Lecture Eight: Dialectic 8.3

8.3 Rescuing differences

The Sophist provides one possible solution to the problems introduced in the Parmenides. Here, Plato advances a new way of conceiving of ideas or forms as necessarily interconnected and sharing in one another. Once again, the dialogue is conducted not by Socrates, but rather by a ‘visitor from Elea,’ who thinks of Parmenides as his ‘father.’ And yet, the visitor is ready to overcome Parmenides’s own contention that ‘what is not’ is something that cannot be thought or talked about. In this sense, the discussion in the Sophist takes the cue from some of the results of the deductions in the Parmenides and then shows another way of disentangling them.

The general purpose of the dialogue is to arrive at a sound definition of what a ‘sophist’ is, especially for the sake of distinguishing between a ‘sophist’ and a ‘philosopher’ (the latter being something like the ‘noble’ and ‘right’ version of the former). The visitor applies a method that is referred to as dialectical but does not work like the one illustrated in the Parmenides. In this new method, the purpose is to first identify a common genre to which the thing-to-be-defined belongs, and then progressively divide up this genre into mutually exclusive sub-categories, such that the thing-to-be-defined has to be neatly posited in one or in the other. This process of subsequent divisions is continued until one reaches the point where any new division would directly include the thing-to-be-defined as one of the two parts to be divided.

The visitor begins to apply this method in a number of iterations, reaching various definitions of what a sophist might be. However, all these definitions appear to some extent provisional, until he stumbles upon the issue of falsehood. The sophist, so it seems, must be shown to be someone who is not really an expert as he pretends to be, but someone who deceives and creates only a semblance of knowledge. But how can we define this possibility of falsehood in the first place?

The problem is that speaking the false means saying something that does not correspond to how things really are. Falsity is a way of asserting ‘what is not.’ This observation leads the visitor to engage with Parmenides’s views. The historical Parmenides already claimed that thought and speech can only be about Being, while non-being cannot be thought or talked about. The visitor introduces a number of puzzles and problems that would follow from denying this Parmenidean tenet. He then states:

However, even saying this much is contradictory, since it attributes predicates to what is not (238e-239a). This constitutes the ‘problem of non-being,’ namely, a series of puzzles concerning the impossibility of talking about non-being (as when one speaks falsehood) together with the impossibility of not talking in a way that somehow entails a paradoxical reference to some form of non-being. To define a speech as true and not deceitful, one needs to be able to spell out what deceitful speech is, by thus granting the possibility of speaking falsehood. At this point, the visitor announces:

In reference to what we have seen in the Parmenides, two points needs to be emphasized. First, the problem of non-being can easily be rephrased as the problem of accounting for the idea of difference, since non-being is the paradigm for conceiving of the property of ‘being other-than,’ or ‘different-from’ something else. Without offering a valid account of difference, it will be impossible to account for falsehood or appearance. Paradoxically, the visitor’s claim entails that Parmenides himself would not have been entitled to talk about falsehood (about the ‘path of Night’ that he takes non-being to be) or appearances (about the way in which mortals think about phenomena as really changing and partaking of both being and non-being), since in Parmenides’s view it is impossible to talk about non-being, and hence it is impossible to utter falsehoods or distinguish appearances from reality. The series of deductions we encountered in the Parmenides, however, suggests one way in which this paradox can be alleviated. On one account of the function of the deductions, we saw that the distinction between appearance and reality does not cut across different regions of what can be said, but rather distinguishes between the whole of what can be said (covered by the deductions) and an ultimate reality that is behind or beyond it, accessible only through some intuition. However, even in this case, Parmenides (both the historical author and the character in Plato’s dialogue) does not seem entitled to make this distinction because this would require accepting the reality of such a difference, while also denying that difference (‘what is not’) is something real.

Hence, the second point made by the visitor: the way out from this tangle consists in merging being and non-being to some extent. This is the suggestion that could have been already derived from the Parmenides, insofar as it was becoming apparent that Socrates’s positing of ideas as sharply demarcated from one another was the most problematic assumption in the whole discussion. In this sense, the visitor now tries to flesh out a possible way of envisaging being and non-being as somehow mutually interwoven. In so doing, the visitor also introduces several important clarifications, which will end up creating a snowball effect against the very idea of conceiving of dialectic as an anesthetic practice. This latter aspect is particularly relevant for our present discussion and must be stressed.

One of the most important remarks, for instance, comes from the visitor’s definition of being:

‘To be’ means to be capable of acting or be acted upon. Being and action are convertible to some extent and in some way.^[1] Since action is transitive, an intransitive reality cannot be said to be active in any way (Indian thinkers would agree). But this then means that what is entirely devoid of action is by definition a sheer nothingness, it is no reality at all (pace Parmenides and Indian thinkers). The visitor goes further:

There is here the possibility of interpreting being in a quasi-personalistic and theological way, since being must also possess life and intelligence, hence the key qualities that would make up some sort of divine person. The visitor also repeats the issue already encountered about the conditions of intelligibility of reality and the need for postulating ideas: if ideas are completely unchanging, they escape the domain of knowledge (which is a sort of action) and are of no use in knowing anything. Yet if everything is changing, nothing can be known, because nothing will have any stable nature to be known.

This and connected considerations lead the visitor to conclude that ideas must be taken as connected and partaking in each other. To some extent, some ideas must be able to mix, some to a greater degree, some to a lesser degree. Some ideas might be disjoined, but others must be necessarily linked. On this basis, it is possible to better understand that the one who is genuinely skilled in mastering these distinctions is the true philosopher, the expert in dialectic:

Notice how different this view of dialectic is from the one we encountered in the Parmenides. There, the sort of training that Parmenides advocated had to do with the ability of articulating various hypotheses, permutating elements, considering positive and negative consequences, until the whole logical space surrounding a given idea was exhausted, and arguably mutual incompatible consequences derived. Here, instead, the visitor contends that dialectic is concerned with distinguishing between various genres and kinds, sorting out similarities and differences. In this sense, this kind of dialectic is already based on the assumption that ideas do partake of each other. Since this assumption was precisely what was denied in the Parmenides, the dialectical practice in the two dialogues is not only different, but it is based on opposite premises.

This becomes most apparent in the way the visitor arrives at a definition of the ‘five great kinds,’ namely, the five most general ideas that can be used to understand the basic features of reality. These are: being, change, rest, sameness, and diversity. For present purposes, it is the inclusion of diversity within one of these five kinds that is particularly noteworthy. This move allows the visitor to define ‘what is not’ as an expression of sharing diversity among different things. As he explains:

Difference is one of the most general kinds or ideas, in which all other ideas necessarily partake insofar as they are distinct ideas. Socrates’s intuition in the Parmenides, according to which ideas must exist in themselves and by themselves, is thus vindicated. In order to be what they are, ideas (like any entity), need to be different from other entities, and this means that each entity is not something else. The existence of this property of ‘not-being-something-else’ means that all entities necessarily partake in difference. However, difference must not be conceived as a kind in its own right that is absolutely unmixed with all other kinds. In fact, the opposite is the case. By partaking in all other kinds, difference allows for their mutual distinguishability, but also for the fact that things can both be what they are and be different from one another. This is the how the visitor goes beyond Parmenides’s prohibition of talking about non-being.

Such a move comes with an important qualification: ‘when we say something is not, it seems, we’re not saying that it is the opposite of what is, we’re just saying it is different’ (257b, transl. Rowe 2015, 160). The visitor makes clear that ‘what is not’ cannot be conceived in terms of an absolute opposite to Being itself, since conceiving of non-being in this way is precisely what leads to the tangle of problems mentioned earlier. The issue with this approach is that it takes difference as an idea that is unmixed with any other, and hence as something that needs to operate as an absolute, like in the absolute opposition (difference) that Parmenides posited between Being and nothing. In this case, difference means that if A and B are different, then they cannot share anything (they cannot also partake of identity). The presence of difference excludes the presence of anything else, including identity. This rigid view of difference is essential to Parmenides’s account, but is also precisely what the visitor rejects. In other words, the underpinning difficulty in the Parmenidean approach is to stick to a too rigid understanding of ideas that does not allow for their mixing (which was in fact Socrates’s own problem in the Parmenides).

Having abandoned this view as unhelpful, the visitor can thus conclude:

The opposite of being (absolute non-being or absolute nothingness) is not something that is just left behind untouched by this discussion. Rather, it is dismissed as the wrong way of conceptualizing non-being. The mistake in this account is taking non-being as something that could somehow stand in its own right without mixing with anything else. This sharp ontological demarcation is the main problem, and once it is abandoned, non-being can be more helpfully understood as the quality of ‘not-being-something-else,’ namely, as difference. Difference partakes in being and hence difference is, and certainly the sharing of difference in being is the sharing of two genuinely distinct and irreducible ideas in their mutual inter-mixing. Difference is different from the being in which it shares (sharing in something else presupposes a difference between at least two entities); and since difference is different from being, it must surely be possible for difference to be what is not, that is, it must be possible to assert that difference is a form of non-being. Moreover, in virtue of the fact that being is different from difference itself, being can be asserted as a kind in its own right. Considering being an idea in its own right vindicates some of the qualities attributed to it by (the historical) Parmenides, who conceived of being as an absolute unity, homogeneous, and lacking any determinations. What allows being to have these qualities is precisely its ability to share in the nature of difference, in virtue of which it can be set apart (i.e., be different) from all the other ideas.

One way of contrasting the sort of dialectic presented in the Parmenides with the dialectic advocated in the Sophist is by calling the former a ‘segregating dialectic,’ and the latter a ‘relational dialectic.’ Against the segregating kind of dialectic, the visitor reiterates its inability to achieve any form of meaningful discussion:

To be fair, on our reading at least, the segregating dialectic was perhaps not intended to support colloquial conversation, especially if one uses it as a tool for inducing anesthetic intuition. Be that as it may, supporting colloquial conversation becomes now a central feature in the visitor’s discussion, and he can easily make the point that only a relational dialectic fits this bill.

This turn towards language signals the way that Plato drifts away from the anesthetic approach. In the last part of the Sophist, the visitor comes back to the main topic of dialogue. He grants that ‘speech, when there is speech, must necessarily say something of something; it’s impossible for it to say something of nothing’ (262e, transl. Rowe 2015, 168). This remark is a steppingstone for introducing a ‘correspondence theory of truth’, according to which speech is true when it picks out a relation among things that corresponds to how these things actually are in reality (somehow ‘outside’ of speech itself). Falsehood is defined as a lack of such a correspondence between reality and speech. As the visitor explains:

Falsehood and appearance instantiate a particular form of difference or dissimilarity between speech and reality. Before this long discussion, it seemed problematic to offer an account of falsehood, since difference entails a form of non-being, and according to Parmenides, non-being cannot meaningfully be part of any discourse or even be thought of. Now this Parmenidean worry has been left behind. The visitor thus makes one further move and identifies thought and belief with speech. Thought is ‘an internal dialogue of the soul with itself,’ which means that from a structural point of view, to think and to use language are the same (hence, there is no thought without some linguistic and conceptual articulation).^[2] No further justification and argument are provided here to back up this move, which is perhaps taken to be unproblematic or obvious.

But this is far from obvious. The historical Parmenides himself equated being and thought (Fragments 3 and 6) but considered words (speech) as only misguiding constructions of mortals who follow the path of Night (Fragment 8). This suggests that he would have denied that thought (which is a truthful manifestation of being) and speech (which establishes nothing but ‘names’ and does not yield the truth) can be equated. We can also add that some Indian Upaniṣadic thinkers, at least, would strongly protest against this conflation of linguistically articulated thought and thought in general, since the activity of cognizing does not necessarily entail having an object, and surely does not entail having to be articulated linguistically. So, by equating thought and speech, Plato is redefining philosophy, opening a new way of conceiving of its nature and tasks, which remains the dominant one today.^[3]

This Platonic move does not necessarily entail that philosophy becomes entirely a theoretical affair. Quite to the contrary, if we follow Hadot’s interpretation (Lecture Zero), Hellenistic schools will derive from the practice of Socratic dialogue the inspiration for several spiritual exercises aimed at overcoming individual passions and reaching some sort of universal standpoint; perhaps an identification with a Cosmic Reason or Consciousness. However, these exercises all rely on the interiorization of dialogical (and social) practices, which exclude the method of anaesthetic trance and aim at a final goal more akin to an intellectual understanding of the unity of the universe, rather than an actual immediate experience of an ineffable and difference-transcending reality.^[4]

We noticed above the definition of being as a capacity to act or be acted upon. We then observed how this quickly led to the possibility of personalizing the idea of being, assuming that it must also be somehow endowed with thought and intelligence. Further, the visitor introduced his account of relational dialectic, as the expertise in drawing distinctions between kinds and accounting for the mixing of various ideas. This sort of relational dialectic (which is the special art of the philosopher) is based on a relational account of difference, no longer conceived of as the Parmenidean absolute non-being, but rather as a relational difference among things or entities. Building on this account, the visitor can draw an even stronger connection between language and dialectic, showing why discourse necessarily requires a relational account of difference. This account allows for the possibility of distinguishing between truth and falsity (or reality and appearance). Eventually, the equation between thought and speech closes the discussion, by revealing that the art of dialectic does not concern only a skillful way of talking about realities, but also the most skillful way of thinking, since there is in fact no difference between speech and thought.