynamic set of relations. Even as in the soul, this characterization of the ideas still attempts to set the ideas apart and by themselves. It says ‘thoughts’ but implicitly still treats them as things. Secondly, and more importantly, it fails to do justice to that way in which the ideas are, in a certain respect, independent of our thoughts. Using Parmenides’ account from above as a model, we can sketch an understanding of ideas that places them within a relational structure of world and soul. Ideas are what are glimpsed by the soul within the many things, and in that respect are in the things, or perhaps are only in being-drawn-out of things. In either case, it falls short to say that they are only in souls. This basic point is expressed in Parmenides’ response to Socrates. He reduces the situation to the following: If things are to partake of eide, and eide are nothing but thoughts, then the things must be thoughts as well (even, that everything thinks); or, that, while posited as thoughts, everything is not-thoughts, ανητα.18 The point seems to be that if everything is reduced to thought, it is the same as to say ‘not-thoughts’ since the

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The Ideas of Socrates

meaning of ‘thoughts’ loses its sense. Thoughts only properly are as thoughts of ; to speak of thoughts is only meaningful when there is something over and against thought. One of the difficulties with accounting for the ideas, however, is that they cannot simply be identified with that which thoughts are of. This comes out in the wake of Socrates’ next proposal. That Socrates is struggling to keep his footing in his conversation with Parmenides is clearly seen in his next remarks. Referring to Parmenides’ criticism of his last suggestion, Socrates says: ‘Well that too . . . makes no sense. However, Parmenides, here’s how it really appears to me to be: these eide stand in nature like patterns [paradigms/παραδεγµατα]. The different things resemble them and are likenesses, and so the different things’ participation in the eide turns out to be nothing else than to be made in their likeness!’ (132c–d) The immediately striking aspect of Socrates’ statement is its absolute reversal of the previous position. The rhetorical dimension of this move reveals that Socrates has no steadfast understanding of the ideas. He seems to have a general sense of what he means by ideas, and appears to have thought about them in all of these ways previously. But under Parmenides’ scrutiny the inconsistency of the totality of his understanding is becoming clear. There are three basic problems with Socrates’ new proposal. The first is highlighted by Parmenides in the lines that follow. In essence, it is another version of the third-man argument. In the previous exchange, Parmenides had noted that when Socrates looks over the many things alongside of the idea, some third thing, another idea, makes its appearance. In those remarks the context was one in which the soul of Socrates was responsible for the holding together of the many things and the idea. In Parmenides’ response to Socrates’ proposal that the ideas are patterns in nature, which are related to the many things through a relation of likeness, we see an infinite multiplication of the ideas without recourse to soul. Parmenides’ criticism is that for two things to be alike, there must be something by reference to which they are alike; but this something is nothing but the idea itself. Therefore, if the many things are like the idea, then the idea is also like the many things, and that by which each is like the other is some other idea of that way in which they are alike. Again, the idea undergoes an infinite multiplication. The other two problems with ideas being patterns in nature are only

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implicit in the text. Firstly, the status of likeness in Socrates’ proposal is ambiguous. Previously, likeness was itself one (in fact the first) of the ideas that Socrates isolated for discussion. What does it mean then to say that many things are related to an idea through likeness? If likeness is an idea, then when the many great things, for instance, are great by means of likeness to the idea of greatness, they would be like, by means of another idea, the idea of likeness. The relation between many things and any given idea would be mediated by the idea of likeness. What the consequences of this are is not immediately apparent, but it is clear that the problem is elided in Socrates’ remarks. Furthermore, and secondly, the status of ‘making’ is also problematic in this conception of the ideas as patterns in nature. Implicit in Socrates’ statement is that the many things are not simply like this or that idea, but are made in the likeness of the idea. This poses two problems. The first is that it is simply left unstated who would be doing the making.19 In one sense, what Socrates says here really only duplicates Parmenides’ comments regarding Socrates looking over the many things. Socrates, whether aware of the implication or not, has articulated a structure of relation between the many things and the ideas that includes a third thing that is at once outside of those things and simultaneously responsible for their relatedness. The second problem implicit in the question of making is the kind of ideas which are under consideration. Socrates is typically interested in ideas such as justice, beauty, greatness and equality. Parmenides has suggested to him not to discount any of the ideas, and here forms of natural kinds seem to be most clearly signalled by ‘patterns in nature’. Again, it is not that such ideas are inherently more problematic than the others, but it is a problem for Socrates that his discourse is stretched in directions that he is neither aware of nor able to control. In some sense, it seems to be part of Parmenides’ goal to impart to Socrates a capacity to be conscious of these very difficulties when talking about ideas. If one takes each of these last two short exchanges separately, they each seem to amount to very little. Parmenides reduces each of them to nonsense very quickly. Also, Socrates’ own attitude involves a certain flippancy. He is only too eager to abandon his statement that the ideas are thoughts to say that they are really patterns in nature. But taken together, something important is disclosed. Even if each of these characterizations of the ideas is deficient on its own, perhaps the two together yield something more than the sum of their parts. Must ideas be thought of as at once thoughts in the soul and patterns in nature? How to think this is a difficult matter, but one which might be easier to answer as we move on.

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The Ideas of Socrates

The final exchange between Socrates and Parmenides concerning the ideas and participation centres on the issue of separation. We saw from the beginning of Socrates’ presentation of the ideas that they entailed separation, both from the many things and from each other. However, the manner of this separation was not entirely clear at the beginning. Socrates spoke of the ideas being ‘different’ than the many things and from each other, and spoke of the ideas as being themselves by themselves. At the very least, these ways of speaking do not require one to think of separation in spatial terms. Parmenides, however, picks up the reified picture of the ideas that he had pressed earlier and uses it here to make his most dramatic statement concerning the ideas. The crux of his remarks develop from his statement: ‘I think that both you [Socrates] and anyone else who posits that there’s a certain beinghood in itself for each thing would first agree that none are among us.’ (133c) Socrates responds: ‘How could it still be “in itself” then?’ (133c) Whether he did so initially or not, it now seems that Socrates is thinking of the ideas as things. This is implicit in his answer to Parmenides. Once the ideas are thought of as things like the ‘many things’, they cannot be ‘in themselves’ and also be ‘among us’. Here we have something resembling a two-world picture, and Parmenides pushes it to the extreme. Since the ideas must be in themselves and therefore cannot be among us, they must be somewhere else. And since to be somewhere else implies a certain place, there must be a region, a topos, for them to be. Parmenides does not dwell on this aspect, but from its suggestion emphasizes that since the ideas cannot be among us we cannot know them. Furthermore, if they are knowable, they are knowable only by the god, and since the god must be ‘there’ where the ideas are, he cannot know us or our world. The picture Parmenides paints here is one that reduces the hypothesis of ideas to complete nonsense. The separation between us and our world and the world of the god and the ideas is absolute. There can be no traffic between the two. But this means that our world is neither made to be like ideas, nor do the many things participate in ideas. In fact, our world has no ideality in it at all. There may be ideas, Parmenides suggests, but if there are, they can be nothing for us.

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Ideas and the One

I have stressed that my goal in this reading of the Parmenides is to think through the manner in which Socrates stands in relation to the ideas. There was in his initial statements the suggestion that Socrates understood the ideas to be essentially unconnected to himself. Parmenides’ series of questions forced Socrates to face this issue, but Socrates is not really able to see what is happening. We have also seen the extent to which Parmenides sketches a picture where the ideas do have an essential relationship to Socrates’ ‘looking over’ the many things. Socrates does not pick up on this and allows the ideas to be thought in terms of various kinds of exteriority at each stage. It is this mode of separation that leads to the ultimate conclusion that even if there are ideas (in this sense) they cannot be known by us. In my remaining remarks concerning the Parmenides I will attempt to show how Parmenides’ gymnastic provides a counter-understanding of the separation of ideas, a separation which is more radical than a two-world separation and at the same time can be seen to entail a certain immanence with respect to soul and world. Furthermore, I hope to show how this understanding of the ideas, or perhaps more properly, ideality, addresses the very challenge put forth by Parmenides. I will do this primarily through a reading of the first two hypotheses as they stand in relation to the discussion of the instant. * * * * * The greater portion of the dialogue consists of a series of hypothetical investigations carried out by Parmenides with a young man named Aristotles. The performance of this exercise occurs because Parmenides tells Socrates that if he is to properly understand the ideas he must slow down and train in a particular manner of investigation. Crucial to such investigation, says Parmenides, is the need to investigate the consequences resulting not only from the hypothesis that something is, but also the consequences of the hypothesis that that thing is not. To illustrate, Parmenides discusses how this would work with Zeno’s hypothesis: ‘If many is’. After some persuading, Parmenides agrees to perform such an exercise. Let us note one detail of Parmenides’ remarks before turning to the gymnastic itself. He says: ‘So where will we start and what will we hypothesize first? Or, since now it seems I must play at this worklike game, shall I begin with myself and my

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hypothesis about the One itself, whether one is or one is not, what must result?’ (137b) It is the ‘myself’ that is striking here. Parmenides seems to suggest that there is some fundamental connection between himself and the hypothesis of the One, and that to work on this hypothesis is not just a working on what is of Parmenides, a working on his hypothesis, but is in fact a working on himself. This one utterance should put us on guard concerning the apparent ‘abstractness’ of the gymnastic. Once again, an art of logos is marked as a matter of working on oneself, as a matter of ethics. The hypothesis with which Parmenides begins is ‘One is’, and pursues the hypothesis with respect to the One in relation to itself. Our goal in examining this hypothesis is first to understand how it follows from the discussion between Parmenides and Socrates, and second to learn something about the relation between ideas, the soul and phenomena. This latter dimension of our goal will follow upon the examination of the second argument and the discussion of the instant. I do not think that Parmenides’ gymnastic concerning the One can be accurately understood simply as a dialectical examination of the ideas. Rather, the connection is more oblique. It is in terms of the oneness of the ideas that this exercise is immediately relevant. As was noted above, this is Parmenides’ hypothesis, and it is different from that of Socrates – the hypothesis of the ideas. To the extent that they overlap they can be examined in light of each other. This seems to be what is happening in the dialogue. Parmenides focused almost exclusively on the unitary aspect of each idea and concentrated his questions on that aspect. What he now teaches Socrates is how to thoroughly think through the relationship between unity and multiplicity.20 This is crucial for Socrates to understand, but it does not exhaust the range of questions concerning the relationships between ideas and things, and ideas and themselves.21 Thus we can set out with Parmenides and Aristotles with the following question in mind: What are the consequences for an idea, with respect to its unity, if in fact it is one?22 Parmenides begins the gymnastic where he began his questioning of Socrates – with parts and wholes. If there’s one, then the One can in no way be many? – How could it? – So it must neither have a part nor be a whole. (137c) The first of these points was made clear earlier; inasmuch as something is unqualifiedly one, it cannot be partitioned into a many. The more radical

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claim, implicit earlier but not thematized, is here made explicit: Absolute unity requires the refusal of wholeness. Why is this the case? It is largely a logico-linguistic (or perhaps phenomenologico-linguistic) matter. Part and whole are relational terms. Parts can only be parts in relation to some whole, and a whole can only be a whole when, as Parmenides says, it ‘lacks no part’. From this impossibility of the One being a whole a number of other consequences follow. Parmenides reasons that if something is neither part nor whole it can have neither beginning, middle nor end (137d). In fact, by extending this reasoning, an absolute One can have no limits, it must be αBπειρον. This means that it can have no shape (137e), nor be in any place (138a). Neither can it itself be the place of itself. And so the thing surrounding would be one thing and the thing being surrounded another [if it surrounded itself], since a whole, of course, will not both suffer and do the same thing at the same time. And thus the One would not still be one but two. (138b) These points make explicit Parmenides’ intimations from above – an absolute One cannot be in or as space. The One is non-spatial. As non-spatial, the One can be neither in motion nor at rest (138b–c), cannot change (138c), and cannot come-to-be in anything (138d–e). All of these consequences resonate with the previous discussion between Parmenides and Socrates. Already at this point, having established that the One is nowhere, neither moves nor stands at rest, and is essentially no-thing, it is very difficult to say just what the One could be. However, Parmenides is far from being finished with his deduction of the negative attributes of the One in relation to itself. He now turns to a set of relational predicates. The first set of predicates he denies to the One are sameness and otherness. The reasoning is, at least on the surface, rather straightforward. Parmenides seems to hold that the One is exhausted in its oneness. If anything other than oneness is ascribed to the One, this would render it as many. Thus Parmenides claims that the One can neither be other than itself, nor other than another. Being other than itself would mean being not-one. Being other than another would mean being other, and thus having an attribute other than oneness (139b–c). This impossibility of having some other attribute means that the One can also not be the same – neither in relation to itself, nor to anything else. As one, if it were the same as another, ‘it would be that thing, but would not be itself’

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(139c). But for the One to be itself is to be one, and thus can also not be the same as itself, for then the One would again become many – one and same. This is difficult territory. In this midst of this section, Parmenides says: The very nature of the One is surely not the same as of the Same. [Ουχ Kπερ το Iν φ!σι, αHτ; δCπου κα7 το ταυτο.] (139d) On Parmenides’ reasoning, the Same is not the same as anything except itself. The Same is the only ‘thing’ of which sameness can be attributed – and it is the only attribute which the Same can possess. But the very utterance of such propositions is problematic. If the Same is only same, then it is not one. And as not-one it cannot be the Same. The very uniqueness of the Same is rendered impossible by the impossibility of attributing oneness to it.23 What this indicates at this point is that if there is any positive sense to Parmenides’ discourse, it entails an understanding that ‘things’ like the One and the Same cannot be taken as subjects in the sense of an underlying substrate. That is, they are neither that in which nor of which things are said. In fact, to speak of them at all seems to strain the sense of words. It makes more sense to say that the One, the Same and the Other, to name just three, are that through which we speak. We cannot speak of them in the way we speak of ordinary things, because it is these very ‘things’ which allow us to speak in the first place.24 For our purposes it is not necessary to comment on each of the remaining sections of the first hypothesis. Parmenides makes similar arguments pertaining to likeness and unlikeness (140a–b), equality and inequality (140b–d), being older or younger (140e–141d), becoming and being (141e–142a). The conclusions of these arguments are similarly negative: the One is neither like nor unlike, altogether without measure, neither older nor younger (in fact, is not in time at all), and has not become, is not becoming, will not become, has not been, will not be and is not. This last, of course, is the most extraordinary conclusion of the first hypothesis. The One, as one, is not. This conclusion is drawn principally from the remarks concerning time and temporality. To be is here equated with being in time; and being is equated with thingly being. Secondarily, there seems to be an implicit leaning on the logico-linguistic point made above. If the One is both one and is, it is not one, but two. However, the conclusion is even more problematic, for to say that the One is one requires the implicit positing of its being, and this is what has just been disallowed. As we will see, however, the severity of this conclusion

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may result from too narrow a conception of being. To understand this, let us now turn briefly to the second argument and the discussion of the instant. * * * * * The second argument continues to examine the consequences of the hypothesis that ‘One is’. Parmenides put this in terms of ‘go[ing] back up . . . once again from the beginning, in case something might appear different to us’. However, the beginning that Parmenides makes here is different from that of the first argument. There Parmenides began by asking whether the One could in any way be many. As we just saw, the whole of the first argument ended with the denial of being to the One. Here, the first question of the second argument is whether the One, if it is (Lν ε6 1στιν), can fail to partake of being (ουσα). Thus Parmenides begins by calling into question the ultimate conclusion of the previous argument. This fact anticipates what occurs throughout the whole of the second argument: one by one, each of the conclusions of the first argument is overturned. The following conclusions are reached: the One is one and many, a whole and pieces, limited and limitless in multitude (145a); the One is in itself and in another (145d); the One is in motion and at rest (146a); the One is ‘other than both the different things and itself and is the same as both them and itself’ (147b); the One is like and unlike both the different things and itself (148d); the One both touches and does not touch the different things and itself (149d); the One is both equal to and greater and less than both itself and the different things (151b); the One is equal and more and less in number than both itself and the different things (151e); the One ‘both is and becomes older and younger than both itself and the different things, and neither is nor becomes either older or younger than either itself or the different things’ (155c). These conclusions present us with a double set of contradictions. The first set is contained in the second argument itself. Each strand of the argument ends by positing that the One both is and is not something; each conclusion is itself a contradiction. The second set of contradictions consists in the relation of the conclusions of the first argument to those of the second. In the first argument all predicates of quantity (magnitude and multitude), quality, space and time are denied of the One; in the second argument they are affirmed. It is important to see that this is the case for both parts of each conclusion in the second argument. For instance, the final conclusion states that the One both becomes and does not become older than itself. While it is clear that the first supposition (becoming older) contradicts the first argument (which denied that the One is in any way in time), it is less clear that the second supposition also does so. But in

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fact, the supposition that the One does not become older than either itself or the different things does not deny that it is in time. Being neither older nor younger while nonetheless being in time means being the same as itself with respect to time. In this way, the whole of the second argument stands in opposition to the whole of the first. This opposition is cast in a particular light through the next section of the dialogue: the exposition of the instant, τ ,ξαφνη. This section begins as follows: Let’s now speak yet a third time. The One, if it is as we have described it – isn’t it necessary for it (since it is both one and many and being neither one nor many and partaking of time), since one is, sometimes to partake of being [ουσα], but since it is not, sometimes, in turn, not to partake of being [ουσα]?25 (155e) This ‘third’ is not akin to the ‘first’ and ‘second’ of the previous arguments; but neither is it simply a continuation of the second. As we will see, while it initially continues within the frame of the second argument, this section offers a certain mediation between the first and second arguments. That it does continue within the frame of the second argument is clear from the passage above – the One here is ‘partaking of time’. The implication of Parmenides’ question is that the contradictions within the second argument can be resolved if viewed with respect to time. We can maintain that the One is, for instance, in motion and at rest, if we clarify that it is in these states at different times. The specific problem of the present section of the dialogue turns out to be the problem of transition – how does the One ‘move’ from one state to its contrary? The problem arises by means of a simple application of the principle of non-contradiction. Motion and rest offer the most evident illustration. Anything capable of motion must either be in motion or not be in motion, that is, be at rest. There is no middle ground with respect to the thing’s existence in time.26 For this reason, if something does in fact pass from one contrary state to another, it must do so in no time. Parmenides names this strange (αBτοπο) time out of time ‘the instant’, τ ,ξαφνη. Giving a name to this place/ time in which change occurs, however, does not in any way explain how change occurs. Rather, it is simply a way of indicating that change occurs. Inasmuch as the One changes, it must change outside of time. Let us listen to Parmenides’ account of τ ,ξαφνη before looking into the implications of this supposition. For the ‘instant’ looks like it signifies this very thing: something from which there is a change in either of two directions. For while still

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standing at rest something cannot change from standing at rest; nor while still in motion can it change from motion. Instead, this sort of momentary, out-of-place nature lurks between both motion and rest and is not in any time. Thus, into this and out of this, whatever’s in motion changes to standing at rest and whatever stands at rest changes to being in motion. (156d–e) As we will see shortly, the language of moving ‘into’ and ‘out of’ the instant is necessarily metaphorical. Being itself out of time and place, the positing of the instant introduces a radically incommensurate register of being into the categories of the second argument. In fact, the One of the first argument, the One stripped of all predicates except for oneness, will come to ‘occupy’ this non-temporal and a-spatial ‘place’ of the instant. Two other discourses will help us locate the specific logic of the instant: Aristotle’s Physics and Euclid’s Elements. Aristotle’s Physics is concerned throughout with describing and explaining the broadest range of the phenomena of motion and change, κνησι. In Book VI, Aristotle is concerned specifically with unfolding the structure of change as transition. The clearest paradigm for expositional purposes is given by local motion and rest.27 Aristotle shows that motion must be accompanied by magnitude, and in two respects. First, anything that would be in motion must have magnitude (‘Every changing thing is necessarily divisible’ [Physics 234b10]). Second, the motion must take place with respect to some other magnitude; it must traverse a certain magnitude of distance. Additionally, Aristotle demonstrates the manner in which time is coordinate with the magnitudes entailed in motion. What this means is that a motion, say the motion of A from point Q to point P, will have a coordinate time, say from time S to time T.28 Conversely, something at rest will remain at the same position during a certain temporal instant – rest is no less in time than motion. If, then, A stands at rest from time R to time S and then moves from point Q to point P during the interval from time S to time T, when does it change from being-at-rest to being-in-motion? Since, as Aristotle demonstrates, both rest and motion take time, there can be no time in which the transition occurs. Aristotle puts it as follows: ‘Since every changing thing changes from something to something, what has changed, when it has first changed, must be in the condition to which it has changed’ (Physics 235b8–10). Said otherwise, there is no beginning to either motion or rest. Each, inasmuch as they determine a certain time, can only be along with that time. Phenomenologically, this entails a curious aspect, namely, motion and rest can only be grasped retrospectively. To see

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that something is moving is to hold together an interval of motion/time; it is to hold on to a past (however proximate) as it unfolds within the present. To see that something is moving is to see that it has moved.29 This introduction of the present, however, brings with it a complementary Aristotelian problem, the now. The now is akin to the instant; it is a certain atemporal time, a time with no duration that stands between the past and the future. One of the riddles of time for Aristotle is the apparent conclusion that the present has no thickness.30 If the now stands as the limit between the past and the future, then the now, oddly, cannot be in time. And if the now is not in time, then the experience of presentness, experience itself, becomes a riddle. This conclusion arises on the basis of a certain logic, a logic of limit and limited. This logic can be helpfully explicated by reference to Euclid’s geometry. The problem of how the now stands in relation to the flow of time and how the instant stands in relation to change can be schematically investigated through an analysis of points and lines.31 Euclid defines a point as ‘that which has no part’ [Σηµεν ,στιν, οM µρο ουθν].32 Within the register of extended magnitudes, this means a point is without magnitude, without extension. The fundamental consequence of this definition is that points cannot be taken as that which make up a line; points are not the building blocks of lines.33 How then is a point to be understood with respect to magnitude – for surely points are what they are only by means of such a relation. The best manner in which to understand this relation is in terms of limit and limited.34 For instance, a line segment is a finite extended geometrical entity. Its finitude is constituted by its coming-to-an-end, that is, by having limits. These limits can be spoken of as end-points; two discrete points are defined with respect to the line segment as that beyond which the line segment does not extend. Conversely, the line segment would not be what it is without being limited, without being subjected to some principle of limitation. A dialectical relationship thus obtains between the line segment and the endpoints. Neither can be without the other. What this shows is the way in which an articulated extended realm is dependent upon principles which are, strictly speaking, non-extended. But what is equally clear is the way in which such principles could neither have any being nor (more crucially) have any occasion for appearing without that which they limit. A point is literally nothing without that of which it is a limit. Appearance (in the sense of being made manifest) is thus at the heart of such a dialectical relationship, but in a particular manner. Given the supposition of an existing line segment, it is possible, on logical grounds, to say that the end-points that are its limits exist along with it. In another

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sense, however, the end-points, in their discreteness, are only latent. The very discreteness of the end-points is only to be found in the dialectical thought which draws them out of the line segment itself.35 If, however, we return to the domain of motion and change, we can see how the same necessity applies. As with the line segment, we can imagine a changing world of physical entities with no observers.36 The beings of this world are in themselves what they are, irrespective of any sensible or intellective grasp. But they are neither for themselves nor for another anything at all. And here both temporality and the soul come into consideration; for it is only on the basis of a certain retention of duration that things can be present to each other.37 Furthermore, it is only from within such presentness that principles or limits can be made manifest. Aristotle writes: ‘But we recognize time whenever we mark off a motion, marking it off by means of a before and an after. And that is when we say that time has happened, whenever we take cognizance of the before and the after in a motion’ (Physics 219a23–25). The retrospective aspect implicit here is essential. As we saw above, neither motion nor rest are intelligible without entailing a temporal duration. From a phenomenological standpoint, this means that to say that motion (for instance) is happening now means that motion has just and is still happening. The now of experience, the now in which the world is made manifest, is an overlapping of the past and the future. Again, Aristotle: ‘But if the now is divisible [not a punctual now], something of the past would be in the future, and something of the future in the past’ (Physics 234a11). As we have seen, the logic of change, time and limit shows such an overlap to be contradictory. The upsurge of phenomena, however, suggests that these logics are not the whole of the truth. These logics themselves, it seems, are abstractions from phenomenal experience. My suggestion then is that the section of the Parmenides on the instant must be read against the backdrop of phenomenal experience; otherwise, it will remain problematically abstract.38 Let us first pick up with Parmenides’ remarks concerning the instant. And the One, then, if in fact it both stands at rest and is in motion, would change from each of these two – for this is the only way it could do both – but changing it changes in an instant, and when it changes it would be in no time, nor would it at that time be in motion or stand at rest. – No, it wouldn’t. – Then is it also this way in relation to the other changes? Whenever from being to perishing it changes, or from notbeing to becoming, doesn’t it at that time come to be between both these motions and rests, and neither is at that time nor is not, neither

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becomes nor perishes? – It certainly looks that way. – According to this speech, then, when going from one to many and from many to one, it is neither one nor many, neither is it separated nor collected. And when going from like to unlike and from unlike to like, it’s neither like nor unlike, neither is it made like not unlike. And in going from small to great and to equal and vice-versa, it’s neither small nor great nor equal, neither would it be increasing nor diminishing nor being made equal. – It doesn’t look like it. – So the One would suffer all these experiences, if it is. – How not? (157a–b) As we saw above, it is difficult to capture the logic of limits in ordinary language. It will be ‘in’ the instant that change occurs, but the instant is neither in time nor in space. And ‘when’ the One is ‘in’ the instant, it too, as in the first argument, is stripped of all predicates. Now what we come to see is that, on the temporal register, the instant is not to be distinguished from eternity – eternity understood not as the infinite duration of time, but as that which stands outside of time, that which has its being outside of time.39 It is precisely the status of this mode of being, however, that is in question. Parmenides has argued that to be is to be in time. Thus both the One of the first argument and the instant, being atemporal, are not. On the basis of the above analysis, however, we can posit a proper mode of being that, while not in time, is constituted by its limitation of temporal being. The One, the now, and the instant all come to name the immanent and operative limitations of spatio-temporal being. In fact, the One of the first argument comes to stand for all such figures of limitation. Looking again at the passage above, we could say that the One and the instant are the same – without the One as limit there can be no nodes of unity within the flux of phenomenal being. A suggestive passage for contextualizing these remarks is one we looked at earlier. When Parmenides pushes Socrates to account for his insistence that the eide are one, Parmenides offers to Socrates an image of Socrates’ comportment toward phenomena. He says: ‘I think that you think that each eidos is one because of this: whenever many things seem to you to be great, it seems probable to you, as you look over them all, that there is some one and the same idea. From this you conclude that the Great is one.’ (132a) The eidos as it is characterized here is, to be sure, a positing. After looking at the many great things, the one eidos is posited as the ground of the community-in-greatness of the many things. But they are not made great by the

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positing. First, the things which appear to Socrates appear as great, then the eidos is posited. What this suggests is that the eidos finds its occasion for being posited, for ‘appearing’ to the mind, in the coming together of the many things and Socrates. I would suggest that it is only in this dynamic setting that the eidos has its proper being. It is in its repeated emergence from the many things of phenomena that the eidos is. And in this respect we can perhaps make better sense of the difficult relationship between Socrates’ ideas and Parmenides’ One of the gymnastic. The One seems to be the abstract figure of the ideas. The One, in its difficult and contradictory relation to the many, is a simplified version of the ideas in their discreteness and community, among themselves and the many things. The manner in which we come to see the One of the first argument stand in relation to the One of the second argument in terms of limit and limited gives us only the barest sketch of what would be entailed in explicating the nature of ideas in their fullness. We can also understand in this regard why Parmenides pushed the inquiry as he did at the beginning of his exchange with Socrates. By forcing Socrates into taking the ideas as spatial entities he was able to negatively highlight the radical difference between the concrete things of phenomena and the ideas. It does the ideas no justice to attempt to find for them some middle ground. And I think we can say that the undertaking of that project would not necessarily be to follow the outward look of Parmenides’ gymnastic, but could take another, yet related, form. One such form would be the Platonic texts themselves. Once we see that the ideas are not to be approached outside of phenomena, but precisely in our being within and of phenomena, we can start to read the Platonic corpus as nothing but the explication of the eidetic, as coming to account for the immanent, yet latent, articulation of phenomenal being. From this perspective, we could imagine a very different set of responses given to Parmenides’ main challenges to Socrates’ positing of the ideas. First, the suggestion that ideas are in danger of being partitioned is no longer a real one. It is only when the idea is reified by us that it exists in a thingly mode. The idea as it appears is not a thing that can be carved up. Second, the middle pair of suggestions that Socrates makes about the being of ideas (that they are, alternatively, thoughts in the soul or paradigms in nature), can now both be seen as necessary. Without the soul the idea will not appear, but equally, the soul draws the idea out of the world. Both moments stand and fall together. Finally, the problem of separation is shown to be improperly formulated. ‘Yes, the ideas are separate from phenomena’, we would respond, ‘but not in the way you explain it’. The separation is not one that can be understood on the

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basis of space and place. It is, one could say, an ontological, not an ontic, separation.40 Let me make one final remark. I noted that at the outset of his questioning of Socrates, Parmenides asked whether Socrates thought things get their names because they participate in ideas. I also noted that this dimension of his question is immediately dropped. However, Parmenides does return to the problem of discourse at the end of his questioning, claiming that one who ‘will not distinguish a certain form of each single thing’ will ‘destroy the power of dialogue’. This power, I would suggest, is the power of eidetic manifestation. The structure of encounter between soul and world is one that takes place in and through logos, and logos lives as dialogue.41

Chapter 3

Symposium The relevance of the Parmenides to an investigation of the eidetic is clearly evident. Socrates’ hypothesis and the subsequent questioning he undergoes at the hands of Parmenides directly address the notions of eidos and idea. As we have seen, these notions are not to be pursued in abstraction from the contexts in which they arise. Indeed, the ideas, as Socrates’ own, are fundamentally tied to himself. However, the parameters of the discussion concerning the ideas also show that they cannot be taken simply as an idiosyncratic hypothesis of one man. The hypothesis, while springing from and tied to this one man, demands to be confronted in terms of its potential universality. In fact, it demands to be questioned with respect to its intimations of transcendence. The relevance of the Symposium to the question of the eidetic is more oblique. We will see that at crucial points the language of the dialogue points rather directly to Socrates’ hypothesis of ideas in the Parmenides, but it is never broached explicitly. The indications that the Symposium is relevant to this inquiry are at this point largely circumstantial. As we have seen above, the narrative frames of the Parmenides and the Symposium share many common features. These resemblances beckon us to read them in tandem. Likewise, containing the third account of the young Socrates, it merits a conjoined reading. Thus we will set out to read Socrates’ speech in the Symposium anticipating that it will contribute to our understanding of the eidetic, but without presupposing what that contribution will be.

1.

Erotic Ascent

The primary interpretive challenge with respect to the Symposium in general is accounting for the relationships among the various speeches, the setting, the actions woven through the speeches, and the theme of the speeches: Eros. We cannot expect to adequately address this challenge in the present investigation. But we must be sensitive to the problems inherent in isolating Socrates’ speech. From its inception, Socrates’ speech seems to address all of the speeches that precede his. This means that in

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our attempt to redress the abstract treatment of the eidetic, we will have to abstract from the whole of the Symposium. Ultimately, this difficulty speaks to the necessity of reading these texts continually. There is no absolute standpoint from which one can give a comprehensive assessment of the Platonic texts. The culmination of Socrates’ speech – the speech itself consisting primarily of a recounting of lessons he claims to have undertaken with a priestess named Diotima1 – echoes much of what we have seen in the previous chapter. The passage begins:2 ‘Now perhaps, Socrates, you too might be initiated into these erotics; but as for the perfect revelations – for which the others are means, if one were to proceed correctly on the way – I do not know if you would be able to be initiated into them. Now I shall speak,’ she said. ‘I shall not falter in my zeal; do try to follow, if you are able.’ (209e–210a)3 Note that the register of speech here is quite different from that of Socrates’ exchanges with Zeno and Parmenides. In that setting, a dialogic encounter between philosophers was presented that entailed a certain frankness of expression. Here, Diotima speaks in a register of revelation and cultic initiation. We must keep this in mind when comparing this speech to the speeches of the Parmenides. Note as well the theme of erotics. Eros has been entirely absent from our investigation of the eidetic thus far.4 It will now become a central theme. Socrates (speaking as Diotima) continues: ‘He who is to move correctly in this manner must begin while young to go to beautiful bodies. And first of all, if the guide is guiding correctly, he must love one body and there generate beautiful speeches. Then he must realize that the beauty that is in any body whatsoever is related to that in another body; and if he must pursue the beauty of looks [εFδει], it is great folly not to believe that the beauty of all bodies is one and the same. And with this realization he must be the lover of all beautiful bodies and in contempt slacken this [erotic] intensity for only one body, in the belief that it is petty.’ (210a–b)5 Here Diotima begins the description of the ascent to the most proper object of erotic desire. Her description implies that a series of stages must be passed through to achieve this ascent. The first stage is to love one body. This love, however, is not complete in itself, but is the occasion for a certain kind of productive generation, the generation of beautiful speeches.

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Furthermore, Diotima states that the lover must come to see that the beauty of one body is the same beauty that is encountered in any beautiful body. Thus, one should love all beautiful bodies, not just one. Note that Diotima does not say here that the lover should love this beauty that is held in common itself, but rather that the recognition of commonness should give way to this love of all beautiful bodies. We have, then, an intricate network of aspects. (1) A relation to a particular body both qua body and qua beauty. (2) The generation of beautiful speeches with respect to this body. (3) The movement from a singular instance of beauty to the beauty that is held in common by all beautiful bodies to the love of all such bodies. (4) A conditional statement made about the beauty of looks, eide, visible beauty. (5) A proscriptive statement claiming that one must detach oneself from the singular and be oriented to all beautiful bodies. We are presented here with a mixture of erotic, generative and contemplative modes: erotic inasmuch as the bodily relation to beautiful bodies is one of desire; generative in the production of speeches; and contemplative in the recognition of a common beauty. This scenario roughly corresponds to the description of Socrates in the Parmenides looking over the many great things and discerning the one of greatness within the many. The structure here is nearly the same, but with the added features of eros and generativity. Inasmuch as Diotima’s speech will claim to say something about philosophy, we must attend to these features of the erotic and generative as we continue. Some comment is also warranted with regard to the occurrence of eide here. In some respects it can be understood how the desire for bodies and their beauty could be other than visual. It could be the case that the beauty that one finds in bodies and the concomitant desire that one has as a consequence is, for instance, tactile. One could love and desire one or more bodies through touch. Such love and desire would literally collapse the distance between lover and object. The love of beauty through vision, on the other hand, allows for two differences. First, it allows one to love at a distance. Second, this distance more easily accommodates the love of many bodies rather than one. There is, it seems, already something philosophical in the love of beauty through the visible, through looks, eide. The orientation to the commonness of the many already carries with it the sense of eidos as ‘class’.6 To love beauty through looks is to love ‘philosophically’. Diotima continues: ‘After this he must believe that the beauty of souls is more honorable than that in the body. So that even if someone who is decent in his soul

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has only a slight youthful charm, the lover must be content with it, and love and cherish him, and engender and seek such speeches as will make the young better; in order that [the lover], on his part, may be compelled to behold the beautiful in pursuits and laws, and to see that all this is akin to itself, so that he may come to believe that the beauty of the body is something trivial.’ (210b–c) Most notable at this juncture is the fact that Diotima does not describe a leave-taking of bodies and particulars. The previous lines, with their stress upon the beauty common to all beautiful bodies, could lead one to expect a turn to that common beauty itself. Instead, we return to a particular, a single beloved, who is now to be loved for a beauty of soul, a beauty that is ‘more honorable’. Furthermore, the prescription to make speeches has now shifted from making beautiful speeches (in general) to ‘engender[ing] and seek[ing] such speeches as will make the young [νου (plural)] better’.7 (Any potential connection between speeches that are beautiful and speeches that make the young better is left unsaid.) Finally, this comportment to speeches, initially directed at the improvement of the young, returns upon the lover in such a way that compels him to ‘behold the beautiful in pursuits and laws [,ν το ,πιτηδε!µασι κα7 το νµοι]’. This is a type of beauty, it seems, that is particularly difficult to see.8 Somehow this difficulty is overcome through the combination of the love of the soul of a particular youth and an orientation toward a certain kind of logos. (The last remark is a difficult one. Given the previous lines, it would seem that beauty, no matter where it is found, is the same beauty. Recognizing this commonality is said to be part of the proper reception of the beautiful. Now we are told that a certain beauty is trivial in relation to another beauty. For this to hold as true, we would have to take it in the following sense: the beauty in bodies is no less beautiful than the beauty in souls, but the dwelling in and upon the beauty in bodies, at the expense of beholding these other occasions of the beautiful, is trivial.) Diotima continues: ‘And after these pursuits, he must lead [the beloved] on to the sciences, so that he [himself, the lover] may see the beauty of sciences, and in looking at the beautiful, which is now so vast, no longer be content like a lackey with the beauty in one, of a boy, of some human being, or of one practice, nor be a sorry sort of slave and petty calculator; but with a permanent turn to the vast open sea of the beautiful, behold it and give birth – in ungrudging philosophy – to many beautiful and magnificent speeches and thoughts; until, there strengthened and increased, he may

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discern a certain single philosophical science, which has as its object the following sort of beauty.’ (210c–e) The next step of this ascent is an attendance to sciences, ,πιστµαι. Again, there is a double aspect here. The lover is to lead his beloved to the sciences and, by means of this leading, to see in them their beauty himself. There is a strong intimation throughout this greater passage that the things done for the sake of the beloved are also that through which the lover achieves an end which is his own. Three types of beauty have been presented: bodily, practical (ethico-political) and intellectual. At this point a radical detachment from all worldly particulars is prescribed – human beings, practices and sciences. This suggests that the intellectual life of the specialist (mathematician?) is still too much tied to particularity. This detachment is, it seems, at once an embrace of all that has preceded it – bodies, practices and sciences – and a turn away from them. The tension here is crucial. This ‘turn to the vast open sea of the beautiful’ is not a turn away from the phenomenal, practical and intellectual aspects of the world as such. It is, instead, a turn away from the particular qua particular. It is a turn by which the same world becomes a vast sea. It is a turn by means of which the intentional comportment to world is transformed, and thus what it means to be in the world changes. This interpretation is supported by the next lines: ‘behold it and give birth – in ungrudging philosophy – to many beautiful and magnificent speeches and thoughts’. The ‘it’ is the sea of beauty, the world taken as a whole from the standpoint of the beautiful. This reinforces a point made above that is worth stressing. Up to this point, there has been no suggestion or demand in Diotima’s speech that the lover turn away from the phenomeno-practical world as such. If what is being presented is an image of the achievement of a proper philosophical stance, then this is not an image of the philosopher as one who looks away from the world toward something that is outside of the world.9 This is not to say that there is no tension between worldliness and the philosopher; rather, the point is that that tension is otherwise than it is commonly understood. It is not the aim of the philosopher to abandon or repudiate the world, but rather that a philosophical orientation toward what is transcendent in the world sets the philosopher at odds with his own being-in-the-world. Only as a result of this new comportment toward the world does the next move arise. On the basis of and from within this being-toward the world as a sea of beauty, the lover discerns a science that ‘has as its object the following sort of beauty’.

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‘Try to pay as close attention as you can,’ she said. ‘Whoever has been educated up to this point in erotics, beholding successively and correctly the beautiful things, in now going to the perfect end of erotics shall suddenly glimpse [,ξαφνη κατψετα] something wonderfully beautiful in its nature – that very thing, Socrates, for whose sake alone all the prior labours were undertaken – something that is, first of all, always being [αε7 Nν] and neither coming to be nor perishing, nor increasing nor passing away; and secondly, not beautiful in one respect and ugly in another, nor at one time so and another time not – either with respect to the beautiful or the ugly – nor here beautiful and there ugly, as being beautiful to some and ugly to others; nor in turn will the beautiful be imagined by him as a kind of face or hands or anything else in which body shares, nor as any speech nor any science, and not as being somewhere in something else (for example, in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else), but as it is alone by itself and with itself, always being of a single form [µονοειδ? αε7 ν]; while all other beautiful things that share [µετχοντα] in it do in such a way that while it neither becomes anything more or less, nor is affected at all, the rest do come to be and perish.’ (210e–211b) The true lover, who now is identified with the philosopher, is not merely a generalist – and in two respects. First, it was stated in the previous passage that ‘a single science’ was to be discerned. The philosopher, it seems, knows the other sciences, but has a distinct science of his own. What exactly this is we cannot say. Second, Diotima said that at an early stage of this process the lover must see that the beauty of one body is the same as the beauty of all bodies. We noted the similarity of this claim to certain moments of the Parmenides. What is clear now is that the recognition that something is held in common by many phenomenal things is not the same at to behold ‘the thing itself’.10 The philosopher is not one who is engaged in abstraction for the sake of abstraction. Using Diotima’s stages as a basis, we could in fact say that abstraction carried out through generalization is rather low on the erotico-philosophic ascent. We see now that there is something that is not simply held in common, but is also apart. And this language sounds an accord with Socrates’ hypothesis of ideas from the opening of the Parmenides. There are also echoes of things said of the One in Parmenides’ first argument. Let me enumerate these similarities. The closing lines of the passage above speak of this beautiful something as (1) ‘alone by itself with itself [αυτ καθ’ αHτ]’, (2) ‘always being of a single form’, and (3) remaining unaffected as ‘all other beautiful things . . . share in it’. These points have a close similarity to things Socrates says

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to Zeno in the Parmenides. In his initial presentation of the eide we saw that Socrates uses this same phrase – αυτ καθ’ αHτ – to speak of the unique separateness of the ideas. The notion of sharing or participation was also introduced at the very opening of Socrates’ remarks. He said there: ‘both you and I and the different things which we do in fact call “many” come to partake [have a share/µεταλαµβα´νειν] of these two things [likeness and unlikeness] which are’ (Parmenides 129a). Finally, the characterization of this beautiful ‘something’ as being always the same and unaffected in its being-participated-in echoes Socrates’ challenge to Zeno: ‘But if he demonstrates that whatever One is, this very thing, is many and that the Many, in turn, are one – of course I’ll wonder at that’ (Parmenides 129c). These echoes, however, indicate neither that what Diotima is talking about is simply identical with the eidetic hypothesis of the young Socrates nor that this is an instance of a Platonic doctrine. This becomes clear in one respect because Diotima also uses language that echoes Parmenides. This is particularly true of the long list of negative attributes that Diotima assigns to this ‘something’. She repeats the basic range of possible ascriptive domains: being and becoming, magnitude/multitude, relation, time, place and body. At the same time, however, her language includes an orientation toward the beholding of objects that is absent from Parmenides’ discourse. This makes sense given that Diotima is speaking about beauty. This much seems to be shared by both the Parmenides and the Symposium – that the ‘itself’ is a certain appearing within a dynamic structure. The nature of that structure is coming more into view. The motor of the dynamism remains for now just a name – eros. Diotima both recapitulates and sharpens her discourse in what follows: ‘So whenever anyone begins to glimpse that beauty as he goes on up from these things through the correct practice of pederasty, he must come close to touching the perfect end. For this is what it is to proceed correctly, or to be led by another, to erotics [,ρωτικα`] – beginning from these beautiful things here, always to proceed on up for the sake of that beauty, using these beautiful things here as steps: from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies; and from beautiful bodies to beautiful pursuits; and from pursuits to beautiful lessons; and from lessons to end at that lesson, which is the lesson of nothing else than the beautiful itself [αυτο ,κενου το καλο]; and at last to know what is beauty itself [Oνα γν2 αυτ τελευτ8ν D ,στι καλν]. It is at this place in life, in beholding the beautiful itself [θεωµν4 αυτ τ καλν], my dear Socrates,’ the Mantinean stranger said, ‘that it is worth living, if – for a human being – it is [worth living] at any place.’ (211b–d)

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One implication of Diotima’s discourse is that erotics in its most proper sense is achieved in this final stage of ascent. All of the prior stages are a sort of training ground for this eroticism. They are not unerotic, but we might say that they are not fully erotic. At this point, however, it becomes clear that the key elements of this account are not yet well defined. Eros and erotics on the one hand, and ‘beauty itself’ on the other, are left rather obscure. It is at this point, therefore, that we must look at the prior moments of Diotima’s conversation with Socrates in order to better understand what is at stake in this account of erotics and beauty.

2.

The In-Between

Socrates begins his speech on eros in an appropriately Socratic fashion – he initiates a dialogue. Following upon Agathon’s speech, which praised Eros as the ‘fairest and best’ and the ‘cause for everyone else of the same sort of fair and good things’, Socrates makes a request to ask Agathon some questions as a prelude to his own speech. The crux of Socrates’ questions concern the issue of whether the attributes of beauty and goodness can in fact be ascribed to Eros. Since, Socrates suggests through his questions, eros is the desire of something and since it desires that thing because it is lacking, Eros cannot be both the desire for beauty and/or goodness and be beautiful and good. On these basic terms then, eros is taken to be constituted by a relational structure: eros is being-toward the beautiful and good inasmuch as they are lacked. This structure contains decisive moments of both positivity and negativity. The structure is positive in that the objects of desire are actually in view (even if as fantasy) and are, in some sense, being aimed at.11 Thus both the being of the beautiful and/or good and the directionality of desire are constructive moments of the relation. On the other hand, there exists a separation between that which desires and that which is desired. This separation itself can be seen as both positive and negative. It is negative in that it represents the condition of lack. The distance between that which desires and the beautiful is the distance of lack. But at the same time, desire as such is positively constituted by the presence of this distance. Eros cannot survive the closing of this gap. This is Socrates’ point – the positivity of eros is grounded in a moment of negativity. It seems, then, that Socrates has set himself a difficult challenge in light of this prelude to his speech. If, in fact, eros has this type of structure, then one cannot logically speak of eros ‘itself’ simpliciter. An intelligible account of eros must, on the above terms, be based upon an account of the

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moments by which it is constituted. The reason this makes Socrates’ task a difficult one is that he is supposed to be praising Eros as a god, which suggests, at the very least, a praising of something with independent being. As we read through this speech we must keep this problem in mind. * * * * * After introducing his encounter with Diotima, Socrates recalls that: ‘[He] came pretty near, in speaking to her, to saying the same sort of things that Agathon said to me now – that Eros was a great god, and was the love of beautiful things. She then went on to refute me with those same arguments with which I refuted him – that he is neither beautiful, according to my argument, nor good.’ (201e) At the time of his conversation with Diotima, Socrates was surprised by this claim and wanted to know if Eros were then ugly. Diotima answers Socrates by outlining the notion of the in-between. Eros, she says, is neither simply beautiful nor simply ugly, but in between the two.12 She articulates this point by reference to wisdom and lack of understanding, σοφα and αµαθα. ‘Don’t you know,’ she said, ‘that to opine correctly without being able to give an account [logos] is neither to know expertly (for how could expert knowledge be an unaccounted for [alogon] matter?) nor lack of understanding (for how could lack of understanding be that which has hit upon what is)? But surely correct opinion is like that, somewhere between intelligence and lack of understanding.’ (202a) Thus what Diotima means by the in-between with respect to correct opinion is clear.13 It shares some of two extremes. It is like wisdom in that it is in accord with the truth, but it is like ignorance in that it cannot account for itself. She uses this logic to then claim that what is not beautiful need not be ugly. ‘Then do not compel what is not beautiful to be ugly, or what is not good, to be bad. So too since you yourself agree that Eros is not good or beautiful, do not at all believe that he must be ugly and bad,’ she said, ‘but something between the two of them.’ (202b) That eros is a between in the same sense as opinion cannot be maintained. Eros, we have seen, is constituted by a relation between one who desires and something beautiful and/or good. More precisely, we might say that eros

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is this relation, a relation that spans the distance of lack. If this is true, then eros will not be between the beautiful and the ugly in the sense that it is somewhat beautiful and somewhat ugly; rather, it must be understood as the space of relational desire between the ugly and the beautiful. On hearing that Eros is not beautiful, Socrates immediately sees that this calls into question the status of Eros as a god. ‘And yet,’ I said, ‘it is agreed by all that he is a great god.’ ‘Do you mean by all who do not know,’ she said, ‘or by those who know?’ ‘No, by all together.’ And she said with a laugh, ‘And how, Socrates, could he be agreed to be a great god by those who deny even that he is a god?’ ‘Who are these?’ I said. ‘You are one,’ she said, ‘and I am one.’ (202b–c) If we take Socrates’ speech to be an impromptu invention that is intended to address the other speakers at the banquet, then this passage hints at the implication worked out above – that Eros cannot be a god qua independent being. When eros is understood in its relational constitution, it can no longer be viewed as a god of the Olympian type – immortal, beautiful and also, in a certain respect, substantial. This implication, however, is only partly carried through in what follows. Eros retains a certain share of divine being and is spoken of still as a character on the divine stage. This second aspect of Socrates’/Diotima’s discourse can be understood as a consequence of its poetic setting. The first is less easily understood. For now we could say that it indicates that the erotic, even as de-substantialized, stands somehow higher than the merely human. Socrates’ response to Diotima’s assertion that he is one of those who denies that Eros is a god is to ask if Eros is then a mortal. Not surprisingly, Diotima says that Eros is between mortal and immortal; is, in fact, a ‘great daemon [δαµων µγα]’, ‘for everything daemonic is between [µεταξ!] god and mortal’ (202d–e). There is again, here, a logical difficulty. The notions of mortality and immortality seem to be of the sort that do not allow for a middle ground. Either something lives and then dies, or lives and does not die. Later Diotima will say more about this: ‘And his nature is neither immortal nor mortal; but sometimes on the same day he flourishes and lives, whenever he has resources; and sometimes he dies, but gets to live again through the nature of his father [Poros/Resource].’ (203e)

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This does not so much resolve the logical problem as mitigate it. Again, it is incumbent upon us to attempt to discern what might be the positive contribution of this apparent contradiction. (Perhaps we could mention the common fleetingness and unexpected return of desire as indicative of this daemon that dies only to be reborn.) Nevertheless, Socrates wants to know ‘what kind of power’ this daemon has who resides between the gods and mortals. Diotima responds: ‘Interpreting and ferrying to gods the things from human beings and to human beings things from the gods: the requests and sacrifices of human beings, the orders and exchanges-for-sacrifices of gods; for it is in the middle of both and fills up the interval so that the whole itself has been bound together by it . . . These daemons are many and of all kinds; and one of them is Eros.’ (202e–203a) I am, again, interested here in the structure that is indicated by Diotima’s remarks. Prior to dwelling on what passes between the gods and human beings, it is worth noting simply that a structure of openness and receptivity is outlined here. Both the gods and human beings are receptive to things that come from the other. Eros, it is said, is that which shuttles the things exchanged between the two groups. Relating this to our initial characterization of desire as a certain intentional directionality across a space of lack, we could say that eros, as experienced by humans, is on these terms a comportment toward the divine. Eros would, again, not be a thing but rather this very being-toward the divine qua lack. An aspect of the mythic register of the discourse here highlights a significant point of interpretation presented in Chapter 2. I argued there that the model of separation between ideas and things that Parmenides presents at the culmination of his questions to Socrates is inadequate. The inadequacy is rooted in the spatial sense given to separation in that context. The ‘realm’ of ideas is another place where the god resides and where humans cannot go. I also argued that this model was a radicalization of the line of reasoning that Parmenides pushed onto Socrates, but that his own questions and answers in the gymnastic actually provide a different way of understanding separation. Here again we have a picture of humans and gods separated spatially and Eros shuttling things between them. Sticking with this model, one could say that this account of Eros provides the answer to Parmenides’ challenge: humans can have knowledge of ideas because Eros brings this knowledge to them; Eros bridges a gap that is otherwise impossible for humans to span. But this reading misses the obvious point: the model it

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would supplement is already insufficient. The spatial separation of ideas and things, and humans from ideas, is simply the wrong way of understanding the separation. Thus the place of eros in mediating separation is not properly understood on the mythic model, but must be transferred to the philosophical model, to the understanding that ideas and things are separated in their manner of being, not in the places they occupy. A demythologized eros would, on this reading, name the power of soul that makes the idea ‘appear’.

3.

The Genealogy of Eros, or The Philosopher

It is tempting at this point to say something along the following lines: Diotima’s account of the erotic ascent, an ascent that culminates in the vision and knowledge (gnosis) of ‘beauty itself’, is now made clear: the gods are replaced by the beautiful, and true erotics is the self-aware striving for the true object of beauty rather than its phantom images. The danger of such a claim, on the one hand, is that it fails to interpret Diotima’s discourse from within her own language; that is, it moves too quickly from the language of revelation to the language of philosophy. On the other hand, it overlooks the issues that arise in the intervening moments of her dialogue with Socrates. Therefore, as in the previous chapters, we must look at these passages without presupposing what will be found. After hearing that Eros is not a god but a daemon, Socrates inquires about his parents. Socrates asks, ‘Who is his father?. . . And who is his mother?’ Diotima answers by telling a story. According to her account, Eros was conceived at a feast celebrating the birth of Aphrodite. This, she says, is why Eros is love of the beautiful. The parents of Eros are Poros/ Resource and Penia/Poverty. (Diotima also makes a point of mentioning that Poros is the son of Metis/Intelligence.) Penia has come to the feast to beg – as her nature would suggest. But it seems that she had more in mind than just crashing the party. Diotima says that, ‘Penia, who because of her lack of resources was plotting to have a child made out of Poros, reclined beside him [while he was drunk] and conceived Eros’ (203b–c). (It turns out that Penia is not entirely resourceless after all.14) And we can see, on the basis of this genealogy, how Eros comes to be an in-between – he is conceived from parents who are by nature contrary. This story is followed by an accounting of Eros’ traits that spring from his parentage. Diotima says: ‘So because Eros is the son of Poros and Penia, his situation is in some such case as this. First of all, he is always poor; and he is far from being

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tender and beautiful, as the many believe, but is tough, squalid, shoeless, and homeless, always lying on the ground without a blanket or a bed, sleeping in doorways and along waysides in the open air; he has the nature of his mother, always dwelling with neediness. But in accordance with his father he plots to trap the beautiful and the good, and is courageous, stout, and keen, a skilled hunter, always weaving devices, desirous of practical wisdom and inventive, philosophizing through all his life, a skilled magician, druggist, sophist. And his nature is neither immortal nor mortal; but sometimes on the same day he flourishes and lives, whenever he has resources; and sometimes he dies, but gets to live again through the nature of his father. And as that which is supplied to him is always gradually flowing out, Eros is never either without resources nor wealthy, but is in between wisdom and lack of understanding. For here is the way it is: No one of the gods philosophizes and desires to become wise – for he is so – nor if there is anyone else who is wise, does he philosophize. Nor, in turn, do those who lack understanding philosophize and desire to become wise; for it is precisely this that makes the lack of understanding so difficult – that if a man is not beautiful and good, nor intelligent, he has the opinion that that is sufficient for him. Consequently, he who does not believe that he is in need does not desire that which he does not believe he needs.’ (203c–204a) Let me make two comments on this passage. First, there are indications that, in certain respects, Eros has been made in the image of Socrates, or Socrates (he himself is telling us) has made himself in the image of Eros. Many of the attributes ascribed to Eros are commonly ascribed to Socrates as well: not-beautiful, tough, shoeless,15 poor, and courageous.16 This suggests that we can discern something of Eros not simply by listening to Socrates’ words, but also by studying his character. If it is true that Socrates knows nothing but erotics (177e), then his character should reflect this knowledge. However, we must remember that Socrates also claims to know nothing but his own ignorance. If these claims are not contradictory, then somehow knowledge of ignorance and knowledge of erotics must be identical. An indication of this identity comes at the end of the passage above. Inasmuch as someone knows, he cannot desire to know what he knows; and inasmuch as someone does not know that he does not know, he can also not desire to know. Thus within the sphere of knowledge and wisdom, only that person who is aware of his ignorance can be related toward wisdom through desire. Second, Diotima has introduced the philosopher and philosophizing. An explicit connection has now been established between eros and philosophy. Nevertheless, we must still

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remember that while Diotima speaks of the philosopher, she does not speak as the philosopher. The near identification of eros and the philosopher is made in the next exchange. ‘Then who, Diotima, are the philosophers,’ I said, ‘if they are neither the wise nor those who lack understanding?’ ‘By now it is perfectly plain even to a child,’ she said, ‘that they are those between them both, of whom Eros would be one. For wisdom is one of the most beautiful things, and Eros is love in regard to the beautiful; and so Eros is – necessarily – a philosopher; and as a philosopher he is between being wise and being without understanding. His manner of birth is responsible for this, for he is of a wise and resourceful father, and an unwise and resourceless mother. Now the nature of the daemon, dear Socrates, is this; but as for the one whom you believed to be Eros, it is not at all surprising that you had this impression. You believed, in my opinion, as I conjecture from what you say, that the beloved is Eros, and is not that which loves. It is for this reason, I believe, that Eros seemed to you to be wholly beautiful. For the beloved thing is truly beautiful, delicate, perfect, and most blessed; but that which loves has another kind of look, the sort that I just explained.’ (204a–c) From a logical perspective, this passage again presents certain difficulties. Philosophers, says Diotima, are between wisdom and ignorance in the sense that they are in a certain state. As we saw above, such a state is something like ‘right opinion’. Eros is one of those in this in-between state. But as Eros, he must also be striving toward wisdom and knowledge inasmuch as they are beautiful. The implication would be that some philosophers have right opinions, but do not desire anything more. But this seems wrong. The very word philosophos implies a loving comportment toward wisdom. So either everyone, inasmuch as everyone must have some right opinions, is a philosopher; or Eros is not one philosopher among many, but rather is the very model of the philosopher. Or both are true. The human condition as such entails that everyone exhibits some pull of desire toward wisdom and knowledge – even if it is highly particularized and local. ‘Philosopher’ would be a universal attribute that is applied to a special group.17

4.

Possession and Generation

The orientation of Diotima and Socrates’ dialogue shifts at this point in response to Socrates’ next question: ‘All right, stranger, what you say is

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fine. If Eros is of this sort, of what use is he for human beings?’ This reorientation has two consequences. First, the discussion shifts from a largely mythical account of a daemon to an account of human ways of being. Second, however, eros largely retreats from the centre of the discussion. This seems appropriate given the nature of eros as delineated so far. As something fundamentally liminal and relational, eros is difficult to isolate. The attempt to do so leads to a (mythical) reification. But the attempt to see eros as it unfolds in human life can result in its disappearance in the things it holds together. The turn in Diotima and Socrates’ conversation seems to be indicative of this difficulty. There is also a shift in the conversation from the beautiful, to kalon, to the good, to agathon. Diotima asks Socrates what it is precisely that one wants when one desires beautiful things. ‘That they be his’, replies Socrates (204d). Diotima immediately pushes the question a step further and asks, ‘What will he have who gets the beautiful things?’ To this Socrates cannot give an answer. The shift comes when Diotima says, ‘What if someone changed his query and used the good instead of the beautiful? Come, Socrates, the lover of the good things loves: what does he love?’ (204e). Again Socrates answers that the person desiring such things wants them to be his. And this time Socrates is able to answer the subsequent question. When Diotima asks, ‘And what will he who gets the good things have?’ Socrates answers, ‘This . . . I can answer more adequately: he will be happy’. This turn in the conversation brings a decisively ethical dimension to the conversation. Eros can now be seen not simply in the light of particular lacks, lack of this or that, but rather as oriented toward the common telos of human life, happiness, ευδαιµονα.18 I think this perspective provides the proper vantage point to view the subsequent themes of discussion between Socrates and Diotima, and ultimately the final account of erotic ascent. It is not the case that the discussion wavers arbitrarily between beauty and goodness, but rather that a dialectical relationship exists between the beautiful and the good. In a sense, the mythical account of Eros is an abstraction from the erotic dimension of human life. The turn that occurs here can be seen as an attempt to correct this abstraction by showing eros in its immanence within human life. What we will see is that the return to beauty at the end of Diotima’s lesson is a result of the unfolding of this immanence. The lines running from 205a5 to 206a2 establish one fundamental point: all humans are lovers, despite the fact that this term is generally used to specify a smaller group. This point is summed up in Diotima’s question: ‘Then . . . is it to be said unqualifiedly that human beings love

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the good?’ (206a). ‘Yes’, says Socrates. To this two further claims are added: that human beings desire the good to be theirs and that they desire it to be theirs always. Eternal possession of the good is now the understanding of eros put forward, and it must be understood as a universal attribute of human beings. The next lines broach yet another theme: ‘Since eros is always this,’ she said, ‘then in what manner and in what activity would the earnestness and intensity of those who pursue the good be called eros. What in fact are they doing when they act so? Can you tell?’ ‘If I could, Diotima, then I should not, you know, in admiration of your wisdom,’ I said, ‘resort to you to learn this very thing.’ (206b) Given the previous claims, one might expect this activity to be acquisition, but it is not. ‘Well, I shall tell you,’ she said. ‘Their deed is bringing to birth in beauty both in terms of the body and in terms of the soul.’ (206b) Generation, not acquisition, is the activity proper to eros. Socrates does not understand, so Diotima elaborates: ‘Well, I shall speak more clearly,’ she said. ‘All human beings, Socrates,’ she said, ‘conceive both in terms of the body and in terms of the soul, and whenever they are at a certain age, their nature desires to give birth; but it is incapable of giving birth in ugliness, but only in beauty, for the being together of man and woman is a bringing to birth. This thing, pregnancy and bringing to birth, is divine, but the beautiful is fitting. So Kallone [Beauty] is the Moira [Fate] and Eileithyia for birth. It is for these reasons that whenever the pregnant draws near to beauty, it becomes glad and in rejoicing dissolves and then gives birth and produces offspring; but whenever it draws near to ugliness, then, downcast and in pain, it contracts inwardly, turns away, shrinks up, and has a hard time of it. So this is why someone who is pregnant, with breasts swelling, flutters so much around the beautiful, because the one who has the beautiful releases him from great labor pains. For eros is not, Socrates,’ she said, ‘of the beautiful, as you believe.’ ‘Well, what then?’ ‘It is of engendering and bringing to birth in the beautiful.’ (206c–e)

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The invocation of nature here is appropriate. This desire to give birth is a natural condition; it is a condition that is coextensive with nature itself. Nature, physis, is that region of being that is marked by self-movement and upsurge. Nature is generativity. This is relevant inasmuch as this drive for generation is, at a certain level, not a conscious human project. It is rather a certain indwelling urging of the natural body. This makes sense of the discussion of beauty here. Basic sexual attraction, a certain attraction to beautiful bodies (at least between a man and a woman), hides within it a secret urge for giving birth. Attraction to such bodies is a trick of nature to carry out its own end – continual generation. In the next section, Diotima extends this line of inquiry. She confirms the ‘uncanny disposition’ of animals that compels sexual union. But beyond this, she notes the temperament of animals toward their offspring. ‘They are ready to fight to the finish, the weakest against the strongest, for the sake of those they have generated, and to die on their behalf; and they are willingly racked by starvation and stop at nothing to nourish their offspring. One might suppose,’ she said, ‘that human beings do this from calculation; but as for beasts, what is the cause of their erotic disposition’s being of this sort? Can you say?’ (207b–c) The answer to Diotima’s question is the striving for immortality. She claims that it is a condition of ‘mortal nature’ as such to ‘seek as far as possible to be forever and immortal’ (207d). But because the mortal nature is mortal, because it is its nature to pass away, the only immortality available to it is by ‘leaving behind another that is young to replace the old’. One survives in one’s descendants. However, Diotima radicalizes this notion. She observes that while each animal is said to be one and the same throughout its life, the individual, too, exists as a perpetual replacement of the old by the young. ‘He is forever becoming young in some respects as he suffers losses in other respects: his hair, flesh, bones, blood, and his whole body. And this is so not only in terms of the body but also in terms of the soul: his ways, character, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, each of these things is never present as the same for each, but they are partly coming to be and partly perishing. And what is far stranger still is that in the case of our sciences too not only are some coming to be while others are perishing (and we are never the same in terms of the sciences either); but also each single one of the sciences is affected in the same way. For studying, as it is called, is done on the grounds that science is passing out

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from us; for forgetfulness is the exiting of science; and studying, by instilling fresh memory again to replace the departing one, preserves the science, so that it may be thought to be the same. For in this way every mortal thing is preserved; not by being absolutely the same forever, as the divine is, but by the fact that that which is departing and growing old leaves behind another young thing that is as it was. By this device, Socrates,’ she said, ‘the mortal shares in immortality, both body and all the rest; but the immortal has a different way. So do not be amazed if everything honors by nature its own offshoot; for it is for the sake of immortality that this zeal and eros attend everything.’ (207d–208b) This passage indicates nothing less than the radical transitoriness of mortal being. It is not the case that though we pass out of being, we are otherwise stable and statically self-identical. The kind of being that we are is a being that is in continual reconstruction, continual replacement. This is true not simply on the physical level, but on the level of knowledge as well. What might seem to be something immutable, something one knows to be true, is in fact a series of copies of something one has learned. To know, it seems, is to re-learn the same thing again and again. However, this picture of constant overturning has as its complement a repetition of the same. The account of mortal being given here is not one of absolute flux. Rather, it is one of a very circumscribed flux. It is a flux that unfolds in adherence to what is. We have then a coincidence of two seemingly opposed modes of being, the changing and the permanent. In this account, that which is ever changing changes in accordance with what already is. Things change in order to remain what they are.19 Again, this struggle to preserve what is, forever, within the realm of change manifests itself in more than one way. Biological procreation is the most immediate, unreflective form of this struggle. More honourable, however, is another kind of procreation, that of ‘prudence and the rest of virtue’ (209a). Like all generation, this too requires the presence of the beautiful. ‘So whenever someone from youth onward is pregnant in his soul with these virtues, if he is divine and of suitable age, then he desires to give birth and produce offspring. And he goes round in search, I believe, of the beautiful in which he might generate; for he will never generate in the ugly. So it is beautiful bodies rather than ugly ones to which he cleaves because he is pregnant; and if he meets a beautiful, generous, and naturally gifted soul, he cleaves strongly to the two (body and soul)

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together. And to this human being he is at once fluent in speeches about virtue – of what sort the good man must be and what he must practice – and he tries to educate him. So in touching the one who is beautiful, I suspect, and in association with him, he engenders and gives birth to offspring with which he was long pregnant; and whether the [lover] is present or absent he holds the beautiful one in memory, and nurtures with him that which has been generated in common.’ (209a–c) Here we arrive back at the account of the erotic ascent with which we began. We left off from that account when it became apparent that its central terms, eros and beauty, had not been clearly delineated. What I will do now is reassess Diotima’s account of erotic ascent in light of the foregoing explication.

5.

Eros and Ideas

When viewed in isolation, Diotima’s account of erotic ascent appears to culminate in the revelation of the idea of beauty. The analysis above revealed that there is a striking echo of language used in the Parmenides concerning ideas and the One. However, it was also noted that the notion of eidos/idea is never broached explicitly in Diotima’s account, even if it is thematically and linguistically evoked. Hence we must hold in suspension any final decision concerning the eidetic status of beauty itself. Having read through the passages leading up to this account, we can now say more precisely what its central concerns are. It is now evident that Diotima’s occasion for outlining this ascent is the immediately prior discussion of generation in the beautiful. The horizon of the account of the ascent is the scenario set out in the last passage cited above. It is one who is pregnant with prudence and virtue who sets out upon this ascent. And this means as well that it is because of the desire for immortality that one pursues such generation. Keeping this in view is crucial for properly understanding what is at stake in an analysis of this passage. As I suggested above, eros is ultimately not to be understood as itself transcendent to human being, but is rather the unfolding of what is immanent to our being. However, the striving for immortality, for being always, indicates that our nature is oriented toward transcendence. This is brought out in the peculiar kind of transitoriness that mortal being is. It was noted that our being, while fully of the realm of becoming, acts as an imitation of the permanent and eternal. I would suggest that this is doubly true of human being. Through logos human beings are able to comport

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themselves explicitly toward that which is and not just that which becomes.20 The eroticism of human life is an unfolding of itself toward the very conditions of its being.21 We also saw, however, that the horizon of generation in the beautiful is itself located within an ethical horizon, that is, as taking place with respect to the desire for happiness. The discussion of giving birth to speeches about prudence and virtue is particularly cogent in regard to this dimension. We could say that in both form and content the generation of such speeches is oriented toward the good life. Diotima claims that such speeches are an offspring with which certain people are ‘long pregnant’. Thus, as regards the above point, their birth (the speeches) is a kind of natural upsurge of human immanence. In this respect, their very generation is an unfolding of a certain good. At the same time, such speeches aim at articulating that very thing that they embody – ‘of what sort the good man must be and what he must practice’ (209c). The generation of such speeches is thus partly, but in no sense primarily, instrumental. Speeches about the good life are both an accounting and a (partial) embodiment of the good life. In this regard, the erotic ascent is nothing less than the work of becoming good. The eroticism of the ascent must then be taken in this expansive sense. If read in isolation, it can appear that a narrow erotics of the body somehow becomes the springboard for a higher or better erotics. It seems to me that such narrowness has already been abandoned at the beginning of Diotima’s account of ascent. The erotics of the body are one dimension of a thoroughgoing erotics of human, mortal being – and the erotics of the body remain a vital element of the lover at each stage. Hence the centrality of the beautiful. The beautiful is that which shines through phenomena and attracts and overtakes us. Beauty, even the beauty of a soul, is experienced receptively, is encountered as an undergoing. This is why even as the good comes at a certain point to dominate Diotima’s conversation with Socrates, the beautiful is never actually left behind. Eros and beauty are co-constitutive, or rather, they are names for the same thing viewed from different perspectives. Eros does not precede the beautiful; it is not something looking for the beautiful. Eros is the condition of being drawn to the beautiful. But this in turn means that the beautiful is only experienced as an erotic undergoing. In light of this, let me comment again on the following lines: ‘With a permanent turn to the vast open sea of the beautiful, behold it and give birth – in ungrudging philosophy – to many beautiful and magnificent speeches and thoughts.’ (210d)

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Philosophy is not a repudiation of erotics, but is rather its radicalization. Philosophy is universal eroticism; it is the achievement of a stance by means of which one’s reception of the world – phenomenal, ethical and intellectual – is erotic. Thus on the terms set out above, philosophy would be the self-aware unfolding of and striving for the immanent ethics of human being-in-the-world. This helps to give some substance to something that was mythically presented above – that eros and philosophy are identical. * * * * * The conclusions we drew from the Parmenides can help us to now say something regarding the relationship between ‘beauty itself’ and ideas as Socrates presents them in the Parmenides. In that dialogue the apparent ease with which Socrates spoke of both the separateness of ideas from each other and from the many things, and the participation of the many things in the ideas, was unsettled by Parmenides’ questioning. On the one hand, Parmenides forces Socrates to see that participation is a very unstable notion and is impossible to consistently maintain on its own terms. On the other hand, separation is itself shown to entail monumental difficulties. Not only do the ideas themselves exhibit an overlapping structure, their very being, as separate from the many things, is constituted in a dialectical relationship with the phenomenal world. At the same time, however, it can still be maintained, in a certain respect, that the ideas stand in relation to becoming as principles. While we saw that there are some indications of an ethical horizon in the Parmenides, its immediate concerns could be classed as epistemoontological, as an endeavour of knowledge and being. I put a great deal of emphasis on the dynamism of the intersection of soul and world as revealed in the Parmenides. Both Socrates’ ideas and Parmenides’ One manifest themselves through the power of the soul. However, there was little indication there as to why such manifestation comes to pass. Parmenides lets us see that it is Socrates who brings the eidos into view in his relation to things, but he does not explain the power by which Socrates is able to do so. Diotima’s lesson provides the answer. The soul which seeks to know is also a soul which strives for happiness, strives for a life which is good; and the good life is a life which unfolds as generation within the beautiful. The pursuit of knowledge – indeed, of wisdom – finds its place within this horizon. Parmenides shows Socrates that he cannot understand the being of things if he leaves himself out of the account. Diotima reveals that an understanding of the telos of one’s own immanence is coincident with coming-to-know the transcendent object of one’s striving. This is why Diotima

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does not speak of the idea of beauty. Diotima’s discourse is not about a problem of one and many. Nor is ‘beauty itself’ meant to explain anything. Her discourse concerns rather the whole and its ground. In light of this, the Symposium does not contain a teaching about ideas per se. Rather, it contains a teaching about the erotico-ethical horizon of the striving toward transcendence, striving toward our own being as transcendence. This horizon informs, rather than is explained by, the manifestation of ideas.

Chapter 4

Phaedo We left off from Socrates’ autobiography in the Phaedo at the point where it shifts from the past to the present tense. The detour of the previous chapters was occasioned by this temporal shift. It seemed prudent to pursue the other accounts of the young Socrates before attempting to explicate Socrates’ account of his mature practices. And, in fact, we are now in a better position to situate Socrates’ self-understanding of his practice of positing ideas. To summarize briefly, the Parmenides and the Symposium reveal that Socrates neither remains unaware of the many dangers inherent in the notions of eidos and idea nor sees in the ideas a narrow project of ontological explanation. In light of these claims, the two guiding questions of the remainder of this investigation become: (1) Why does Socrates nevertheless continue to posit ideas in a way that resembles his positings at the beginning of the Parmenides, and (2) Does Socrates’ account of his positing of ideas in the Phaedo fit within the erotico-ethical horizon disclosed in the Symposium? *

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It will be helpful at this point, before venturing further into Socrates’ account of his second sailing, to recapitulate three distinct senses of ideality that we have encountered. Indeed, it is better to speak here of ideality and not ideas since only one of these senses is specifically marked by the Platonic texts as eidos/idea. The first sense is the nascent, emergent ideality that is revealed in Socrates’ early pursuits. Through his encounters with the discourses of the physicists and Anaxagoras, Socrates ran up against two forms of ideality. The first was disclosed in Socrates’ explicit reflections on the terms and conditions of physical inquiry. For instance, Socrates saw that the investigation of growth orients itself by means of notions of size and addition. The type of account that speaks of growth as the addition of matter emphasizes the material aspect without recognizing that the account is dependent on an (at least implicit) understanding of two abstractions: the comparison of bodies with respect only to relative magnitude and the formal operation of addition. Socrates’ own manner of confronting these dimensions of explanatory discourse reveal a twofold

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reflexivity. On the one hand, Socrates discloses that these dimensions are already operative in the discourse; they are not things that are added onto a deficient account. On the other hand, Socrates suggests that one must not only recognize this fact but must explicitly engage in a reflection on this dimension of discourse as a separate moment of investigation. The other way in which Socrates’ autobiography in the Phaedo reveals ideality is in his discussion of Anaxagoras. This discussion (obliquely) presents the way in which this first mode of ideality is related to mind. His account in no way suggests that ideality is a creation of the mind, but rather suggests that mind and ideality need to be understood together, and that a failure to do so will result in an illicit reification of both. Additionally, the passages relating to Anaxagoras also raise questions of teleology, the structure of human action, and the nesting of explanations. Socrates’ second sailing is a response to the failure to secure knowledge of the ultimate arche of cosmic order(ing). The difficulty of grasping such knowledge was strangely circumscribed by the contradictory coincidence of the Athenians’ desire to punish Socrates and Socrates’ desire to abide by the laws of Athens. The actions of each seek the same result, but for different reasons. This illustrates the difficulty in isolating a single arche even for one occurrence. Finally, these considerations bring into view the necessary orientation to the good that is required for human action to be intelligible and which would need to be a moment of a divine mind setting in place the order of the cosmos. The depth of these problems are only hinted at in these passages.1 We then encountered ideality through Socrates’ presentation of ‘his’ ideas and Parmenides’ subsequent questioning and dialectical exercise in the Parmenides. The lesson we can take from that encounter can perhaps be easily summarized: the positing of ideas as explanatory principles does not in itself protect one from the dangers of reification. In fact, we might say that the Parmenides account shows the nearly unavoidable dangers of bringing ideality to the surface. Once it is there in view, once one has ‘seen’ the ideality implicated in and through one’s mode of contact with the world, there is a tendency to revert to thinking about ideality in terms of ‘things’. The proper eidos, which manifests itself in the psychic encounter with phenomena, is taken to be a thing like phenomenal things. The danger here is not simply failing to explain this or that; rather, oneself is forgotten in the moment of reification. Eidos becomes a name for the occlusion of oneself. Finally, an image of ideality was disclosed in the account of erotic ascent in the Symposium. I say ‘image’ because Diotima’s discourse does not reflect explicitly on the nature of the ideal; rather, we discover the ideal here

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through echoes of language used elsewhere. The broader context in which beauty itself is presented makes clear that there is much more to be learned here about what something like ‘beauty itself’ means for us than what it is in itself. In fact, a dialectic can be discerned in moving from the Parmenides to the Symposium, a dialectic that takes up and develops what is only hinted at in the Parmenides. Namely, that being-toward the ideal is neither exclusively, nor even principally, a concern of knowledge of things, but rather is a concern of knowledge of oneself. Furthermore, the Symposium account suggests that the proper manifestation of the ideal cannot be identified with the positing of ideas; rather, it is (akin to) a moment of revelation that results from the achievement of a radically erotic comportment toward the world. Finally, this comportment is shown to be of a piece with the ethical project of simultaneously coming to know and cultivating the good life. In this sense, the Symposium account does not simply follow from the Parmenides account, but lets us see what stands implicitly at the root of it. The truth of Socrates’ youthful hypothesis of ideas is his mature concern for self-knowledge and harmony. One final comment before proceeding. All of these senses of ideality are linked in some fashion to logos. In the first instance, the ideality that Socrates reveals is shown to be embedded in an existing logos. In the second instance, logos is shown to live from ideality. Logos is said to be impossible without it. In the final instance, logos, as part of a living ethos, unfolds itself toward the ideal. Let us not forget the connections drawn above between Socrates’ art of logoi and the project of self-harmonization and stability.

1.

Safety

I argued in the first chapter that the warning against misology provides the proper measure for Socrates’ account of his own development. This assertion is affirmed and deepened as that account progresses. The safe answers that Socrates gives to questions of causation are the ground of his safety from misology. Moreover, as we saw above, resisting misology is integral to the project of self-knowledge and harmony. At that moment when Socrates shifts from the past to the present tense, he says: ‘In any case, that’s how I set out: On each occasion I put down as hypothesis whatever account I judge to be mightiest; and whatever seems to me to be consonant with this, I put down as being true, both

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about cause and about all the rest, while what isn’t, I put down as not true. But I want to tell more plainly what I mean, because I think that right now you don’t understand.’ (100a)2 The most remarkable aspect of what Socrates says here is not the specifics of the procedure,3 but rather its thoroughgoing reflexivity. His logos is about the method of logos he uses to look into logoi. Furthermore, his account concerns his doing, his hypothesizing and judging. The emphasis here is more squarely on the hypothesizing than the hypothesis, and furthermore, more squarely on the accounting for the hypothesizing than the act itself. That is to say, Socrates is attempting to have Cebes understand his own practices as practices. Surely a dimension of that exposition is an account of the procedure itself; but it is distorting to read the passages that follow as some kind of neutral, disinterested account of a method that stands on its own, a method that could be applied indiscriminately. Furthermore, these considerations deeply question any interpretation that attempts to make out of the following account a Platonic doctrine inserted into the dialogue.4 As we proceed through the following passages, we will see that Socrates never abandons this stance of reflection on the employment of his method. Socrates goes on to clarify what he has said above: ‘But . . . all I mean is this – nothing new but the very thing I’ve never stopped talking about at other times and in the account that’s just occurred as well. For I’m going to try to show you the form of the cause [τ α6τα τ ε=δο] with which I’ve busied myself. And I’ll go back to those much-babbled-about-things and take my beginning from them, putting down as hypothesis that there’s some Beauty Itself by Itself and a Good and a Big and all the others. If you give me those and grant that they are, I hope, from them, to show you the cause and to discover how soul is something deathless.’ (100b–c) If it were Socrates’ intention to put forth a metaphysical doctrine of eide as the answer to the question of cause, his manner of doing so would be strange indeed. In fact, if that were his intention, we should expect not an account of his doings, but simply an account of eidetic participation – something along the lines of his presentation of the eide in the Parmenides.5 As I stressed when commenting on those passages in Chapter 2, Socrates does not include his positing of the eide in his account of the eide. Rather, in that context he simply asserts that they can answer certain questions about how things are both many and one. Here instead Socrates speaks of

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the eide always with respect to the act of positing them within a logos. Indeed, the eide here seem inextricable from their being-talked-about. As we proceed we will see the extent to which Socrates’ ‘form of cause’ is logos bound. But even this way of stating the matter is distorting. Socrates does not here name the eide explicitly. In this section of the dialogue, it is Phaedo who first uses the term ε=δο to delimit the much-babbled-about things. Socrates limits himself to more roundabout locutions. When Phaedo resumes his account after an interjection by Echecrates, he names – for the first time in the dialogue – the ‘things spoken of’ as ‘eide’. Phaedo says, ‘Once this had been granted [Socrates], and it was agreed that each of the εFδη was something and that everything else that has a share in them gets its name from these very things, here’s what he asked next’ (102a–b). Socrates himself uses ε=δο in this way only toward the end of his account of contraries, and even then only sparingly. These facts of the text seem to call for a certain measure of prudence when asserting what Socrates is concerned with here. Why is it Phaedo who first uses ε=δο in this ‘technical’ fashion? What significance can be ascribed to the coincidence that Phaedo is also the narrator of this account of Socrates’ last day? If someone else had recounted the conversation, would ε=δο have been used in just the same way? I do not intend to pursue these questions explicitly, but present them here to at least mark the extent to which we must tread carefully with respect to the importance of the term ε=δο for Socrates in the Phaedo. This seems important for the following reason: the Parmenides discloses the dangers of reification, and reification seems to follow (to some extent) from the use of language. Once we have a stable name for something, it is easy to think that the thing itself is something stable like the name. I suggest that Socrates has learned this lesson. He is wary of speaking too quickly and too carelessly of eide. So instead he talks around the name, keeping the things always moving with and through his logos, rather than having it appear that the logos is simply transparent and points toward the eide as ‘objects’. Socrates does mention that what he is talking about now he talked about earlier in the conversation, so maybe he names the eide there. In fact, he does not. The following are all of the instances of ε=δο prior to Phaedo’s use of it at 102a: [Cebes] ‘But this is impossible if our soul was not somewhere before being born in this human form [εFδει] here.’ (73a) [Socrates] ‘They recognize the lyre and they grasp in thought the form [ε=δο] of the boy whose lyre it was?’ (73d)

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[Socrates] ‘Therefore, Simmias, our souls were earlier too, before they were in human form [εFδει], and they were separate from bodies and had thoughtfulness.’ (76c) [Socrates] ‘Let us then posit, if you want to . . . two forms [εFδη] of the things that are – the Visible and the Unseen.’ (79a) [Socrates] ‘Then to which form [εFδει] do we say the body would be more similar and akin?’ (79b) [Socrates] ‘So again, to which form [εFδει] does the soul seem to you to be more similar and akin, given what was said both before and now?’ (79d) [Cebes] ‘I don’t take back that it’s been demonstrated with complete elegance and, if it’s not laying it on too thick, complete accuracy, that our soul was even before she came into her present form [ε=δο].’ (87a) [Socrates] ‘Simmias, as I think, is distrustful and is terrified that the soul, though she’s a more divine and beautiful thing than the body, may perish before it, if she’s in the form [εFδει] of a tuning.’ (91d) [Socrates] ‘Do you perceive, then . . . that you’re going to be saying this whenever you claim that the soul is before she arrives in human form [ε=δο] and body.’ (92b) [Socrates] ‘I was prepared to yearn no longer for any other form [ε=δο] of cause.’ (98a) [Socrates] ‘For I’m going to try to show you the form [ε=δο] of cause with which I’ve busied myself.’ (100b). Note that none of these uses refers to anything like ‘beauty itself by itself’. Such things are discussed in the earlier parts of the dialogue, but they are not named as eide. Many of the instances listed above use ε=δο in its colloquial sense of look, shape or kind. The use closest to those things which are themselves by themselves is the use of ε=δο to distinguish between the visible and the invisible. But it must be stressed that in this case ε=δο refers equally to both modes of being. The ε=δο of the visible is its visibility, just as the ε=δο of the invisible is its invisibility. To begin to see how ε=δο might not be symmetrically implicated here is to see how the distinction itself is not to be found in the visible. The eide of the visible and the invisible both belong on the side of the invisible. That is to say, we must posit a distinction between the visible qua visible and its ε=δο. But I hope we can see that this manner of looking at the issue is already on the road to a rather nuanced understanding of ε=δο as bound up with the operations of mind and an interweaving of intelligibility and phenomena. It is a crucial detail of this passage that Cebes straightaway grants to

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Socrates that the much-babbled-about things are.6 The being of these things is not going to be considered here. It is only on the supposition that they are that the account can and will proceed. The readiness of Cebes to grant this supposition is in some need of explanation. One explanation of his readiness is simply his enthusiasm at being able to hear the rest of Socrates’ account. It seems he might grant just about anything at this point. But a prior section of the dialogue provides more insight into this readiness. One of the arguments put forward in the first half of the dialogue for the deathlessness of the soul was the argument about the generation of opposites. The crux of that argument was that opposite things come from opposite things, and thus living things come from dead things. This exchange prompts Cebes to invoke a logos that Socrates is ‘in the habit of making often’ (72e), the logos pertaining to recollection. Simmias asks to be reminded of this logos. This prompts Socrates to address Simmias in what follows. Socrates demonstrates that things both similar and dissimilar can be occasions for recollection. On the one hand, a picture of Simmias can prompt the recollection of Simmias himself. But equally likely, some object, not itself similar to Simmias, but which one associates with Simmias, can be an occasion for recollecting Simmias. In either case, some prior acquaintance with Simmias is required for there to be a recollecting. Socrates then focuses on cases involving similarity and asks: ‘But at least whenever somebody’s recollecting something from similar things, isn’t it necessary for him to undergo this as well: to note whether or not, with respect to similarity, this thing somehow falls short of what he’s recollected?’ (74a) Simmias says that it is necessary. The sense in which this is true must be as follows: if something prompts me to recollect something else, I must be able to distinguish that which prompts the recollection from that which is recollected; if such a distinguishing were not possible, I would not experience this as a recollecting of something else, but would experience it as an encounter with the very thing itself. That is, in order to recollect something through something else, I must be able, within the act of recollection, to hold apart as different these two things.7 In cases involving the recollection of phenomenal beings, this dynamic is largely one of being able to distinguish a genuine particular (Simmias himself) from more or less faithful images of that particular. But Socrates is going to introduce a different kind of particular, a different kind of ‘itself’.

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‘Consider then . . . if it’s like this: We claim, I suppose, that there’s some “equal.” I don’t mean stick equal to stick or stone to stone or anything else like that, but something other, beyond all these things – the Equal Itself [αυτ τ Fσαν]. Shall we claim that this is something, or nothing at all?’ (74a) Simmias answers: ‘By Zeus . . . we certainly shall claim it, wondrously so [θαυµαστ8 γε]!’ (74b) This is not the first time in the dialogue that Socrates exploits the presuppositions of Simmias and Cebes. Their Pythagorean tendencies predispose them to readily grant the being of something like ‘the equal itself’. What goes unremarked (both by Socrates, his interlocutors and most commentators) is what kind of being such a thing is. Is the equal itself a thing in the same way that Simmias is? And, anticipating Socrates’ next question, do we know equality in the same way that we know Simmias? As we follow this passage through, I want to focus on two aspects. First, this passage will establish another reason why Cebes is readily willing to grant being to the much-babbled-about things. Secondly, it will help establish my claim that when Socrates refers to this account later in the dialogue he does not necessarily understand himself to be committed to an understanding of ‘things themselves’ as self-standing, reified entities. Nevertheless, a certain reified conception of things like ‘the equal itself’ lends itself to Socrates’ attempt to use the recollection argument to prove the deathlessness of the soul. As I noted at the beginning of Chapter 1, the unfolding of these arguments is dialogical and Socrates’ ultimate purposes are far from evident. If ‘the equal itself’ is something that resides somewhere, and if it can be shown that our ability to discern a resemblance of equality in phenomenal things is grounded in a prior grasp of equality itself, then it can be declared that our soul must have been there and grasped that before we were born. The cogency of such an argument, however, presumes an entitive understanding of ‘the equal itself’. Let us read what Socrates says as this account of equality continues in order to see if it is necessary, on Socrates’ own terms, that this kind of entitive understanding be accepted. Socrates elicits Simmias’ agreement that the occasion of our ‘grasp of knowledge’ of the equal itself is an encounter with equal things, sticks or stones perhaps. Socrates makes a series of points: (1) Such things can look equal from one point of view, but unequal from another; (2) ‘equals

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themselves’ will never appear unequal and equality will never appear as inequality;8 (3) the ‘equal itself’ is nevertheless grasped from these other equals (sticks and stones apprehended as equals); (4) since these things are not equality itself, they must be occasions for recollection of that equality; (5) these things fall short of the equal itself (74b–d). Socrates then says: ‘Then do we agree to this: Whenever somebody who’s seen something notes, “What I’m now seeing wants to be of the same sort as something else among the things that are; yet it falls short and isn’t able to be that sort of thing but is inferior,” then mustn’t the man who notes this necessarily have had occasion to see beforehand that thing he says it’s like but falls short of?’ – ‘Necessarily.’ – ‘Well then, have we undergone some such thing with respect to equals and the Equal Itself, or not?’ – ‘Altogether so.’ – ‘Then it’s necessary that we saw the Equal before that time when we first saw equals and noted: “All these things are striving to be like the Equal but fall short of it.” ’ (74d–75a) For the immediate purposes of Socrates’ discourse, the crucial point being established is that we saw the equal itself before we saw equal things. Simmias grants that this must be the case based upon what has been said before about recollection. And on this basis Socrates is able to elicit the agreement both that this is a case of recollection akin to someone recalling Simmias by looking at a painting, and that as such a case of recollection there must have been a prior time at which one encountered the equal itself. This is the argument that establishes the agreement, among his interlocutors, that things like the equal itself are. This agreement helps to explain why Cebes is prepared to grant them being later in the discussion. However, the cogency of the argument begs certain questions. First, it is only on the presumption that this is a case of (ordinary) recollection that the argument can be entertained. Socrates directs the questioning in such a way that the manner of recollection of a sensible particular, Simmias, is equated with the manner of recollection of the equal itself. Socrates accomplishes this in the following way. He elicits agreement that Simmias can be recollected by both similar and dissimilar things. Such recollection must be grounded in a prior acquaintance with Simmias himself, and one must be able to distinguish Simmias from that which prompts his recollection. Socrates then sketches a situation in which one encounters sensible particulars, and in this encounter discovers something that is not these particulars themselves; for instance, equality. The phenomenal encounter is the occasion for the ‘appearance’ of equality. And since we can ‘see’ that

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the sensible things fall short of the equal itself, we can discern that it is distinct from them. It is in this moment of grasping the distinctness of the equal itself that Socrates claims that it must be a moment of recollection. He exploits a similar structure of encounter and elicitation to simply equate the two. But does it really follow that this is a recollection like the recollection of Simmias? It seems to me that the cogency of the account of the recollection of Simmias presumes a common-sense understanding of what it means to be familiar with Simmias. One’s ability to understand Socrates’ analysis of such recollection is premised on this common-sense notion. Thus, if I were to say that a certain object brings Simmias to mind, another person would infer from this that I have had a previous acquaintance with Simmias – at least of some sort. When Socrates turns to sticks and equality, he makes it look as if the very same thing must be happening: because the sticks elicit something other from which they fall short, it is a case of recollection, and therefore I must have encountered equality before seeing the sticks. But this need not be the conclusion that is drawn. Just because equality is other than the sticks themselves, this does not mean that its appearance is an instance of recollection akin to the recollection of Simmias. It could be, but the necessity does not follow as a point of logic. Briefly, I want to sketch an alternative understanding of the appearance of equality. Rather than being the case that there is a temporal structure to the situation, the relationship between grasping equality itself and seeing ‘equal’ things is one of mutual implication. Socrates gets Simmias to agree that before we see equal sticks we have grasped equality and that is why after we see equal sticks we recollect equality. This way of stating the situation strictly separates sensation and knowing. It makes it look as if sensation elicits something knowable, but that sensing as such is radically set apart from intellection. I want to suggest, alternatively, that Socrates also evokes an understanding of sensation and intellection as radically intertwined.9 What does it mean for two sticks to be equal? In order to answer such a question one must give an account of equality that addresses the role of abstraction. Two sticks cannot be the same in every respect and still be two. Thus perfect equality would be complete identity in every respect except for numerical identity. Nevertheless, equality usually carries a less strict meaning, and in cases of bodies is often limited to measures of magnitude. For instance, we could consider the sticks only with respect to their length and declare them equal if they are identical in this dimension. Furthermore, we might call them equal even if we understand that they are not necessarily exactly the same length; and the strictures of equality can vary. In certain instances, the ascription of equality will have more variability

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than in others. If one were cutting wood to build a frame for a house, the demand for equality in length would be less strict than if one were cutting wood for fine joint work in cabinetry. But in each case one would understand that no matter what level of precision the situation demands, absolute equality is never achieved. However, my sensible apprehension of the particulars in view is constantly guided by my understanding of something that transcends the particulars. I cannot attempt to cut more or less equal pieces of wood unless I have a ‘pure’ notion of equality. So it seems to be the case that the possibility of the kind of sensibility that we have, one which is a sensibility of things about which we speak, is grounded in intelligibility. To see equality in sticks is to know equality itself in the seeing, even if we have never reflected upon equality as such. But to call this knowing a before is misleading. Whatever priority such knowing possesses, it need not be understood temporally. I cannot argue at this point that Socrates intimates all of this in his questions to Simmias; but I will suggest that Socrates leaves some clues that his overt argument moves too quickly in the manner in which it separates sensibility and knowing. Recall Socrates’ words: ‘Then do we agree to this: Whenever somebody who’s seen something notes, “What I’m now seeing wants to be of the same sort as something else among the things that are; yet it falls short and isn’t able to be that sort of thing but is inferior,” then mustn’t the man who notes this necessarily have had occasion to see beforehand that thing he says it’s like but falls short of?’ (74d–e) It seems highly significant and extremely suggestive that Socrates places the crucial point of the analysis in the voice of another, speaking about the situation from within. His manner of expressing the phenomenological situation binds together seeing, speaking and intellection. The one who apprehends the sensible things attests to this seeing in speech; the seeing occurs in and through the speaking. The speaker also attests to the sensible things undertaking a certain striving. However, it is (implicitly) only because the person seeing the things simultaneously has an intellective grasp of something that is (e.g., equality itself) that he can sense the striving. Furthermore, the situation would not be taken to be a striving unless the thing striven after was held in ‘view’ by the seer as distinct from the things themselves. There are, in the above scenario, a number of distinct moments. First, there is a distinction between the physical relation of observer and observed and the speaking about what is observed. Second, there are

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distinct moments of the speaking. There is an attestation to the fact of observation; there is a claim about the striving of the things observed; and there is, implicitly, an intellective grasp of that toward which the things strive. I have no wish to collapse the distinctness of these moments. What I do want to emphasize at this point is that Socrates’ account presents these as moments of one complete situation. This digression has perhaps now gone on long enough. As I noted above, my goal was to establish two points. The first was that this prior discussion helps to explain Cebes’ willingness to grant that the much-babbled-about things are. Socrates’ elicitation of agreement for a contact with such things before our birth also established an implicit agreement that these things are. The second point, which will take us into the remaining passages, is that Socrates should not be taken as holding an entitive view of the ideas, even if his overt statements might suggest such a view. * * * * * Having received Cebes’ agreement that ‘beauty itself by itself and a good and a big and all the others’ are, Socrates says: ‘Consider then . . . whether you’re of my opinion about what comes next after this. For it appears to me that if anything else is beautiful besides the Beautiful Itself, it’s not beautiful because of any other single thing but this: because it participates in that Beautiful. And I speak [λγω] of all things in this way. Do you grant such a cause?’ – ‘I grant10 it,’ [Cebes] said. (100c) Once again, I want to emphasize the precise manner in which Socrates situates this proposal. Socrates does not say simply, ‘Beautiful things are beautiful because of beauty itself’; rather the cause is one that ‘appears’, and in its appearing Socrates makes a claim upon it. The frame in which we see Socrates’ claim about the nature of cause is the way that he speaks about such a cause. As should be clear by now, I do not intend by such observations to reduce that which is spoken about to the speaking. What I do want to insist upon is that if we ignore the way in which the claim of cause is couched in an account about logos, we will not be able to understand the nature of the cause. Socrates continues: ‘Therefore I no longer understand . . . nor am I able to recognize the other causes – those wise ones. But if somebody should tell me why anything is beautiful by saying it has a blossoming color or shape or

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anything else of that sort, I bid farewell to all that, since I’m discombobulated by all these other things; and simply and artlessly and perhaps naively, I hold this close to myself: that nothing makes a thing beautiful but the presence of or communion with that Beautiful – or however and in whatever way you say it happens. As for that, I don’t yet make any definite assertion, but I do assert it’s by the Beautiful that all beautiful things are beautiful.11 For that seems to me to be the safest answer for both myself and another. And by holding tight to this, I think I won’t ever fall down, but it’ll prove safe for myself and for anyone else to answer that beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful. Or does it seem so to you?’ (100d–e) The language here recalls Socrates’ discussion of misology at the centre of the dialogue. The hypothesis of ideas as causes is something that Socrates ‘holds close’ because it is ‘safest’ and will prevent his ever ‘falling down’. This safety, however, is not grounded in a transparent, self-consistent metaphysical system. Socrates has some notion of how the beautiful itself and beautiful things are related, but he is not committed to the specifics of that understanding.12 What is translated here as ‘assert’ is διισχυρζοµαι, defined in the Greek lexicon as both ‘to lean upon, rely on’ and ‘to affirm confidently’. Interestingly, all of the references for the second meaning are from Platonic texts. This suggests that Plato’s use of this word brought with it its other meaning. Socrates asserts or affirms not out of knowledge, but in order to have something to lean on, to hold himself up. This is the primary aim of Socrates’ positing of ideas. This laying down which is the method of hypothesis is also a setting up that gives Socrates something with which to support himself. But what is he protecting himself from? It is another kind of answer, another kind of speaking, against which Socrates braces himself. ‘And therefore you wouldn’t allow it if somebody should claim that one man’s bigger than another by a head and that the littler man’s littler by this very same thing. Instead, you’d protest that you’re not going to say anything else than this: Every bigger thing’s bigger than another by nothing but Bigness, and it’s bigger because of this, because of Bigness, while the littler is littler by nothing but Smallness. I suppose you’d be terrified that some contrary argument [,ναντο λγο] would come at you, if you claimed somebody’s bigger or littler by a head – that, first of all, the bigger’s bigger and the littler’s littler by the same thing, and next, that the bigger’s bigger by the head, which is small, and it’s surely a monstrosity that somebody be big by something small. Or wouldn’t you

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be terrified of these things?’ – And Cebes, with a laugh, said, ‘I sure would!’ (100e–101b) This passage confirms that Socrates is trying to steel himself against sophistic arguments. This follows from his claims in the warning against misology: to entertain logoi that attempt to shred one’s confidence in the nodes of stability in phenomena is a failure to hold to oneself in the proper way. Certain ways of arguing, of speaking about things, make it look as though the correspondence of what is stable in speech and what is stable in phenomena is a ruse and a deception. By contorting speech to say absurd things, the sophistical speaker seeks to undermine another’s confidence in such correspondence. Socrates’ mode of assertion is a protection against such attempts. However, we should recall a point made in Chapter 1. It looks as if Socrates’ method of positing ideas is the making explicit of what was revealed in his encounter with ones and twos. That impasse, and the problems which led to it, showed how the apparently self-evident discourses about growth as addition were really themselves already quite sophisticated. That is, the physical theories of growth were premised upon certain notions of size, magnitude, multitude and number, but these aspects were not made explicit. Socrates’ method of hypothesis brings that layer of discourse to the surface. It asserts that the things we say already contain the truth of things at a basic level. Nevertheless, that our discourse contains such truth does not mean that we comprehend it, nor that we are even aware of it. What is brought out in this context is Socrates’ effort to expose this aspect of logos as a first step in philosophical conversion. The simplemindedness of the positing of ideas as a protection against falling down has as its other side an outrageously speculative hint about the concordance of logos and being. Socrates continues: ‘Then wouldn’t you be terrified,’ said he, ‘to assert that ten things are more than eight by two and exceed them because of this cause but not by Multitude and because of Multitude? And that the double foot’s bigger than the single one by half but not by Bigness? For I suppose there’s the same terror.’ – ‘Of course,’ he said. – ‘And what about this: When a one has been added to a one or has been divided up, wouldn’t you beware of asserting that the addition or division is the cause of its becoming two? And you’d shout bigtime that you don’t know any other way each thing comes into being except by participating in the particular Being of each form in which it participates; and that in these cases you don’t have any other cause of its becoming two than its

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participation in the two; and that whatever’s going to be two must participate in this, and whatever’s going to be one, in the unit – but to these dividings and addings and other such fancy stuff you’d bid farewell, leaving them to others wiser than you to answer for. But you, in fright (as the saying goes) at your own shadow and inexperience, holding tightly to that safe hypothesis, would, I take it, answer as we did.’ (101b–d) The final lines of this passage confirm that Socrates has finally caught up to his warning against misology. The object of fear that stands at the end of Socrates’ autobiography is not death, but sophistic refutation. The fear, φβο, that needs to be addressed is this fear. And Socrates does not suggest that it can simply be overcome and dispensed with. Rather, it seems that this fear remains and motivates the laying down of the safe hypothesis. The battle against falling down when confronted by ‘wise’ logoi does not seem to ever end. Furthermore, the positing of ideas is, in its initial moment, not a comprehension of things, but is only the accomplishment of the requisite stability to pursue further investigation. To not fall down is not the same as to know. Rather, remaining upright is necessary for one to pursue knowledge. One will get nowhere if one is continually being knocked down by the ‘wise’. Socrates’ final remarks in this immediate context suggest that once one has (provisionally) secured oneself against sophistry, one must turn to oneself and re-examine the very thing one has used to procure this security. ‘But if, on the other hand, somebody should hold tightly to the hypothesis taken all by itself, you’d bid him farewell and wouldn’t answer until you’d considered the things that spring forth from that hypothesis – that is, whether in your view those things are consonant or dissonant with one another. And should you have to give an account of that hypothesis itself, you’d give it in just that same way, by hypothesizing in turn another hypothesis, whichever of the higher ones appeared best, until you came to something sufficient. And at the same time, you wouldn’t jam things together, the way the debaters do, by conversing both about the beginning and what emerges out of it – if, that is, you wanted to discover something about the things that are. There’s probably not even one argument or careful thought these people have about this matter; for they’re so self-sufficient because of their wisdom that even though they confound all things together, they themselves are quite satisfied with themselves. But you – if in fact you’re one of the lovers of wisdom [τ8ν φιλοσφων] – would, I suppose, do as I say.’ (101d–102a)

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Let me attempt to draw out a number of important points contained in this final portion of Socrates’ account. (1) The hypothesizing of ideas can establish a security against sophistical arguments, but it cannot secure the cogency of the hypothesis itself [αυτ τ Hποθσεω]. I am inclined to read this claim as a general statement about the positing of ideas, not as being about this or that instance of such hypothesizing. In each instance, such a procedure can give oneself something to lean upon, and in this regard it is beneficial. But this benefit does not affirm the inherent truth of what has been hypothesized. Rather, the benefit of upright stability now occasions a new beginning.13 (2) This new beginning is an investigation of this mode of hypothesizing itself.14 Socrates is telling Cebes that not being knocked down by ‘wise’ arguments is not the same as knowing. To hold to the hypothesis as if one knew something by it is not what is proper. Rather, one must look into the ‘things that spring forth from that hypothesis’. This looks a great deal like what Socrates experienced with Parmenides. Socrates was confident that his hypothesis of ideas gave him knowledge about the way things are. Parmenides playfully, but rigorously, disabused him of that confidence. However, remember that Parmenides’ purpose in his challenges to Socrates was not to undercut the notion of ideas altogether, but rather to show that a certain care and slowness is required when attending to such things. The power of ideas as hypotheses masks an abyss of problems when considering ideas themselves. (3) What does Socrates mean when he says, ‘And should you have to give an account of that hypothesis itself, you’d give it in just the same way, by hypothesizing in turn another hypothesis’? This is an important question, but one that I think can be answered rather simply. To pursue an investigation of eide themselves requires making explicit a distinction that is covered over in the initial positing: the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible. However, this distinction is itself a hypothesis. The distinction between the sensible and the intelligible is not something we simply encounter, but something that is asserted, and in this sense something that is laid-down in order to pursue further inquiry.15 Furthermore, the hypothesis of such a distinction leads to (at least) two more sets of distinctions: the distinguishing of ignorance, opinion and knowledge on the one hand, and the distinguishing of being and non-being on the other.16 In light of this claim I think it would be possible to show how Socrates has drawn out these very distinctions in the first half of the Phaedo – however, no one present seems to understand what he is doing. (4) This leads to the assertion that one should not ‘jam together’ the ‘beginning and what emerges out of it’. I take it that, in this context, the

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beginning is the inquiry into cause and the hypothesis of an idea as cause. ‘What emerges out of it’ is the dialectical investigation of ideas as such. The two operations move in different directions. The first is oriented toward phenomena. The positing of ideas as causes is made in the context of explaining phenomena in a (potentially) disputatious setting. The investigation of ideas themselves is not principally concerned with explaining phenomena, but with teasing out the implications of a certain hypothesis about phenomena. What Socrates seems to be warning against (again) is the danger inherent in taking the shakiness of the notion of ideas as a verdict upon the shakiness of phenomena. Parmenides made the same point: a rigorous encounter with the problems of ideas themselves should not dissuade one from holding to them nevertheless. Rather, one must pursue two avenues of inquiry and keep them distinct: looking into things (through logoi) and looking into eide, ousia and episteme. (5) Finally, Socrates suggests that it is the very confounding of these two aspects that is a source of satisfaction for many people. Delight is taken in showing how there can be no truth, no knowledge, nothing good in itself, nothing beautiful either, because an investigation of these things themselves is difficult, contradictory and aporetic. This point echoes Socrates’ remarks concerning the sources of misology. There is a certain kind of person, Socrates says, who takes pleasure in stripping others of all confidence in anything, except for the universal instability and relativity of phenomena and knowledge. The ‘all’ here is crucial, for Socrates also seems to delight in stripping others of their confidence. The decisive difference is that while Socrates will on one occasion after another drive an interlocutor into aporia with respect to a particular claim of knowing, Socrates never undercuts the possibility of knowing.

2.

Soul and Ideas

Every inquiry must begin with some presuppositions; otherwise it would be impossible to begin. At a certain point, however, it is necessary to bring those presuppositions into question. The presupposition with which I began was that it made sense to attempt to read a group of passages from three Platonic dialogues with respect to the eidetic. It was presumed that the eidetic is a coherent enough theme in the Platonic texts to warrant such a starting point. I would like to end this study by asking in what sense it is warranted to isolate the eidetic as a separate concern in the Platonic texts. Or rather, whether a focused account of the eidetic cannot ultimately stand on its own.

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To some extent this has already been answered negatively: the delimitation of the eidetic is in the service of an ethical project and should not be construed as something that is pursued for its own sake. Nevertheless, this would not rule out the possibility that within certain parameters an account of the eidetic has a clearly defined coherence. The discourse of the Parmenides, for instance, displays a remarkably rich reflection on the eidetic that is largely ontological and epistemological. To radically question the sense of treating the eidetic in isolation one would have to show that it is in fact impossible to construct a coherent account of the eidetic on its own terms. Again, the Parmenides also hints at such a conclusion – Parmenides seems to suggest that Socrates will never understand his hypothesis of ideas if he does not look to himself when looking at the ideas. I would assert, however, that a fuller reckoning with this problem is needed. I will approach this problem by tracing the manner in which the eide (or rather, the things about which we say ‘itself’, for we have seen that the eide are not named as such until late in the dialogue) are introduced into the conversation of the Phaedo and how our understanding of them must be conditioned by a much larger set of terms. In a sense I will attempt a version of what Socrates calls for at the end of his autobiography – a questioning of the eide on the basis of further hypotheses. Recall Socrates’ initial characterization of death as the separation of the soul from the body. If we look again at his exact words, we see something perplexing, if not extraordinary – Socrates speaks of the soul and the body with the exact same language that he speaks of the ideas. ‘And is [death] anything but the freeing of the soul from the body? And is this what it means to have died: for the body to have become separate, once it’s freed from the soul and is itself all by itself [αυτ καθ’ αHτ], and for the soul to be separate, once she’s freed from the body and is herself all by herself [αυτ;ν καθ’ αυτ;ν]? Death couldn’t be anything other than this – could it?’ (64c) Now, to simply say that Socrates takes the soul and the body to be ideas does not really explain anything since we have not been able to say just what an idea is. The equal ascription of ‘itself by itself’ to both the soul and the body mirrors what seems to be the presumption of his interlocutors; namely, that the soul and the body are each things that can stand alone. Death as the separation of the soul from the body, on these terms, is just the taking apart of a composite that has no essential togetherness. But is this the manner of togetherness of soul and body? Are they principally

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things that stand alone, or is their separateness in fact derivative of a more fundamental unity? The word rendered here as ‘itself’ is the same word used to designate the human self. This, in fact, is the first word of the dialogue – αυτο. It is spoken by Echecrates to Phaedo. You yourself, Phaedo – were you present with Socrates on that day when he drank the potion in the prison? [αυτ, P Φαδων, παρεγνου Σωκρα´τει ,κεν- τ .µρ  τ φα´ρµακον 1πιεν ,ν τ2 δεσµωτηρ4.] (57a) What is the relationship between the αυτ of self and the αυτ καθ’ αHτ of the ‘things of which we say “itself” ’? In the previous section I stressed the phenomenological complexity of the appearance of ‘equality itself’ in the discussion of recollection. Having in view equality as an ideal was a necessary moment in a structure with other necessary moments: a field of phenomena, a person who is both sensibly receptive and thoughtfully active, and the enactment of language through speech. All four of these moments are needed to account for any one of them. The apparent idealization of soul and body in Socrates’ remarks above point to another such structure: the soul and body as moments of the more primordial being of the self. If, in fact, the self qua this particular person is more primitive and primordial than either body or soul, then it is right to speak of them separately as idealizations. It will be objected, however, that, at the very least, this cannot be true of the body. It is a thing. It can be seen and touched. It has an independent existence. Such an objection, however, is blind to its own operations of abstraction. The living body is not indiscriminately a body among other bodies. It is a body that is animate. It is a body that maintains itself through continuous effort. This is precisely what Diotima spoke of in the Symposium. The living being is its own continual effort to replace itself with the same. Our mortality speaks to the ultimate failure of this effort. It is an effort that is successful only partially and only for a time. To abstract the activity of life away from a living body is to entertain a notion of body that is a one-sided idea of body, one that does not adhere to the truth of such a body.17 If such an abstraction of thought were to impinge upon the living body, it would initiate its decay and dispersal. The abstraction of life from the living body would be its death. Soul, then, names this effort, this activity, which is an activity of the body. This kind of body is a body that contains its own activity. What it is itself is constituted by this activity that folds back upon itself. Soul is the being, in its active sense, of the living body. Soul is not something added to a body that

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makes it live. Rather, soul is the living of the body. The self is a body that lives.18 The distinction between body and soul is nonetheless a necessary one. It is necessary because the living being is a being that distinguishes itself. To account for the manner of being of the living thing it is necessary to distinguish between its being qua material thing and its being qua selfmaintaining. However, such a distinction does not warrant a hypostatization of the terms of the distinction. What is required is an effort to think the terms of the distinction only as moments of the living thing. To speak of soul in this way is not to give an explanation of the genetic cause of life. The positing of soul as the living of the body is not to explain how something that is not alive becomes alive. One begins with the living thing and thinks its being through the distinction between body and soul. But soul names more than just this activity of living. For the human being, soul also names that of the self that knows. Soul is aligned with thought in the human being. Is this the same soul? Is the activity of thought a moment of the activity of living? Or does soul here name something else entirely? Is soul an equivocal term that masks a rift in the human being? In the text of the Phaedo we can easily discern the indication of such a rift in Socrates’ remarks. After asking whether it is the business of the philosopher to attend to matters of the body, he asks: ‘All in all, doesn’t it seem to you,’ he said, ‘that the business of such a man is not with the body; instead, he stands apart from it and keeps turned toward the soul as much as he can?’ (64e) Soul here cannot mean the active living of the body. It must mean the soul as the locus of thought and knowledge. But it is precisely by collapsing these two senses of soul that Socrates is able to orient the conversation in a particular way. He says next: ‘First then, in such matters, isn’t the philosopher clearly beyond other human beings in releasing the soul from communion with the body as much as possible?’ (65a) The implication, to his interlocutors’ ears, is that the philosopher is able to attain (some) separation between the soul and the body. This separation is, again, modelled on the separation of two bodies. The soul here is extracted from the body, to which it is otherwise bound. Let me introduce one more dimension of the soul at this point: the locus

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of pleasure and pain. The self is not only a thing that lives and thinks, but also one that feels. The life of sentience is one that entails a feeling of and through the body. This dimension complicates the divide between soul as life and soul as locus of thought. Socrates’ remarks concerning this dimension of experience ring true. ‘And I suppose the soul reasons most beautifully when none of these things gives her pain – neither hearing nor sight, nor grief nor any pleasure – when instead, bidding farewell to the body, she comes to be herself all by herself as much as possible and when, doing everything she can to avoid communing with or even being in touch with the body, she strives for what is.’ (65c) It is hard to think when one is hungry or tired or in pain. Equally, moments of joy, even ecstasy, are not typically occasions for clarity of thought. And while this does not instruct us as to the precise nature of the connection between feeling and thinking, it at least seems that they entail a certain togetherness. Thus to ‘separate’ the soul qua thinking power from the soul qua feeling power must also be thought otherwise. One possible way of thinking this ‘separation’ is through moderation. To maintain the body and emotions in those middle grounds between fatigue and excitement, fear and hope, thirst and drunkenness, is to ‘separate’ the power of thought. Rendering such passions (temporarily) neutral allows thought to be itself by itself. We are now getting closer to understanding the relationship between soul and ideas. I have distinguished three senses of soul, none of which can be said to be entirely autonomous: soul as the activity of the living body; soul as the seat of pleasure and pain; soul as the locus of thought. Focusing upon the third, let us now ask: Is the soul qua locus of thought distinct from that which it thinks? Is there a real power of the soul that is a thinking thing? Or is this soul, like soul qua activity of living, a moment of a more primordial phenomenon? The living being is a spontaneously reflexive being. This is what it means for the living thing to maintain itself as itself against the forces of change and decay. The soul as a thinking thing, on the other hand, is marked principally by an openness to an outside. There is no thinking without it being a thinking of something. Thus unless the soul thinks, it is not a thinking thing, only one that is potentially so. Only by thinking something does the soul become a thing that thinks. It only is inasmuch as it thinks. In the next series of exchanges, Socrates introduces those things that will later be called eide.

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‘And what about this sort of thing, Simmias: Do we claim that there is some Just Itself – or no such thing?’ ‘We do claim it, by Zeus!’ ‘And also some Beautiful and Good?’ ‘Why, certainly.’ ‘Well, ever see anything of that sort with your eyes?’ ‘In no way,’ said he. ‘But did you lay hold of them by any other sense that comes through the body? And I’m speaking about the Being of all such things, about Bigness and Health and Strength and, in a word, all the rest – whatever each happens to be. Is what’s truest about them beheld through the body? Or does it work this way: He among us who best prepares himself to think through most precisely each thing he investigates – that man would come closest to recognizing each thing?’ ‘Certainly.’ ‘Then wouldn’t that man do this most purely who approaches each thing as far as possible with thought itself [αυτ τ διανο ], and who neither puts any sight into his thinking nor drags in any other sense along with his reasoning; but instead, using unadulterated thought itself all by itself, he attempts to hunt down each of the beings that’s unadulterated and itself all by itself [αλλ αυτ καθ  αHτ;ν ε6λικρινε τ διανο χρRµενο αυτ καθ  αHτ ε6λικριν? Sκαστον ,πιχειρο θηρε!ειν τ8ν ντων], and once he’s freed himself as far as possible from eyes and

ears and, so to speak, from his whole body, because it shakes the soul up and doesn’t let her attain truth and thoughtfulness when the body communes with her – isn’t this the man, Simmias, if anyone, who will hit upon what is?’ ‘Extraordinary how truly you speak, Socrates!’ said Simmias. (65d–66a) Just as the discernment of soul as the activity of living does not explain the genesis of life, neither does the discernment of soul as the locus of thinking explain the happening of thought. We think and we live. These come first, not second. And just as body and soul are necessary moments in the being of the living thing, so the power of thought and that which is thought are necessary moments of thinking. We are always already thinking. We do not choose to activate our thinking capacities and then pursue the thinkable. Rather, (somehow) we attend to our thinking that is already underway. It is in this attendance to thinking that we discern both the power of thought and that which is thought. In this sense, both are abstractions from a thinking that is always already underway.

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Body and soul, thought and that-which-is-thought19 – these are all marked in the text as things that are themselves by themselves. In this sense they are all eide. These are ‘pure’ notions, idealities. But as such they are moments of and in thinking. And thinking is a moment of the soul, which is itself a moment of the self. In turn, the self is the ensouled, bodily being that thinks. This is a circle that must be continuously traversed; and it seems to be a circle of thought and being. To think the self is to think its moments as what it is. The moments are. But to think the moments is to think them as idealizations; it is to posit them as distinct moments. The ideas of justice, beauty, the good, bigness, strength and so on, are equally to be found both within and without this circle of the self. As thought by the self, they are in the soul as a thinking power; but as a moment of thinking, they actualize that power. The soul discovers that it thinks such things, and in this way the soul is simultaneously turned inward and outward. It thinks itself thinking, and it thinks that which it thinks. That which the soul thinks transcends the soul. Thoughts are held in common. Thinking is transcendence; it is being beyond oneself. Sometimes, the name of this beyond is ε=δο.20 These remarks concerning the soul and ideas clarify what is at stake in isolating the eidetic as a subject of investigation. That ideas exist independently of phenomena and the soul, that they are as much a matter of being as of thought, does not warrant their severance from thinking or the soul. To think through the eidetic means ultimately to think beyond and upon the eidetic simultaneously.

Concluding Remarks The readings carried out in the preceding chapters have attempted to follow the texts of the Phaedo, Parmenides and Symposium where they lead, but always with an eye toward gaining some insight into the ideas and Socrates’ relation to them. I would like now to offer a set of synoptic remarks about some of the conclusions achieved along the way. I would also like to make clear that offering such a synopsis is somewhat at odds with the practice of reading the Platonic texts, for it seems that all we can really do is continually read these texts anew. However, our interpretations, if we do not hold to them too tightly, allow us to discern aspects of the texts when we read them again that we might not have otherwise seen. Thus, I offer these remarks in exactly this spirit, as new entry points into the unending work of reading the Platonic texts. We can begin by considering the interpretation of the Parmenides presented in Chapter 2. There are a number of things to be said about the significance of the Parmenides for our understanding of the ideas, but the most crucial aspect of the dialogue for this study is its status as an episode in the life of the young Socrates (as presented in the Platonic texts). The point here is not that the Parmenides provides biographical information about Plato’s Socrates, but rather that this episodic perspective on the dialogue should dictate how we read Socrates’ exchanges with Parmenides and how we should interpret Parmenides’ discourse on the One. Furthermore, the insights gained in reading the dialogue in this episodic fashion provide a powerful way to interpret Socrates’ remarks on the ideas and the hypothetical method in the Phaedo. By focusing on the ideas as encountered in the Parmenides as ‘the ideas of Socrates’ and not as Plato’s (theory of) ideas, two general conclusions can be reached. First, while Plato does not tell us how Socrates comes to the ideas, they are emphatically presented as Socrates’ hypothesis. Furthermore, while Parmenides seems intent on forcing Socrates to face squarely the immense difficulties inherent in the notion of the ideas as the young Socrates first presents them, Parmenides does not tell Socrates to abandon his hypothesis; indeed, Parmenides suggests that this hypothesis is necessary if we want to maintain the possibility of common discourse.

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The second general conclusion is that the long discourse on the One that Parmenides performs in the Parmenides must be read first and foremost as being performed for Socrates’ sake. It is not simply a screen on which Plato can project his dialectical exercises on the One, but is itself a truly dramatic and dialogic moment of the dialogue. We must imagine the young Socrates taking in the elder Parmenides’ commanding performance. In fact, Plato has constructed the dialogue in such a way that it is as if the reader assumes the position of Socrates listening to Parmenides once he begins the gymnastic. Four points can be drawn from the Parmenides concerning how we should understand the ideas. First, Parmenides shows (indirectly) that the ideas cannot be understood as being like material things. Any model of the ideas that ascribes to them spatial attributes is bound to get caught up in intractable inconsistencies. This point bears on the second conclusion: the ‘separation’ of the ideas cannot be a spatial displacement. To maintain the discreteness of the ideas over against the phenomenal/material world one must (somehow) think the separation of ideas as a separation between two manners of being. We might say that the separation is ontological rather than ontic. Third, this ontological separateness can be approached by recourse to principles of limitation in relation to the limited. Limits do not exist in the same way that the limited things themselves do, e.g. the point is not an extended thing like the line segment it limits. Fourth, on this model, separation must entail an intimate and necessary intertwining (perhaps we can call it ‘participation’). Just as the limited cannot exist without its limits, so the limit only is as limiting the limited. Taken all together, we have seen that these points indicate that the proper locus of the ideas ‘in themselves’ is in the coming together of the soul and the world. While the ideas might be said to reside latently in the world, only the power of the soul can make them manifest. Socrates’ speech from the Symposium, which we encountered in Chapter 3, teaches that this power of manifestation is not a narrowly intellective one, but is a power of erotics. Furthermore, this eroticism is identified with philosophy in its truest sense. We saw that Diotima’s speech does not bear directly on the ideas in the way that the speeches of the Parmenides do. But the echoes of the language of the eidetic in the erotic ascent draw these two dialogues together, and at least on the narrow question of the psychic manifestation of ideas, the Symposium would suggest that this power is an erotic one. The penultimate moment before the sudden glimpse of ‘beauty itself’ in Diotima’s account describes the initiate’s comportment toward the world as a vast sea of beauty. The world becomes an erotic object of desire for the philosopher not in its particularity, but in its

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bearing of universality. The manifestation of the ideas as outlined in the Parmenides is disclosed in the Symposium as an erotic endeavour. We also saw how this erotic ascent has an ethical horizon. It is in terms of the project of engendering speeches about the good life and cultivating a life of virtue that the erotic ascent is undertaken. My principal contention with respect to the Phaedo, made explicit in Chapter 4, is that Socrates’ account of his own mature practices can only be understood in light of the lessons he learned as a young man with Parmenides and Diotima. The simplest way to see this is by emphasizing what seems to be a radical split in the way that the mature Socrates deals with the ideas. One of these ways is practical; the other we might call speculative. The practical side of Socrates’ relationship to the ideas is outlined clearly in his account of his hypothetical method. Socrates states unequivocally that he posits the ideas in disputatious situations simply to keep himself standing up. The skeptical challenges of the sophist can only be endured by means of this crutch. Without it, Socrates suggests, he would be knocked down. And while this stance acts as if the positing of ideas has explanatory value, Socrates himself says that such positing is at bottom ‘artless’. But as the discussion of misology at the centre of the Phaedo makes clear, winning arguments cannot be a virtuous end in itself because it can prevent us from searching for the way things are in themselves. Thus, Socrates keeps himself standing in the face of sophistic arguments not in order to win, but so that he can remain committed to the conviction that there is an intelligible order in the world. This does not mean that Socrates has discerned this order, but indicates his prior commitment to live as if there is such an order. The artless positing of ideas allows Socrates to remain in harmony with himself. This leaves Socrates’ (and our) speculative relationship to the ideas. It is precisely here that Plato largely leaves us unsatisfied. The mature Socrates, as Plato depicts him, does not engage in lengthy dialectical considerations of the ideas themselves. Indeed, such considerations are presented only as those lessons delivered by others in the presence of the young Socrates. The question thus opened by this study would be whether we can discern that the mature Socrates adheres to the teachings of these lessons elsewhere in the dialogues. The stakes of such a reading would be to ask whether the ideas stand in the Platonic corpus as the cornerstone of a doctrinal system, or whether instead the ideas present us with a problem that must be confronted anew whenever we read Plato’s texts.

Notes Introduction 1 The Republic of Plato (trans. Allan Bloom; New York: Basic Books, 1991). 2 See John Sallis, Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) and Stanley Rosen, ‘The Role of Eros in Plato’s Republic’ in The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 102–18. 3 As in the Republic, which is narrated by Socrates, we do not know who is being addressed by the narrator. Unlike in the Republic, the narrative frame is broken briefly near the beginning of the dialogue, but the speaker/auditor is named only as a comrade, Iταρο. 4 Plato’s Symposium (trans. Seth Benardete; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Translation originally appeared in The Dialogues of Plato (intro. Erich Segal; trans. Seth Benardete; New York: Bantam Books, 1986), intro. © Erich Segal, trans. © Seth Benardete. Used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. 5 ‘First time’ in terms of biographical chronology. This claim has nothing to do with a chronology of the date of composition of the dialogues, nor with the historical Socrates. It is a textual fact circumscribed by the Socrates that is presented in the Platonic dialogues. 6 Plato’s Parmenides (trans. Albert Keith Whitaker; Newburyport: Focus Publishing, 1996), © Albert Keith Whitaker. Used by permission. 7 Plato’s Phaedo (trans. Eva Brann et al.; Newburyport: Focus Publishing, 1998), © Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage and Eric Salem. Used by permission. 8 See Seth Benardete, ‘On Plato’s Symposium’ and ‘On Plato’s Phaedo’ in The Argument of the Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 176–85 and pp. 277–96. 9 See Leo Strauss, On Plato’s Symposium (ed. Seth Benardete; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), ch. 1, for detailed list of connections that he draws between the Symposium and many other dialogues. 10 There is a grey zone here. The Parmenides, like the Republic, is entirely narrated. The Phaedo and the Symposium both have an outer frame that is strictly speaking direct dialogue. Yet in these latter two dialogues the principal conversations are narrated by one speaker: Phaedo in the Phaedo, Apollodorus in the Symposium.

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Additionally, the Theatetus presents a hybrid case. In this dialogue, unique in its kind, a previous conversation is read from a transcript that has been written down. So while it is not a direct dialogue, neither is it a recounting from memory as with the three mentioned above. 11 I first encountered these observations in the work of Seth Benardete. See Benardete, The Argument of the Action, pp. 178–79. I later encountered the same observations in Leo Strauss, On Plato’s Symposium, 186. I suspect, but cannot confirm, that Benardete heard these things from Strauss. 12 For an insightful reflection of these concerns, see Drew Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), ch. 7. 13 I make no claim at the outset whether such things are words or concepts, separately real or only in the mind, innate or learned. Again, it is the unfolding of the study itself that will either answer such questions, or place the questions themselves in question.

Pythagorean Overture 1 ‘It is necessary at this point to note that the background of the entire dialogue is “Pythagorean” and “orphic”. A Pythagorean brotherhood is known to have resided in Phlius, where Phaedo talks to Echecrates. Philolaus is the founder of a similar brotherhood in Thebes, to which Cebes and Simmias apparently belonged. The assertion that it is not permitted to take one’s own life is – as Socrates intimates (62b) – a part of an esoteric doctrine of the Pythagoreans, according to which men live in a kind of enclosure, namely the body, and ought not to set themselves free and run away.’ Jacob Klein, ‘Plato’s Phaedo’ in Lectures and Essays (ed. Robert B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman; Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1985), pp. 375–93 (379). 2 It may be the case that a purely philosophical doctrine of the immortality of the soul is impossible. 3 Aristotle, Metaphysics (trans. Richard Hope; Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1952). 4 This is true of moderate readings such as that in Charles H. Kahn, ‘Pythagorean Philosophy before Plato’ in Alexander P.D. Mourelatos, The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1974), pp. 161–85; and stronger readings such as Leonid J. Zhmud, ‘All is Number? Basic Doctrine of Pythagoreanism Reconsidered’, Phronesis 34(3) (1989), pp. 270–92. 5 From K.S. Guthrie, The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library (Grand Rapids: Phanes Press, 1987), p. 168 (DK 4). Translation slightly altered. As I will argue, it does not seem warranted to use this statement to ground an understanding of numbers as (bodily) elements. However, it seems that statements like this one could have been the occasion for such understandings of Pythagorean thought.

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6 Cf. Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (trans. Eva Brann; New York: Dover, 1968), pp. 63–69 for a succinct but perspicacious account of Pythagorean number. 7 G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic (trans. A.V. Miller; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), p. 155.

1. Phaedo 1 It should also be noted that the bulk of Socrates’ speech is framed as that which someone (else) who is a philosopher would say. In a common Socratic move, Socrates distances himself from his own speaking. 2 Plato’s Phaedo (trans. Eva Brann et al.). All subsequent quotations of the Phaedo are taken from this translation. All references in this chapter are to the Phaedo, unless otherwise noted. 3 For a discussion of the notion of dialogic necessity, see Claudia Baracchi, Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato’s Republic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 78–80. 4 The usual approaches to interpreting Socrates’ autobiographical testimony in the Phaedo are to take it as (1) an accurate account of the historical Socrates’ own experiences, (2) a veiled account of Plato’s experiences or (3) a combination of 1 and 2. Firstly, I do not think that it is necessary to take a position on this question in order to meaningfully interpret the text. The relevance of such questions fall away once one no longer looks to the text for the transmission of a doctrine. If the passage is rather interpreted (a) in terms of the strict letter of the text, (b) in relation to the overall economy of the dialogue, and (c) in relation to the whole Platonic corpus, one has enough to work with without getting caught up in largely intractable debates which cannot really shed any light on the meaning of the text itself. Secondly, as Jacob Klein points out, strictly speaking, the words that Socrates speaks are neither his own, nor Plato’s, but the words of Phaedo. Plato makes Phaedo speak for Socrates. Thus if one is to begin sorting out who is speaking for whom in these passages, one must begin first with the question of who Phaedo is, and why Plato chooses him as the narrator of this dialogue. For a discussion of Phaedo’s reliability as a narrator see Anne Hartle, Death and the Disinterested Spectator (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 78–81. 5 Seth Benardete divides the dialogue in the following way: Part I (1) Purification of Athens – no killing: Separation. (2) Phaedo’s mixture of pleasure and pain: Together (soul). (3) Socrates’ pleasure and pain: Together (body). (4) Purification of Socrates – myth making: Separation. Part II (1) Philosophy as the practice of dying and being dead. (2) Proof of the necessary sequence of opposites generated out of one another. (3) Doctrine of recollection as proof. (4) Aesopian ghost story.

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Notes Part III (1) Simmias’ objection. (2) Cebes’ objection. (3) Socrates talks to Phaedo about the character of logos. (4) Refutation of Simmias. Part IV (1) Socrates’ autobiography to refute Cebes. (2) Refutation of Cebes. (3) Myth. (4) Socrates’ death.

This schema can be found in Benardete, The Argument of the Action, pp. 279–80. 6 See Gregory Vlastos, ‘Reasons and Causes in the Phaedo’, The Philosophical Review 78 (1969), pp. 292–96 and Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 133. 7 Note also that Socrates does not promise a formal refutation of Cebes’ objection. Rather, he says that what he is going to discuss might be useful for purposes of ‘persuasion’. 8 Both of which have been said to be at the root of philosophical thinking. See Theatetus 155d and Metaphysics 980a21. 9 Cf. Michael Davis, ‘Socrates’ Pre-Socratism: Some Remarks on the Structure of Plato’s Phaedo’, Review of Metaphysics 33 (1980), pp. 559–77 (560). 10 This is only true of the way that Socrates has construed these questions here. It is not the case, for instance, that Empedocles’ notions of thinking and knowing are calculated ‘scientific’ notions. They are, in fact, part of a highly self-reflective system of inquiry. What seems to be intimated by Socrates’ words is an attitude that has taken up the writings of thinkers like Empedocles and stripped them of their reflective aspects and reduced them to ‘causal’ accounts. 11 Davis makes this observation: ‘At a certain point eating no longer leads to growth, or at least to growth understood as healthy or natural. After that point there begins a gradual decline of life leading ultimately to death. If the common sense understanding of growth were true we would continue to grow indefinitely’ (‘Socrates’ Pre-Socratism’, p. 563). 12 Note that the conceptual analysis of the body into flesh, bone, and other parts anticipates the problems of parts and wholes, ones and twos, that will be spoken of below. 13 Note that with the comparisons of men and horses we again see a part/whole relationship. The head, as part of the whole of the body, is taken as that which explains the difference in size. The head is simultaneously included in and separated from the whole. This intertwinement of collection and division, of unity and partiality, will be brought out explicitly below. 14 Cf. Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, ch. 6. 15 This is not to say that number or mathematics will be the mode of explanation. Rather, it is a matter of coming to understand one’s own activity, coming to understand that what seems to be a simple and straightforward activity is in fact complex and multifaceted. 16 Note that this discussion retains a rather decidedly ‘physical’ aspect. The ones and twos are spoken of as if they are bodies in space. This is not yet the ‘One’ that we will encounter in the Parmenides which will resist any spatial or quantifiable attributes.

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17 This problem of ones and twos has immediate bearing upon the overall discussion of the Phaedo. The burden of the dialogue has been to determine whether the soul remains after death. In the course of the investigation it had been largely presumed that the soul is something separate from the body. That is, even when connected to the body during the course of a human life, the soul is treated as a distinct entity from the body, one which sometimes is seen as trapped in the body and other times seen as ruling over the body. In any case, there is a distinct schema of duality that has been in play throughout. Socrates’ account of ones and twos casts much of what is taken for granted in these exchanges into doubt. On the one hand, it reveals that an understanding of soul and body as two things which are brought together operates with an implicit spatial framework. It presumes that proximity is enough to account for the togetherness of the soul and body. On the other hand, such an understanding never really takes account of the unity of body and soul; it never undertakes to account for the person who would be this conjunction of soul and body. This aporia is marked in the Phaedo, and is foregrounded in the opening line: ‘You yourself, Phaedo – were you present with Socrates on that day when he drank the potion in the prison? [αυτ, P Φαδων, παρεγνου Σωκρα´τει ,κεν- τ .µρ  τ φα´ρµακον 1πιεν ,ν τ2 δεσµωτηρ4]’. The αυτ of Phaedo is presumed but never thematized. 18 G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 363–64. 19 I by no means think that this ambiguity is something naïve or primitive. The clear positing of sensibility and intelligibility that one finds in Plato conceals its own intimations of the ambiguous relationship between the two. What is perhaps lacking in an account like that of Anaxagoras is the dialectical moment of positing mind and intelligibility as different in kind. 20 The claim at this point does not require that the good itself is known, only that some good is desired. I think one would do well at this point in Socrates’ account to turn to Aristotle’s ethical writings. The entire argument that unfolds in the Nichomachean Ethics from the fact that human action is always oriented to some good seems to me directly relevant both to Socrates’ remarks concerning the problems of ‘inquiry into nature’ and his account of his second sailing. 21 Cf. Plato’s Crito for both a description of Socrates’ options for leaving Athens and avoiding his penalty, and for Socrates’ account of why he thinks it better for him to stay. 22 At this point it seems that even Socrates’ bending of his leg to rub away the pains of his bonds cannot be understood as primarily a bodily cause. Socrates’ bonds are the physical manifestation and enforcement of the will of the Athenian citizens. We see now that saying that the bonds are the cause of pain in Socrates’ leg is not the same as saying why he is in bonds in the first place. 23 Ronna Burger notes that if one were in fact able to know the final cause of everything, then philosophical inquiry would not be necessary. She suggests that perhaps the good of the impossibility of knowing such a cause is the possibility of

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philosophy itself. See Ronna Burger, The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999), p. 141. A two-level account runs through this section. On the one hand, Socrates speaks of those who despair of the stability and soundness of the things of the world and those who succumb to the thirst for victory. In each case he seems to mean that these people do so without understanding what they are doing. On the other hand, one can see in Socrates’ remarks an image of the sophist. The difference is that the sophist understands what he is doing; he self-consciously exploits the inconstancy of logos to paint a picture of a world without stability, and exploits the thirst for victory while not necessarily believing his own arguments. There is a sense in which such self-reflection is a trait shared with the philosopher. Cf. Gorgias 482c. Again, Aristotle’s ethical writings seem to echo the Socratic ‘method’ outlined here. The project of Aristotelian ethics is one where self-understanding through logos aids in the achievement of a certain harmony. Ethical life is a having of harmony. The phrase δε!τερο πλο refers to the use of oars when the winds fail, and can be rendered as the ‘second-best way’. This would be suggested by the movements which begin in the chapter on ‘Sense Certainty’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. There seems to be no necessity for anyone in particular to reflect on such things, but once one has it is impossible to revert to a prior standpoint. See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A.V. Miller; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 58–66. There is a great deal that could be said here about the relationship between the sun, blindness and the good, especially in relation to certain passages from the Republic. I do not think it is necessary to pursue those avenues here, more so because I think they are secondary to Socrates’ primary purpose – bringing attention to the unavoidable confrontation with logos as both the source and obstacle of human wisdom. See Francisco J. Gonzalez, Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice of Philosophical Inquiry (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), ch. 7, for an argument for this passage being about the good. Cf. Claudia Baracchi, ‘The Nature of Reason and the Sublimity of First Philosophy: Toward a Reconfiguration of Aristotelian Interpretation’, Epoché 7 (2003), pp. 223–49. See also Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (trans. Michael Heim; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). The appendix to this book, ‘Describing the Idea and Function of a Fundamental Ontology’, contains an important discussion of transcendence in which Heidegger attempts (in a language not used in Being and Time) to articulate the concordance between transcendence and being-in-the-world. Heidegger by no means abandons the notion of transcendence, but attempts to show that it is not to be understood as a leave-taking of this world, but rather that our very mode of being entails an always already accomplished transcendence. Such an understanding of transcendence will appear on the margins of this study. The

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common possession of language is one such marker of this understanding of transcendence. This entire section is presented as operating on the level of opinion. Socrates says three times in this paragraph that he is guided by what seems to be the case to him. He is not operating from a standpoint of certain knowledge. It would not be productive at this juncture to carry out a detailed debate over what might be called a metaphysics of mimesis, one where sensible things are taken to be ‘images’ of ideal ‘realities’. The text here is simply too thin to say anything decisive about it on this issue. Thus a more robust account would have to marshal many other Platonic texts, and this falls outside my project. This is the case both in terms of Platonic texts and other writings. The Republic, again, contains key passages that must be assessed with regard to Plato’s use of αλCθεια. Heidegger’s reflections on truth in Plato are essential explorations, even if they cannot be fully endorsed. See Martin Heidegger, ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’ in Pathmarks (ed. William McNeill; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For a criticism of Heidegger’s views see Paul Friedländer, Plato: An Introduction (trans. Hans Meyerhoff; New York: Pantheon Books, 1958). See also Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (trans. Janet Lloyd; New York: Zone Books, 1996). See Bernard Knox, Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 120–21 for a discussion of the word σκοπειˆ ν in relation to Attic science and inquiry. If vision retains a certain centrality with respect to the eidetic it must do so in light of a second sailing upon logoi and not in opposition to logoi. I presented in the introduction some other indications that these texts should be read together. Principally among them are the overlapping facts that these three dialogues are the only three narrated dialogues not narrated by Socrates and each contains an account of his early endeavours. The temporality of Socrates’ remarks in the Phaedo passage suggests that this is a fruitful place to pursue an interpretation of these texts.

2. Parmenides 1 All quotations from the Parmenides are from Plato’s Parmenides (trans. Albert Keith Whitaker; Newburyport: Focus Publishing, 1996). All references in this chapter are to the Parmenides unless otherwise noted. 2 This is made explicit in the case of Anaxagoras, but is implicit with regard to the questions and answers outlined at the beginning of his narrative. 3 Whitaker notes in the introduction (pp. 18–19) to his translation that ‘at the beginning of almost all of the arguments which follow in his conversation with Aristotles, Parmenides repeats the phrase “Once again, from the beginning”. It is a command that Socrates respects (his first words in [the Parmenides] are his request to Zeno to hear “once again” the “first” hypothesis) and many times

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in later life we hear Socrates repeat these same words: “Once again, from the beginning” ’. This is literally ‘without potential’ (αδ!νατον). I will use the terms eidos and idea interchangeably. Part of my argument pertains to the difficult status of eide as at once of things and of thought. For this reason I do not employ the commonly used ‘form’ for eidos. With the English word ‘idea’ I hope to be able to include both the Greek aspect of eidos/idea as the ‘looks’ which adhere in the things themselves, and the thought-dimension included in the typical use of ‘idea’ in English. For a very useful account of the terms ε=δο and 6δα in Greek literature before Plato, see A.E. Taylor, Varia Socratia: First Series (Oxford: James Parker & Co., 1911), ch. 5, ‘The Words ε=δο, 6δα in pre-Platonic Literature’. As Cornford writes: ‘It is generally agreed that the theory of Forms here put forward is identical with the theory as stated earlier in the Phaedo’. It is just this agreement that I wish to call into question. This claim is true only on the grounds that there is a theory of forms in the Phaedo. In fact, it is assumed that the presentation of ideas that Socrates makes in the Parmenides is essentially the same as some ‘theory’ given in the Phaedo. As I hope to show later, both are mistaken. There are some subtle, but crucial, differences between what Socrates says in the Parmenides and what he says of his hypothetical method in the Phaedo (particularly as regards the logos-embedded aspect of the account in the Phaedo), and the appeal to evidence for a theory of forms in the earlier arguments of the Phaedo fails to place that evidence in the proper dialogic context. Cf. F.M. Cornford, Plato and Parmenides (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1939), pp. 70–71; Robert G. Turnbull, The Parmenides and Plato’s Late Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 16. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference (trans. Joan Stambaugh; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 23–25. Cf. Hegel, Science of Logic, pp. 117–22. Sayre notes that this speech given by Socrates is the longest uninterrupted speech in the dialogue. He also notes that Socrates repeats himself often in this speech and gives it a rather unwieldy form. The conclusion that Sayre draws from this, which seems perspicuous, is that these are very much Socrates’ eide and that his presentation and understanding of them is distorted and clouded by his closeness to them. See Kenneth M. Sayre, Parmenides’ Lesson: Translation and Explication of Plato’s Parmenides (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), pp. 67–68. Miller notes that Socrates, in particular, seems unaware of the ways in which the eide must be thought as bound up with each other, regardless of their relation to things. Miller writes: ‘If plurality, for instance, is a form, it will be one; thus one form, plurality, will “commune with” or partake of its opposite, unity. This relation, of course, immediately suggests others. Each form will be one; but then each will be, as one, like the other forms and, so, will partake of likeness. On the other hand, as a distinctive one each will also be unlike the other forms

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and so will partake of unlikeness.’ (Mitchell H. Miller Jr., Plato’s Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986], pp. 41–42). Sayre claims that this remark by Socrates is intended to mean that we directly know the eide by ‘mind or reason’. I think this is wrong. There is nothing in Socrates’ speech that suggests that we know the eide themselves. Rather, I think this statement has to be taken as I stated above, that through a calculative reasoning we come to ‘grasp’ the eide in their necessity for explanation, but do not grasp them in the sense that we know them. Cf. Sayre, Parmenides’ Lesson, p. 75. The question of what there are ideas of is an important one, but not the most important for our present investigation. Being able, at the outset, to answer it would presume to already know what ideas are and how they stand in relation to things. Since this is part of the larger field of questions, it has to be answered either before or at the same time as the question ‘of what are there ideas’ is answered. Nevertheless, there is a general sorting of types in Parmenides’ questions to Socrates. After establishing that Socrates says there is an idea of likeness, he asks about justice, beauty and good. Then he asks about man, fire and water. Finally, he asks about hair, mud and dirt. Likeness points to ideas of relations, among which would be such ideas as equality, bigness and smallness. Justice, beauty and good are what we might today call regulative ideas; they are in any case not ideas of ‘things’ in any simple sense. Man, fire and water are natural kinds that display certain consistent ‘looks’. Finally, hair, mud and dirt represent things which seem to possess a certain fundamental indeterminacy – this seems to be why Socrates hesitates over the question of whether there are ideas of these things. The first two sets, the relational and regulative ideas, are the ones that Socrates is nearly always speaking of in the dialogues. Whether this fact is an answer to the question ‘of what are there ideas’ is unclear. Let us remember that in the ancient classification of the dialogues the Parmenides was given the subtitle ‘On Ideas’. Sayre agrees that the voluminous work produced on this question may in the end have little to say about the overall argument of the dialogue, and in fact may not be all that relevant to the specific discussion itself. See Sayre, Parmenides’ Lesson, pp. 78–80. It is instructive to compare this passage with Socrates’ remarks discussed above concerning the discernment of ideas through logismos. Parmenides characterizes ideas in terms of an appearing, precisely as appearing from within phenomena, whereas Socrates initially places the being-there of ideas in a largely logico-deductive context. Sayre turns the order of things around here. Much of his explication of these passages assumes that Plato is trying to contend with his so-called early theory of the forms. Sayre, for instance, makes repeated references to the Phaedo and its language of eide being unitary and separate. What he fails to take into account is that the Phaedo as a whole enacts a dissolution of these simple notions of oneness and separateness and that the account that Socrates gives of

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his hypothetical method never fails to foreground the positedness of the form. That is what is highlighted here – the eidos comes to be seen as one in concluding that it is one. Cf. Sayre, Parmenides’ Lesson, p. 79. See section 2 of Chapter 4, pp. 105–11. Sayre’s way of describing the ‘un-thought’ is by means of an image of thoughts floating around in the sensible world that are thought by no mind. See Sayre, Parmenides’ Lesson, p. 85. One could obviously turn to the Timaeus for an account that would seem to fit this need, but that what one finds there could unproblematically be supplemented as an answer to this question is highly doubtful. The halting, selfcorrecting and greatly qualified mode of speech in the Timaeus requires that the isolated moments of the dialogue not be too quickly extracted from their contexts. See John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Merle Walker writes, in an extremely perspicuous essay: ‘For every truly existent thing there are two aspects – its unity, absoluteness, and existence-in-self, which distinguish it from the infinite flux of becoming; its plurality and relativity through which the content of its nature is comprised. The problem of the One and the Many turns on the nature and mode of connection of these two essential aspects. Two salient facts concerning this paradox are obvious from the foregoing discussion: (1) the categories of Unity and Plurality are not restricted to any one order of Being, but are pervasive of all reality – Ideas, the soul, the cosmos, the state; and (2) if both self-identity and internal relation among real entities are definite attributes of Being, the final conclusion concerning the nature of the One and Many cannot be a resolution of either into terms of the other. Rather, the status of any real thing, whatever its degree of being, will always manifest two ultimate general characteristics of equal validity and necessity: self-existence and relation. The problem of how the one can be many or the many one therefore cannot be phrased, “Is the actual entity one or many”?, but must rather take the form of determining the nature of its unity and plurality, together with the full extent and meaning of their reciprocal relation.’ See ‘The One and the Many in Plato’s Parmenides’, The Philosophical Review 47 (1938), pp. 488–516 (492). This is a disagreement I have with Miller’s interpretation. Much of his analysis and interpretation is very cogent and perceptive, but he does not often enough emphasize the difference between the One and the ideas as each one. I would temper these remarks with the claim that this is only a provisional understanding of the relationship between Socrates’ hypothesis and Parmenides’. We will see that inasmuch as Parmenides’ gymnastic becomes a discourse about being, it cannot but end up having a wider relationship to the questions surrounding the eidetic than those of unity and multiplicity. From 139e to 140b a similar argument is made concerning likeness. We saw above that, in terms of the eide, this was a problem for Socrates. If likeness is an idea, and things are said to be like other ideas, then the ideas themselves are

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‘like’ and thus participate with other ideas. One might be tempted to say that Parmenides makes this point explicit here, but as I have been emphasizing, it is difficult to map Parmenides’ discourse directly onto a discourse about eide. What we are leading up to as a question, not to be answered but rather to be articulated, is the connection between speech, thought and being. For to say that the One, the Same, the Other and so on stand as conditions for the possibility of speech is not to propose some sort of priority of speech and language. These same ‘things’ seem equally to stand as conditions of the possibility of thought and being. Part of the project of inquiring into the status of the eidetic in the Platonic texts is the work of unfolding the connections among these various registers. Translation altered. Working out the relation between being and not-being is more difficult since it requires the addition of a second set of terms: coming-to-be and perishing. These are two modes of becoming, one on its way to being, the other on its way to not-being. In this regard, the sequence of transitions would be being → perishing → not-being and not-being → coming-to-be → being. The whole of Aristotle’s Physics, as well as the treatise on generation and corruption, could be fruitfully read in conjunction with this sequence in the Parmenides. This is largely a heuristic device. Examples of local motion are easier to set up in a way that is useful for explanation. It must be remembered, however, that two of the basic types of kinesis Aristotle is concerned with are those of growth and decay in nature and qualitative change (say, from black to white). ‘Now since a moving thing is moved from something to something, and every magnitude is continuous, the motion follows the magnitude. For through the magnitude’s being continuous, the motion too is continuous and through the motion the time. For as much as the motion is, so much also does the time always seem to become. And before and after belong first of all to place, and thereby to position. But since there is a before and an after in motion, analogous to those in the magnitude. But also there is a before and an after in time, since the one of them always follows the other. And whenever there is a motion, there is a before and an after in it. But surely being before-and-after is something else and not motion. But we recognize time whenever we mark off a motion, marking it off by means of a before and an after. And that is when we say that time has happened, whenever we mark off a before and after in a motion. And we mark them by taking them to be other and other with something else between them. For whenever we think the extremes differ from the middle, and the soul says there are two nows, one before and one after, then also we say this to be time. For time seems to be bounded by the now’ (Physics 219a10–30). Joe Sachs, Aristotle’s Physics (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995). ‘It is clear that everything that is moving has been moving earlier. For if in the primary time XR, something has been moved through the magnitude KL, then in half the time, something with the speed which started at the same time will

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have moved through half of it. But if the thing with equal speed has been moved a certain distance in the same time, the other one too must have moved the same magnitude, and so the moving thing will have been moving. And further, if we say something has been moved in the whole time XR, or in any time in general, by coming to the last now of it (since this is the boundary, and what is between nows is time), then also in the same way it should be said to have moved in the other times. And the division is the extremity of its half. So it will have been moved also in the half time, and in general in any of its parts whatever, since by means of the cut, every time is always bounded by the now there with it’ (Physics 236b32–237a11). 30 ‘That time either has no being at all, or is only scarcely and faintly, one might suspect from this: part of it has happened and is not, while the other part is going to be but is not yet, and it is out of these that the infinite, or any given, time is composed. But it would seem impossible for a thing composed of nonbeings to have any share in being’ (Physics 217b33–218a3). ‘For take it as impossible that the nows be touching each other, just as it is impossible that a point can touch a point. Then if it is annihilated not in the succeeding now [since there is no next succeeding one], but in another, then it would be at the same time as the infinitely many nows between them: but this is impossible’ (Physics 218a18–21). 31 ‘And the now marks off the motion into a before and an after; and this it does in a manner corresponding to that of the point. For the point also both holds together the length and divides it, since it is a beginning of one part and an end of another. But whenever one takes it in this way, using what is one as two, it is necessary to make a stop, if the same point is to be a beginning and an end. But the now is always other through the moving of the thing carried along. So time is a number not as of the same point, which is a beginning and an end, but rather as the extremities of a line; and neither is time a number as parts, both because of what has been said (for one might use the intermediate point as two, so that time would happen to stand still), and further because it is clear that the now is no part of time, nor is the division part of the motion, just as neither is the point any part of the line, but it is two lines that are part of one line’ (Physics 220a8–21). My treatment of this relation between the now and geometric points is somewhat schematic since it is the common logic that is of interest in this context. Aristotle notes the differences between the now and a point, especially as regards the apparent ‘motion’ of the now: ‘The now is a connection [συνχεια] of time, as was said; for it connects the past and the future. And it is a boundary [πρα] of time; for it is the beginning of one part and the end of another. But this is not as clear as with the point, which stands still. And the now divides, potentially; and insofar as it is a division, the now is always different, but insofar as it binds together, it is always the same, as with mathematical lines . . . Thus also, the now is in one way a division of time, potentially, and in another a common boundary and union of its parts. And the dividing and the uniting are

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the same act of the same thing, but the being of them is not the same’ (Physics 222a10–20). Greek Mathematical Works: Thales to Euclid (trans. Ivor Thomas; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), p. 437. Analogously, the now has the same relationship to time: ‘The now is no part of time’ (Physics 218a6). ‘For the limits belong only to that of which they are the limits’ (Physics 220a22–3). Of course, this geometrical example is flawed inasmuch as line segments themselves are limits of plane figures, and plane figures limits of solids. This very exercise, however, is contradictory. Our imagining itself is a sort of observation, and the ascription of ‘entity’ already implies the operation of a principle of unity within a multitude. Aristotle makes a similar point along these lines when he writes: ‘And one might be at an impasse whether, if the soul were not, time would be or not. For if it is impossible for there to be a counter, it is also impossible for there to be anything counted; so it is clear that neither can there be a number. For a number is either what has been counted or what is capable of being counted. But if nothing else is of such a nature as to count but the soul and the intelligence in the soul, then it is impossible that time be if the soul is not; but there would still be that which time depends on the being of, such as motion, if it is possible for it to be without soul. But the before and the after are in a motion, and insofar as they are counted, they are time’ (Physics 223a21–9). We could say, perhaps, that this entire investigation of the eidetic in these passages of Plato is an attempt to overcome a legacy of interpretations in which the eidetic is rendered overly abstract (or, perhaps, wrongly abstract). ‘So it is clear that things that always are, insofar as they always are, are not in time; for they are not surrounded by time, nor is the being of them measured by time. A sign of this is that they not affected by time in any way, just as if they were not in it’ (Physics 221b3–7). This claim is, perhaps, the most highly speculative of this study and calls for substantial further investigation. This reading of the Parmenides offers a set of guide posts that could orient an investigation utilizing a number of Platonic and Aristotelian texts. Again, this is not to say that the eide are linguistic entities. The relationship between logos and eide is one which, like that between points and lines, reveals a dialectical movement of limitation and manifestation. As, in a certain sense, constitutive of logos, the eide stand outside of logos. They are a-logical. See Baracchi, ‘The Nature of Reason’. See also, for an obscure but suggestive account of the relationship between language and ideas in Plato’s thought, Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (trans. John Osborne; London: Verso, 1998), pp. 27–56.

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3. Symposium 1 It is unclear whether Socrates is sincere in his claim that these lessons took place or whether he is inventing the entire story as he speaks. As is so often the case (e.g., Socrates’ speeches in the Phaedrus), Socrates disavows authorship of speeches that seem to be his own invention. 2 It must be remembered that Socrates is relating his encounter with Diotima. This means that the voice is Socrates’ speaking the words of both Diotima and himself. Furthermore, we should keep in mind that the outermost voice is that of Apollodorus, recounting the entire event as he heard it told by Aristodemus. 3 Quotations of the Symposium are from Plato’s Symposium (trans. Seth Benardete; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). All references in this chapter are to the Symposium, unless otherwise noted. 4 Eros does appear for a moment in the first part of the Parmenides. Parmenides prefaces his agreement to go through his gymnastic by saying, ‘Necessary it is to obey. And yet I seem to be suffering something like that Ibyceain horse, which, as a prizewinner but old, is about to take part in a chariot race and, being experienced, trembles at what is about to happen. Ibycus says that he resembles the horse since, although he is so old and unwilling, Necessity forces him to fall in love. And so I seem quite fearful, since I remember what sort of and how great a multitude of speeches I must swim through at my age. Nevertheless, I must show you this favor, especially since, as Zeno says, we are by ourselves’ (Parmenides 136e–137a). 5 Unless otherwise noted, insertions of Greek words are mine and insertions of English words are those of the translator. 6 The translation provided in Leo Strauss’ On Plato’s Symposium (a translation edited by Benardete) reads ‘if he must pursue beauty as a class’. See Leo Strauss, On Plato’s Symposium, p. 230. The note given by Kenneth Dover in the Cambridge edition of the Greek text reads ‘if beauty . . . in appearances is to be pursued’. See Plato, Symposium (ed. Kenneth Dover; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 155. 7 The suggestion is that the lover need not be a speech maker per se; rather, he needs to both facilitate the generation of speeches and seek them out. This points to characteristics of the mature Socrates. 8 Cf. Phaedrus 250b–c. In the great myth of his second speech, Socrates speaks of the difficulty of seeing justice and moderation in the phenomenal world. He says that this is the case because such a vision would be too beautiful. The suggestion, in regard to the present context, is that ‘to behold the beautiful in pursuits and laws’ would in fact be to behold justice and moderation. 9 In his discussion with Glaucon concerning the education of the guardians in the Republic, Socrates reproaches Glaucon for his superficial characterization of astronomy; namely, that astronomy is ‘higher’ and more refined because we look up and away from worldly things. Socrates says: ‘Even if a man were to

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learn something by tilting back his head and looking at the decorations on a ceiling, you would probably believe he contemplates with his intellect and not his eyes. Perhaps your belief is a fine one and mine innocent. I, for my part, am unable to hold that any study makes a soul look upward other than the one that concerns what is and is invisible. And if a man, gaping up or squinting down, attempts to learn something of sensible things, I would deny that he ever learns – for there is no knowledge of such things – or that his soul looks up, rather than down, even if he learns while floating on his back on land or sea’ (Republic 529a–c). While the register of language here may not be entirely commensurate with Diotima’s speech, this passage highlights an important point: literally turning away from worldly things has nothing to do with learning or insight. The turning which is prescribed is an inward turning that transforms one’s relationship to the world that can never effectively be abandoned. See Plato’s Seventh Letter 342b for an echo of the language of suddenness and an explicit usage of language of ‘the thing itself’. Cf. Stanley Rosen, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000), pp. 207–10. There is a logical difficulty with this account. If by saying that Eros is not beautiful and not ugly Diotima means that it has no share of either, then the notion of being between the two seems misplaced. This condition would be instead something like an absolute privation of aesthetic being whatsoever. If, on the other hand, Diotima means that Eros is neither simply beautiful nor simply ugly but partakes of both, then the sense in which Eros is a lack of beauty has to be redressed. This lack could not be an absolute lack; rather it would have to be a lack of absolute beauty. This problem, I believe, is a result of the observation made above: as a relational ‘thing’ eros cannot be understood as if it were a substance. Cf. Republic 477a–b. See footnote 4 in Benardete, The Argument of the Action, p. 295. The Symposium itself is an exception to Socrates’ usual shoelessness. This should tell us something of the concomitant non-coincidence of Socrates and Eros. Cf. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love (trans. Sears Jayne; Woodstock: Spring Publications, 1985), pp. 155–57, and Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Symposium, pp. 233–34. Cf. 205c–d where Diotima speaks of the way in which a general category, making/poiein, is applied as a name to one special group, the poets. The echo of Aristotle here is not coincidental. Diotima’s next statement could be taken as a gloss on Book I of the Nichomachean Ethics: ‘That,’ she said, ‘is because the happy are happy by the acquisition of good things; and there is no further need to ask, “For what consequence does he who wants to be happy want to be so.” But the answer is thought to be a complete one’ (205a). This conception of mortal being can be seen in contemporary accounts of the phenomenon of life. In his book Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life (New York: Columbia University Press,

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1991), Robert Rosen, a theoretical biologist, attempts to give a general account of living being. He reduces the living being to three basic moments: feeding, replication and excreting. This model is essentially one in which the living thing is seen as a being that is continually rebuilding itself in accordance with itself, life as the continual replacement of the same. 20 I mean by this the recognition of the difference between knowing what the conditions of knowledge are and knowledge itself. For instance, Aristotle notes in the Posterior Analytics that knowledge is possible only when one possesses true first principles. Yet, since first principles are that by which we reason, we cannot prove that first principles are true deductively. Thus the whole of the Aristotelian corpus is marked by a certain provisionality. It comprehends and works within the requirements of knowledge, while recognizing the limits of its foundations. 21 There is a sense in which human being is transcendence. Our way of being as being-in-the-world is a way that is always already a way of transcendence. This can be understood on a mundane level in terms of the trans-ness of language and nomos. Our way of being toward each other, the world and ourselves is grounded in things which are held in common, and in this sense transcend each of us. This manner of understanding transcendence can then be pursued further to ask after the grounds of the possibility of these things that we hold in common.

4. Phaedo 1 See the preface to Seth Benardete, Socrates’ Second Sailing: On Plato’s Republic (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984) for a reading of these passages in relation to Socrates’ second sailing. 2 All references in this chapter are to the Phaedo, unless otherwise noted. 3 I think it is impossible to attempt to understand what this procedure is by isolating it from the larger picture. Accounts such as those in R. Robinson’s Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), R. Hackforth’s Plato’s Phaedo (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955) or D. Bostock’s Plato’s Phaedo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) fail to address this issue. These accounts try to render a coherent and detailed procedure from Socrates’ condensed remarks. These accounts must often turn to similar passages in other dialogues to fill out their readings. I am going to largely eschew providing such an account of Socrates’ method. Rather, I want to focus on how the presentation of this method fits into the unfolding of his autobiography and ultimately on how it fits into the discursive and philosophical economy of the Phaedo as a whole. 4 A paradigmatic instance of this can be found in Gregory Vlastos’ well-known article, ‘Reasons and Causes in the Phaedo’. That Vlastos takes the transmission of a doctrine to be fundamental to Plato’s goals in writing the dialogue is beyond doubt. This belief leads Vlastos to make remarks like the following:

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‘Time and again we come across gaps in [Plato’s] thought, not knowing how he would expect us to fill them. This way of writing philosophy is not to be excused, and I have no desire to excuse it. But this much can at least be said for Plato: his silences are themselves suggestive not of confusion but of a canny, self-critical awareness of the limitations of his theory. The problems he persistently declines to discuss in the middle dialogues are those whose solution eludes him.’ (Vlastos, ‘Reasons and Causes in the Phaedo’, p. 323). Recall this formulation from the Parmenides: Socrates says, ‘But tell me this: don’t you think [νοµ7ζει] that there exists [ε=ναι], in itself [αυτ καθ  αHτ], some form [ε6δο] of Likeness, to which is opposed a different one, which is unlike, and that both you and I and the different things which we do in fact call “many” come to partake [have a share/µεταλαµβα´νειν] of these two things which are?’ (Parmenides 128e–129a). Cf. Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues, ch. 7. Burger notes that this capacity to simultaneously be mindful of similarity and difference is akin to the power of phantasia presented in Republic 509e–510a. See Burger, The Phaedo, p. 238. At 74c Socrates says, ‘What about this: Is it possible that the Equals Themselves at times appeared to you to be unequals or Equality to be Inequality?’ This passage has caused much consternation in the secondary literature. See, for example, the account in Bostock, Plato’s Phaedo, pp. 72–85. Much of the debate has been caused by the presumption that here, as elsewhere, Plato is committed to a ‘theory of ideas’ in which each idea is one and self-identical. The talk of ‘equals themselves’ in the plural is then taken to be at odds with this ‘theory’. It seems to me, however, that the singularity of ‘the equal itself’ is in no way jeopardized by ‘the equals themselves’ as long as we recognize the necessarily comparative nature of equality. If it is granted that the equal ‘appears’ only in the holding together in comparison of (at least) two things, then it is easier to see the sense of ‘the equals themselves’. The phenomenological description of the mindful comparison of two things as equal must include as a moment the idealizing of each of the two things as equals. That is, inasmuch as they are apprehended as equal the two are equals. Hence, there are really two modes of ideality here. One is the idea of equality, or ‘the equal itself’; the other is the ‘taking as equal’ each of the things in light of their comparison. Cf. Burger, The Phaedo, pp. 74–75. See John Russon, ‘We Sense That They Strive: How to Read (the Theory of the Forms)’ in John Russon and John Sallis (eds), Retracing the Platonic Text (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), pp. 70–84 (71–73) for a similar account of this passage. The word that is being translated in these passages as ‘grant’ is συγχωρω. The word implies both a moving aside and a coming together. In this context we can see that the ability of Socrates to continue his discourse is premised upon Cebes’ refusal to block his way concerning the matter of the being of beauty itself, etc. But Cebes’ making room for Socrates is at the same time their

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coming together in agreement about the matter at hand, at least provisionally. Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus (trans. Robert M. Wallace; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 35–44. See Klein, Plato’s Meno, pp. 135–36. It seems to me significant as well that Socrates, in this context (again, contra his mode of presentation in the Parmenides), resists generalizing statements about ideas. Instead, he speaks of one ‘itself’ and then another, but never all together. This, too, seems to indicate the way in which the ideas live in discourse or, perhaps, through discourse. This point sums up my disagreement with the standard interpretation of this section of the Phaedo, that it is an attempt on Plato’s part to put forth an (early) version of a theory of ideas. Quite to the contrary, I want to claim that this passage underscores the very tentativeness of the eidetic as a theory. Its clear value is practical, not theoretical. The positing of ideas allows Socrates to do certain things, but in itself such positing does not allow him to know anything. Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato (trans. P. Christopher Smith; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 33–34 and Klein, Plato’s Meno, pp. 137–38. And in this way must itself be examined at some point. The paradigmatic instance of this dialectical progression comes at the end of Book V of the Republic. After Socrates introduces the figure of the philosopher, these sets of distinctions follow one from another: eide, sensible/intelligible, ignorance/knowledge/opinion, being/non-being. The account given there also reveals the way in which these distinctions constitute a certain fabric. There is no simple order to their unfolding; rather one must see how a whole structure of distinctions is implicated as soon as one member of the structure is evoked. See Republic 475e–480a. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1035b14–28. Cf. Hans Jonas, ‘Biological Foundations of Individuality’ in Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974), pp. 185–205. In Greek we could say νησι and νηµα. This line of thinking is fundamentally opposed to the notion put forth by Ross that the soul is related to the ideas as a mediator between the ideas and sensible things. We have seen above that such an interpretation fails to think separation ontologically rather than mythically.

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Index Anaxagoras 19–28, 37, 39, 89–90 Aristotle and Aristotelianism 6–9, 61–3

immortality, striving for 83, 85 in-between opinion 75

beauty 69–74, 78, 81–8, 91, 100–1 Benardete, Seth 2

knowing how and knowing why 24

death fear of 11, 27–8 nature of 34–5 dialectic 91 Diotima 68–82, 85–8, 90, 107 eclipse analogy 33 eide 1–5, 38, 42–8, 51, 64–9, 73, 87, 89–94, 104–6, 109–11 Empedocles 8 episteme 105 equal itself concept 96–8 equality, meaning of 98–9, 107 ergoi 35 Eros and eros 1–3, 67–9, 73–82, 85–7 erotic ascent 67–78, 81, 85–7 Euclid 6, 61–2 geometry 62–3 growth 23 happiness 81, 86 Hegel, G.W.F. 10 hypothetical method 36–7, 92, 101–5 ideality 4–5, 8, 16, 37, 111 distinct senses of 89–91 ideas, nature of 50–4, 65 ignorance, awareness of 79

line segments 62–3 logos and logoi 3, 11, 14, 26, 29–36, 37, 42, 45, 56, 66, 70, 85–6, 91–5, 100–5 manyness of things 43–4 materialist philosophies 9–10 misology 6, 28–31, 91, 101–5 narrated dialogues 3 nature, invocation of 83 non-contradiction, principle of 69 number status of 8–9 understanding of 17 ousia 105 Parmenides and the Parmenides 1–6, 36–69, 72–3, 77, 85, 87, 89–93, 104–6 participation 47–9, 87 persuasion 31 Phaedo, the 2–8, 12, 14, 20, 25, 28, 30, 34, 36–41, 89–90, 93, 104–8 positing of principles and ideas 10, 91, 102–5 procreation 84 Pythagorean thinking 8–9, 96 Pythodorus 45

140

Index

recollection 95–8, 107 reflexivity 92 reification 93, 96 Republic, the 1–2 rhetorical dimension of discourse 40–1, 52 self, the 107–11 self-knowledge 25 separation 54–5, 65–6, 74, 77–8, 87 sexual attraction 83 Socrates autobiography of 28, 34, 37, 90, 103, 106 blindness of 12–19, 32–3 death of 11, 27 second sailing of 5–6, 30–7, 90 as a young man 3, 6, 29–30, 36, 38, 91

sophistic arguments 102–4 soul, the different senses of 109 and ideas 109–11 immortality of 8, 14, 29, 96 as the living of the body 107–10 as the locus of thought 109–11 separation from the body 26, 106, 108 transmigration of 8 Symposium, the 1–6, 36, 67–8, 73, 88–91, 107 third-man argument 49–52 transcendence 88 truth, usages of the word 34–5 Zeno 38–46, 51, 55, 72–3