The awe with which Plato regarded the character of 'the great'
Parmenides has extended to the dialogue which he calls by his name. None
of the writings of Plato have been more copiously illustrated, both in
ancient and modern times, and in none of them have the interpreters
been more at variance with one another. Nor is this surprising. For the
Parmenides is more fragmentary and isolated than any other dialogue, and
the design of the writer is not expressly stated. The date is uncertain;
the relation to the other writings of Plato is also uncertain; the
connexion between the two parts is at first sight extremely obscure;
and in the latter of the two we are left in doubt as to whether Plato is
speaking his own sentiments by the lips of Parmenides, and overthrowing
him out of his own mouth, or whether he is propounding consequences
which would have been admitted by Zeno and Parmenides themselves. The
contradictions which follow from the hypotheses of the one and many have
been regarded by some as transcendental mysteries; by others as a mere
illustration, taken at random, of a new method. They seem to have been
inspired by a sort of dialectical frenzy, such as may be supposed to
have prevailed in the Megarian School (compare Cratylus, etc.). The
criticism on his own doctrine of Ideas has also been considered, not as
a real criticism, but as an exuberance of the metaphysical imagination
which enabled Plato to go beyond himself. To the latter part of the
dialogue we may certainly apply the words in which he himself describes
the earlier philosophers in the Sophist: 'They went on their way rather
regardless of whether we understood them or not.'
The Parmenides in point of style is one of the best of the Platonic
writings; the first portion of the dialogue is in no way defective in
ease and grace and dramatic interest; nor in the second part, where
there was no room for such qualities, is there any want of clearness or
precision. The latter half is an exquisite mosaic, of which the small
pieces are with the utmost fineness and regularity adapted to one
another. Like the Protagoras, Phaedo, and others, the whole is a
narrated dialogue, combining with the mere recital of the words spoken,
the observations of the reciter on the effect produced by them. Thus we
are informed by him that Zeno and Parmenides were not altogether pleased
at the request of Socrates that they would examine into the nature of
the one and many in the sphere of Ideas, although they received his
suggestion with approving smiles. And we are glad to be told that
Parmenides was 'aged but well-favoured,' and that Zeno was 'very
good-looking'; also that Parmenides affected to decline the great
argument, on which, as Zeno knew from experience, he was not unwilling
to enter. The character of Antiphon, the half-brother of Plato, who
had once been inclined to philosophy, but has now shown the hereditary
disposition for horses, is very naturally described. He is the sole
depositary of the famous dialogue; but, although he receives the
strangers like a courteous gentleman, he is impatient of the trouble of
reciting it. As they enter, he has been giving orders to a bridle-maker;
by this slight touch Plato verifies the previous description of him.
After a little persuasion he is induced to favour the Clazomenians, who
come from a distance, with a rehearsal. Respecting the visit of Zeno
and Parmenides to Athens, we may observe--first, that such a visit is
consistent with dates, and may possibly have occurred; secondly, that
Plato is very likely to have invented the meeting ('You, Socrates, can
easily invent Egyptian tales or anything else,' Phaedrus); thirdly, that
no reliance can be placed on the circumstance as determining the date
of Parmenides and Zeno; fourthly, that the same occasion appears to be
referred to by Plato in two other places (Theaet., Soph.).
Many interpreters have regarded the Parmenides as a 'reductio ad
absurdum' of the Eleatic philosophy. But would Plato have been likely to
place this in the mouth of the great Parmenides himself, who appeared
to him, in Homeric language, to be 'venerable and awful,' and to have
a 'glorious depth of mind'? (Theaet.). It may be admitted that he has
ascribed to an Eleatic stranger in the Sophist opinions which went
beyond the doctrines of the Eleatics. But the Eleatic stranger expressly
criticises the doctrines in which he had been brought up; he admits that
he is going to 'lay hands on his father Parmenides.' Nothing of this
kind is said of Zeno and Parmenides. How then, without a word of
explanation, could Plato assign to them the refutation of their own
tenets?
The conclusion at which we must arrive is that the Parmenides is not
a refutation of the Eleatic philosophy. Nor would such an explanation
afford any satisfactory connexion of the first and second parts of the
dialogue. And it is quite inconsistent with Plato's own relation to the
Eleatics. For of all the pre-Socratic philosophers, he speaks of them
with the greatest respect. But he could hardly have passed upon them a
more unmeaning slight than to ascribe to their great master tenets the
reverse of those which he actually held.
Two preliminary remarks may be made. First, that whatever latitude we
may allow to Plato in bringing together by a 'tour de force,' as in the
Phaedrus, dissimilar themes, yet he always in some way seeks to find
a connexion for them. Many threads join together in one the love and
dialectic of the Phaedrus. We cannot conceive that the great artist
would place in juxtaposition two absolutely divided and incoherent
subjects. And hence we are led to make a second remark: viz. that
no explanation of the Parmenides can be satisfactory which does not
indicate the connexion of the first and second parts. To suppose that
Plato would first go out of his way to make Parmenides attack the
Platonic Ideas, and then proceed to a similar but more fatal assault on
his own doctrine of Being, appears to be the height of absurdity.
Perhaps there is no passage in Plato showing greater metaphysical power
than that in which he assails his own theory of Ideas. The arguments are
nearly, if not quite, those of Aristotle; they are the objections which
naturally occur to a modern student of philosophy. Many persons will be
surprised to find Plato criticizing the very conceptions which have been
supposed in after ages to be peculiarly characteristic of him. How can
he have placed himself so completely without them? How can he have ever
persisted in them after seeing the fatal objections which might be urged
against them? The consideration of this difficulty has led a recent
critic (Ueberweg), who in general accepts the authorised canon of the
Platonic writings, to condemn the Parmenides as spurious. The accidental
want of external evidence, at first sight, seems to favour this opinion.
In answer, it might be sufficient to say, that no ancient writing of
equal length and excellence is known to be spurious. Nor is the silence
of Aristotle to be hastily assumed; there is at least a doubt whether
his use of the same arguments does not involve the inference that he
knew the work. And, if the Parmenides is spurious, like Ueberweg, we
are led on further than we originally intended, to pass a similar
condemnation on the Theaetetus and Sophist, and therefore on the
Politicus (compare Theaet., Soph.). But the objection is in reality
fanciful, and rests on the assumption that the doctrine of the Ideas was
held by Plato throughout his life in the same form. For the truth
is, that the Platonic Ideas were in constant process of growth and
transmutation; sometimes veiled in poetry and mythology, then again
emerging as fixed Ideas, in some passages regarded as absolute and
eternal, and in others as relative to the human mind, existing in
and derived from external objects as well as transcending them. The
anamnesis of the Ideas is chiefly insisted upon in the mythical portions
of the dialogues, and really occupies a very small space in the entire
works of Plato. Their transcendental existence is not asserted, and
is therefore implicitly denied in the Philebus; different forms
are ascribed to them in the Republic, and they are mentioned in the
Theaetetus, the Sophist, the Politicus, and the Laws, much as Universals
would be spoken of in modern books. Indeed, there are very faint traces
of the transcendental doctrine of Ideas, that is, of their existence
apart from the mind, in any of Plato's writings, with the exception of
the Meno, the Phaedrus, the Phaedo, and in portions of the Republic. The
stereotyped form which Aristotle has given to them is not found in Plato
(compare Essay on the Platonic Ideas in the Introduction to the Meno.)
The full discussion of this subject involves a comprehensive survey of
the philosophy of Plato, which would be out of place here. But, without
digressing further from the immediate subject of the Parmenides, we
may remark that Plato is quite serious in his objections to his own
doctrines: nor does Socrates attempt to offer any answer to them. The
perplexities which surround the one and many in the sphere of the Ideas
are also alluded to in the Philebus, and no answer is given to them. Nor
have they ever been answered, nor can they be answered by any one else
who separates the phenomenal from the real. To suppose that Plato, at a
later period of his life, reached a point of view from which he was able
to answer them, is a groundless assumption. The real progress of Plato's
own mind has been partly concealed from us by the dogmatic statements of
Aristotle, and also by the degeneracy of his own followers, with whom a
doctrine of numbers quickly superseded Ideas.
As a preparation for answering some of the difficulties which have
been suggested, we may begin by sketching the first portion of the
dialogue:--
Cephalus, of Clazomenae in Ionia, the birthplace of Anaxagoras, a
citizen of no mean city in the history of philosophy, who is the
narrator of the dialogue, describes himself as meeting Adeimantus and
Glaucon in the Agora at Athens. 'Welcome, Cephalus: can we do anything
for you in Athens?' 'Why, yes: I came to ask a favour of you. First,
tell me your half-brother's name, which I have forgotten--he was a mere
child when I was last here;--I know his father's, which is Pyrilampes.'
'Yes, and the name of our brother is Antiphon. But why do you ask?'
'Let me introduce to you some countrymen of mine, who are lovers of
philosophy; they have heard that Antiphon remembers a conversation of
Socrates with Parmenides and Zeno, of which the report came to him from
Pythodorus, Zeno's friend.' 'That is quite true.' 'And can they hear the
dialogue?' 'Nothing easier; in the days of his youth he made a careful
study of the piece; at present, his thoughts have another direction: he
takes after his grandfather, and has given up philosophy for horses.'
'We went to look for him, and found him giving instructions to a worker
in brass about a bridle. When he had done with him, and had learned
from his brothers the purpose of our visit, he saluted me as an old
acquaintance, and we asked him to repeat the dialogue. At first, he
complained of the trouble, but he soon consented. He told us that
Pythodorus had described to him the appearance of Parmenides and Zeno;
they had come to Athens at the great Panathenaea, the former being at
the time about sixty-five years old, aged but well-favoured--Zeno, who
was said to have been beloved of Parmenides in the days of his youth,
about forty, and very good-looking:--that they lodged with Pythodorus at
the Ceramicus outside the wall, whither Socrates, then a very young
man, came to see them: Zeno was reading one of his theses, which he
had nearly finished, when Pythodorus entered with Parmenides and
Aristoteles, who was afterwards one of the Thirty. When the recitation
was completed, Socrates requested that the first thesis of the treatise
might be read again.'
'You mean, Zeno,' said Socrates, 'to argue that being, if it is many,
must be both like and unlike, which is a contradiction; and each
division of your argument is intended to elicit a similar absurdity,
which may be supposed to follow from the assumption that being is many.'
'Such is my meaning.' 'I see,' said Socrates, turning to Parmenides,
'that Zeno is your second self in his writings too; you prove admirably
that the all is one: he gives proofs no less convincing that the many
are nought. To deceive the world by saying the same thing in entirely
different forms, is a strain of art beyond most of us.' 'Yes, Socrates,'
said Zeno; 'but though you are as keen as a Spartan hound, you do not
quite catch the motive of the piece, which was only intended to protect
Parmenides against ridicule by showing that the hypothesis of the
existence of the many involved greater absurdities than the hypothesis
of the one. The book was a youthful composition of mine, which was
stolen from me, and therefore I had no choice about the publication.' 'I
quite believe you,' said Socrates; 'but will you answer me a question? I
should like to know, whether you would assume an idea of likeness in the
abstract, which is the contradictory of unlikeness in the abstract, by
participation in either or both of which things are like or unlike
or partly both. For the same things may very well partake of like and
unlike in the concrete, though like and unlike in the abstract are
irreconcilable. Nor does there appear to me to be any absurdity in
maintaining that the same things may partake of the one and many, though
I should be indeed surprised to hear that the absolute one is also
many. For example, I, being many, that is to say, having many parts or
members, am yet also one, and partake of the one, being one of seven
who are here present (compare Philebus). This is not an absurdity, but
a truism. But I should be amazed if there were a similar entanglement in
the nature of the ideas themselves, nor can I believe that one and many,
like and unlike, rest and motion, in the abstract, are capable either of
admixture or of separation.'
Pythodorus said that in his opinion Parmenides and Zeno were not very
well pleased at the questions which were raised; nevertheless, they
looked at one another and smiled in seeming delight and admiration of
Socrates. 'Tell me,' said Parmenides, 'do you think that the abstract
ideas of likeness, unity, and the rest, exist apart from individuals
which partake of them? and is this your own distinction?' 'I think that
there are such ideas.' 'And would you make abstract ideas of the just,
the beautiful, the good?' 'Yes,' he said. 'And of human beings like
ourselves, of water, fire, and the like?' 'I am not certain.' 'And would
you be undecided also about ideas of which the mention will, perhaps,
appear laughable: of hair, mud, filth, and other things which are base
and vile?' 'No, Parmenides; visible things like these are, as I believe,
only what they appear to be: though I am sometimes disposed to imagine
that there is nothing without an idea; but I repress any such notion,
from a fear of falling into an abyss of nonsense.' 'You are young,
Socrates, and therefore naturally regard the opinions of men; the time
will come when philosophy will have a firmer hold of you, and you will
not despise even the meanest things. But tell me, is your meaning that
things become like by partaking of likeness, great by partaking of
greatness, just and beautiful by partaking of justice and beauty, and
so of other ideas?' 'Yes, that is my meaning.' 'And do you suppose the
individual to partake of the whole, or of the part?' 'Why not of the
whole?' said Socrates. 'Because,' said Parmenides, 'in that case the
whole, which is one, will become many.' 'Nay,' said Socrates, 'the whole
may be like the day, which is one and in many places: in this way
the ideas may be one and also many.' 'In the same sort of way,' said
Parmenides, 'as a sail, which is one, may be a cover to many--that is
your meaning?' 'Yes.' 'And would you say that each man is covered by the
whole sail, or by a part only?' 'By a part.' 'Then the ideas have parts,
and the objects partake of a part of them only?' 'That seems to follow.'
'And would you like to say that the ideas are really divisible and yet
remain one?' 'Certainly not.' 'Would you venture to affirm that great
objects have a portion only of greatness transferred to them; or that
small or equal objects are small or equal because they are only portions
of smallness or equality?' 'Impossible.' 'But how can individuals
participate in ideas, except in the ways which I have mentioned?' 'That
is not an easy question to answer.' 'I should imagine the conception of
ideas to arise as follows: you see great objects pervaded by a common
form or idea of greatness, which you abstract.' 'That is quite true.'
'And supposing you embrace in one view the idea of greatness thus gained
and the individuals which it comprises, a further idea of greatness
arises, which makes both great; and this may go on to infinity.'
Socrates replies that the ideas may be thoughts in the mind only; in
this case, the consequence would no longer follow. 'But must not the
thought be of something which is the same in all and is the idea? And
if the world partakes in the ideas, and the ideas are thoughts, must not
all things think? Or can thought be without thought?' 'I acknowledge the
unmeaningness of this,' says Socrates, 'and would rather have recourse
to the explanation that the ideas are types in nature, and that other
things partake of them by becoming like them.' 'But to become like them
is to be comprehended in the same idea; and the likeness of the idea and
the individuals implies another idea of likeness, and another without
end.' 'Quite true.' 'The theory, then, of participation by likeness
has to be given up. You have hardly yet, Socrates, found out the real
difficulty of maintaining abstract ideas.' 'What difficulty?' 'The
greatest of all perhaps is this: an opponent will argue that the ideas
are not within the range of human knowledge; and you cannot disprove the
assertion without a long and laborious demonstration, which he may be
unable or unwilling to follow. In the first place, neither you nor any
one who maintains the existence of absolute ideas will affirm that they
are subjective.' 'That would be a contradiction.' 'True; and therefore
any relation in these ideas is a relation which concerns themselves
only; and the objects which are named after them, are relative to one
another only, and have nothing to do with the ideas themselves.' 'How do
you mean?' said Socrates. 'I may illustrate my meaning in this way: one
of us has a slave; and the idea of a slave in the abstract is relative
to the idea of a master in the abstract; this correspondence of ideas,
however, has nothing to do with the particular relation of our slave to
us.--Do you see my meaning?' 'Perfectly.' 'And absolute knowledge in
the same way corresponds to absolute truth and being, and particular
knowledge to particular truth and being.' Clearly.' 'And there is a
subjective knowledge which is of subjective truth, having many kinds,
general and particular. But the ideas themselves are not subjective, and
therefore are not within our ken.' 'They are not.' 'Then the beautiful
and the good in their own nature are unknown to us?' 'It would seem so.'
'There is a worse consequence yet.' 'What is that?' 'I think we must
admit that absolute knowledge is the most exact knowledge, which we must
therefore attribute to God. But then see what follows: God, having
this exact knowledge, can have no knowledge of human things, as we
have divided the two spheres, and forbidden any passing from one to the
other:--the gods have knowledge and authority in their world only, as
we have in ours.' 'Yet, surely, to deprive God of knowledge is
monstrous.'--'These are some of the difficulties which are involved
in the assumption of absolute ideas; the learner will find them nearly
impossible to understand, and the teacher who has to impart them will
require superhuman ability; there will always be a suspicion, either
that they have no existence, or are beyond human knowledge.' 'There I
agree with you,' said Socrates. 'Yet if these difficulties induce you
to give up universal ideas, what becomes of the mind? and where are the
reasoning and reflecting powers? philosophy is at an end.' 'I certainly
do not see my way.' 'I think,' said Parmenides, 'that this arises out
of your attempting to define abstractions, such as the good and
the beautiful and the just, before you have had sufficient previous
training; I noticed your deficiency when you were talking with
Aristoteles, the day before yesterday. Your enthusiasm is a wonderful
gift; but I fear that unless you discipline yourself by dialectic
while you are young, truth will elude your grasp.' 'And what kind of
discipline would you recommend?' 'The training which you heard Zeno
practising; at the same time, I admire your saying to him that you did
not care to consider the difficulty in reference to visible objects,
but only in relation to ideas.' 'Yes; because I think that in visible
objects you may easily show any number of inconsistent consequences.'
'Yes; and you should consider, not only the consequences which follow
from a given hypothesis, but the consequences also which follow from the
denial of the hypothesis. For example, what follows from the assumption
of the existence of the many, and the counter-argument of what follows
from the denial of the existence of the many: and similarly of likeness
and unlikeness, motion, rest, generation, corruption, being and not
being. And the consequences must include consequences to the things
supposed and to other things, in themselves and in relation to one
another, to individuals whom you select, to the many, and to the all;
these must be drawn out both on the affirmative and on the negative
hypothesis,--that is, if you are to train yourself perfectly to the
intelligence of the truth.' 'What you are suggesting seems to be a
tremendous process, and one of which I do not quite understand the
nature,' said Socrates; 'will you give me an example?' 'You must not
impose such a task on a man of my years,' said Parmenides. 'Then will
you, Zeno?' 'Let us rather,' said Zeno, with a smile, 'ask Parmenides,
for the undertaking is a serious one, as he truly says; nor could I urge
him to make the attempt, except in a select audience of persons who will
understand him.' The whole party joined in the request.
Here we have, first of all, an unmistakable attack made by the youthful
Socrates on the paradoxes of Zeno. He perfectly understands their drift,
and Zeno himself is supposed to admit this. But they appear to him, as
he says in the Philebus also, to be rather truisms than paradoxes. For
every one must acknowledge the obvious fact, that the body being one
has many members, and that, in a thousand ways, the like partakes of
the unlike, the many of the one. The real difficulty begins with the
relations of ideas in themselves, whether of the one and many, or of
any other ideas, to one another and to the mind. But this was a problem
which the Eleatic philosophers had never considered; their thoughts had
not gone beyond the contradictions of matter, motion, space, and the
like.
It was no wonder that Parmenides and Zeno should hear the novel
speculations of Socrates with mixed feelings of admiration and
displeasure. He was going out of the received circle of disputation into
a region in which they could hardly follow him. From the crude idea of
Being in the abstract, he was about to proceed to universals or general
notions. There is no contradiction in material things partaking of the
ideas of one and many; neither is there any contradiction in the ideas
of one and many, like and unlike, in themselves. But the contradiction
arises when we attempt to conceive ideas in their connexion, or to
ascertain their relation to phenomena. Still he affirms the existence of
such ideas; and this is the position which is now in turn submitted to
the criticisms of Parmenides.
To appreciate truly the character of these criticisms, we must remember
the place held by Parmenides in the history of Greek philosophy. He
is the founder of idealism, and also of dialectic, or, in modern
phraseology, of metaphysics and logic (Theaet., Soph.). Like Plato,
he is struggling after something wider and deeper than satisfied the
contemporary Pythagoreans. And Plato with a true instinct recognizes
him as his spiritual father, whom he 'revered and honoured more than all
other philosophers together.' He may be supposed to have thought more
than he said, or was able to express. And, although he could not, as
a matter of fact, have criticized the ideas of Plato without an
anachronism, the criticism is appropriately placed in the mouth of the
founder of the ideal philosophy.
There was probably a time in the life of Plato when the ethical teaching
of Socrates came into conflict with the metaphysical theories of the
earlier philosophers, and he sought to supplement the one by the other.
The older philosophers were great and awful; and they had the charm of
antiquity. Something which found a response in his own mind seemed to
have been lost as well as gained in the Socratic dialectic. He felt no
incongruity in the veteran Parmenides correcting the youthful Socrates.
Two points in his criticism are especially deserving of notice. First
of all, Parmenides tries him by the test of consistency. Socrates is
willing to assume ideas or principles of the just, the beautiful, the
good, and to extend them to man (compare Phaedo); but he is reluctant to
admit that there are general ideas of hair, mud, filth, etc. There is an
ethical universal or idea, but is there also a universal of physics?--of
the meanest things in the world as well as of the greatest? Parmenides
rebukes this want of consistency in Socrates, which he attributes to his
youth. As he grows older, philosophy will take a firmer hold of him, and
then he will despise neither great things nor small, and he will think
less of the opinions of mankind (compare Soph.). Here is lightly touched
one of the most familiar principles of modern philosophy, that in the
meanest operations of nature, as well as in the noblest, in mud and
filth, as well as in the sun and stars, great truths are contained. At
the same time, we may note also the transition in the mind of Plato,
to which Aristotle alludes (Met.), when, as he says, he transferred the
Socratic universal of ethics to the whole of nature.
The other criticism of Parmenides on Socrates attributes to him a want
of practice in dialectic. He has observed this deficiency in him when
talking to Aristoteles on a previous occasion. Plato seems to imply
that there was something more in the dialectic of Zeno than in the mere
interrogation of Socrates. Here, again, he may perhaps be describing
the process which his own mind went through when he first became more
intimately acquainted, whether at Megara or elsewhere, with the Eleatic
and Megarian philosophers. Still, Parmenides does not deny to Socrates
the credit of having gone beyond them in seeking to apply the paradoxes
of Zeno to ideas; and this is the application which he himself makes of
them in the latter part of the dialogue. He then proceeds to explain
to him the sort of mental gymnastic which he should practise. He should
consider not only what would follow from a given hypothesis, but what
would follow from the denial of it, to that which is the subject of
the hypothesis, and to all other things. There is no trace in the
Memorabilia of Xenophon of any such method being attributed to
Socrates; nor is the dialectic here spoken of that 'favourite method' of
proceeding by regular divisions, which is described in the Phaedrus and
Philebus, and of which examples are given in the Politicus and in the
Sophist. It is expressly spoken of as the method which Socrates had
heard Zeno practise in the days of his youth (compare Soph.).
The discussion of Socrates with Parmenides is one of the most remarkable
passages in Plato. Few writers have ever been able to anticipate 'the
criticism of the morrow' on their favourite notions. But Plato may here
be said to anticipate the judgment not only of the morrow, but of
all after-ages on the Platonic Ideas. For in some points he touches
questions which have not yet received their solution in modern
philosophy.
The first difficulty which Parmenides raises respecting the Platonic
ideas relates to the manner in which individuals are connected with
them. Do they participate in the ideas, or do they merely resemble them?
Parmenides shows that objections may be urged against either of these
modes of conceiving the connection. Things are little by partaking of
littleness, great by partaking of greatness, and the like. But they
cannot partake of a part of greatness, for that will not make them
great, etc.; nor can each object monopolise the whole. The only answer
to this is, that 'partaking' is a figure of speech, really corresponding
to the processes which a later logic designates by the terms
'abstraction' and 'generalization.' When we have described accurately
the methods or forms which the mind employs, we cannot further criticize
them; at least we can only criticize them with reference to their
fitness as instruments of thought to express facts.
Socrates attempts to support his view of the ideas by the parallel of
the day, which is one and in many places; but he is easily driven from
his position by a counter illustration of Parmenides, who compares the
idea of greatness to a sail. He truly explains to Socrates that he has
attained the conception of ideas by a process of generalization. At
the same time, he points out a difficulty, which appears to be
involved--viz. that the process of generalization will go on to
infinity. Socrates meets the supposed difficulty by a flash of light,
which is indeed the true answer 'that the ideas are in our minds
only.' Neither realism is the truth, nor nominalism is the truth, but
conceptualism; and conceptualism or any other psychological theory falls
very far short of the infinite subtlety of language and thought.
But the realism of ancient philosophy will not admit of this answer,
which is repelled by Parmenides with another truth or half-truth of
later philosophy, 'Every subject or subjective must have an object.'
Here is the great though unconscious truth (shall we say?) or error,
which underlay the early Greek philosophy. 'Ideas must have a real
existence;' they are not mere forms or opinions, which may be changed
arbitrarily by individuals. But the early Greek philosopher never
clearly saw that true ideas were only universal facts, and that there
might be error in universals as well as in particulars.
Socrates makes one more attempt to defend the Platonic Ideas by
representing them as paradigms; this is again answered by the
'argumentum ad infinitum.' We may remark, in passing, that the process
which is thus described has no real existence. The mind, after having
obtained a general idea, does not really go on to form another which
includes that, and all the individuals contained under it, and another
and another without end. The difficulty belongs in fact to the Megarian
age of philosophy, and is due to their illogical logic, and to the
general ignorance of the ancients respecting the part played by language
in the process of thought. No such perplexity could ever trouble
a modern metaphysician, any more than the fallacy of 'calvus' or
'acervus,' or of 'Achilles and the tortoise.' These 'surds' of
metaphysics ought to occasion no more difficulty in speculation than a
perpetually recurring fraction in arithmetic.
It is otherwise with the objection which follows: How are we to bridge
the chasm between human truth and absolute truth, between gods and men?
This is the difficulty of philosophy in all ages: How can we get beyond
the circle of our own ideas, or how, remaining within them, can we have
any criterion of a truth beyond and independent of them? Parmenides
draws out this difficulty with great clearness. According to him, there
are not only one but two chasms: the first, between individuals and the
ideas which have a common name; the second, between the ideas in us and
the ideas absolute. The first of these two difficulties mankind, as
we may say, a little parodying the language of the Philebus, have long
agreed to treat as obsolete; the second remains a difficulty for us as
well as for the Greeks of the fourth century before Christ, and is the
stumbling-block of Kant's Kritik, and of the Hamiltonian adaptation
of Kant, as well as of the Platonic ideas. It has been said that 'you
cannot criticize Revelation.' 'Then how do you know what is Revelation,
or that there is one at all,' is the immediate rejoinder--'You know
nothing of things in themselves.' 'Then how do you know that there are
things in themselves?' In some respects, the difficulty pressed harder
upon the Greek than upon ourselves. For conceiving of God more under the
attribute of knowledge than we do, he was more under the necessity
of separating the divine from the human, as two spheres which had no
communication with one another.
It is remarkable that Plato, speaking by the mouth of Parmenides,
does not treat even this second class of difficulties as hopeless or
insoluble. He says only that they cannot be explained without a long and
laborious demonstration: 'The teacher will require superhuman ability,
and the learner will be hard of understanding.' But an attempt must be
made to find an answer to them; for, as Socrates and Parmenides both
admit, the denial of abstract ideas is the destruction of the mind. We
can easily imagine that among the Greek schools of philosophy in the
fourth century before Christ a panic might arise from the denial of
universals, similar to that which arose in the last century from Hume's
denial of our ideas of cause and effect. Men do not at first recognize
that thought, like digestion, will go on much the same, notwithstanding
any theories which may be entertained respecting the nature of the
process. Parmenides attributes the difficulties in which Socrates is
involved to a want of comprehensiveness in his mode of reasoning; he
should consider every question on the negative as well as the positive
hypothesis, with reference to the consequences which flow from the
denial as well as from the assertion of a given statement.
The argument which follows is the most singular in Plato. It appears
to be an imitation, or parody, of the Zenonian dialectic, just as the
speeches in the Phaedrus are an imitation of the style of Lysias, or as
the derivations in the Cratylus or the fallacies of the Euthydemus are
a parody of some contemporary Sophist. The interlocutor is not supposed,
as in most of the other Platonic dialogues, to take a living part in the
argument; he is only required to say 'Yes' and 'No' in the right places.
A hint has been already given that the paradoxes of Zeno admitted of a
higher application. This hint is the thread by which Plato connects the
two parts of the dialogue.
The paradoxes of Parmenides seem trivial to us, because the words to
which they relate have become trivial; their true nature as abstract
terms is perfectly understood by us, and we are inclined to regard the
treatment of them in Plato as a mere straw-splitting, or legerdemain of
words. Yet there was a power in them which fascinated the Neoplatonists
for centuries afterwards. Something that they found in them, or brought
to them--some echo or anticipation of a great truth or error, exercised
a wonderful influence over their minds. To do the Parmenides justice, we
should imagine similar aporiai raised on themes as sacred to us, as the
notions of One or Being were to an ancient Eleatic. 'If God is, what
follows? If God is not, what follows?' Or again: If God is or is not the
world; or if God is or is not many, or has or has not parts, or is or is
not in the world, or in time; or is or is not finite or infinite. Or if
the world is or is not; or has or has not a beginning or end; or is or
is not infinite, or infinitely divisible. Or again: if God is or is not
identical with his laws; or if man is or is not identical with the laws
of nature. We can easily see that here are many subjects for thought,
and that from these and similar hypotheses questions of great interest
might arise. And we also remark, that the conclusions derived from
either of the two alternative propositions might be equally impossible
and contradictory.
When we ask what is the object of these paradoxes, some have answered
that they are a mere logical puzzle, while others have seen in them an
Hegelian propaedeutic of the doctrine of Ideas. The first of these views
derives support from the manner in which Parmenides speaks of a similar
method being applied to all Ideas. Yet it is hard to suppose that Plato
would have furnished so elaborate an example, not of his own but of
the Eleatic dialectic, had he intended only to give an illustration of
method. The second view has been often overstated by those who, like
Hegel himself, have tended to confuse ancient with modern philosophy.
We need not deny that Plato, trained in the school of Cratylus and
Heracleitus, may have seen that a contradiction in terms is sometimes
the best expression of a truth higher than either (compare Soph.). But
his ideal theory is not based on antinomies. The correlation of Ideas
was the metaphysical difficulty of the age in which he lived; and the
Megarian and Cynic philosophy was a 'reductio ad absurdum' of their
isolation. To restore them to their natural connexion and to detect the
negative element in them is the aim of Plato in the Sophist. But his
view of their connexion falls very far short of the Hegelian identity
of Being and Not-being. The Being and Not-being of Plato never merge in
each other, though he is aware that 'determination is only negation.'
After criticizing the hypotheses of others, it may appear presumptuous
to add another guess to the many which have been already offered. May we
say, in Platonic language, that we still seem to see vestiges of a track
which has not yet been taken? It is quite possible that the obscurity
of the Parmenides would not have existed to a contemporary student of
philosophy, and, like the similar difficulty in the Philebus, is
really due to our ignorance of the mind of the age. There is an obscure
Megarian influence on Plato which cannot wholly be cleared up, and is
not much illustrated by the doubtful tradition of his retirement to
Megara after the death of Socrates. For Megara was within a walk of
Athens (Phaedr.), and Plato might have learned the Megarian doctrines
without settling there.
We may begin by remarking that the theses of Parmenides are expressly
said to follow the method of Zeno, and that the complex dilemma, though
declared to be capable of universal application, is applied in this
instance to Zeno's familiar question of the 'one and many.' Here, then,
is a double indication of the connexion of the Parmenides with the
Eristic school. The old Eleatics had asserted the existence of Being,
which they at first regarded as finite, then as infinite, then as
neither finite nor infinite, to which some of them had given what
Aristotle calls 'a form,' others had ascribed a material nature only.
The tendency of their philosophy was to deny to Being all predicates.
The Megarians, who succeeded them, like the Cynics, affirmed that no
predicate could be asserted of any subject; they also converted the
idea of Being into an abstraction of Good, perhaps with the view of
preserving a sort of neutrality or indifference between the mind and
things. As if they had said, in the language of modern philosophy:
'Being is not only neither finite nor infinite, neither at rest nor in
motion, but neither subjective nor objective.'
This is the track along which Plato is leading us. Zeno had attempted to
prove the existence of the one by disproving the existence of the many,
and Parmenides seems to aim at proving the existence of the subject
by showing the contradictions which follow from the assertion of any
predicates. Take the simplest of all notions, 'unity'; you cannot even
assert being or time of this without involving a contradiction. But is
the contradiction also the final conclusion? Probably no more than of
Zeno's denial of the many, or of Parmenides' assault upon the Ideas; no
more than of the earlier dialogues 'of search.' To us there seems to
be no residuum of this long piece of dialectics. But to the mind of
Parmenides and Plato, 'Gott-betrunkene Menschen,' there still remained
the idea of 'being' or 'good,' which could not be conceived, defined,
uttered, but could not be got rid of. Neither of them would have
imagined that their disputation ever touched the Divine Being (compare
Phil.). The same difficulties about Unity and Being are raised in the
Sophist; but there only as preliminary to their final solution.
If this view is correct, the real aim of the hypotheses of Parmenides
is to criticize the earlier Eleatic philosophy from the point of view of
Zeno or the Megarians. It is the same kind of criticism which Plato has
extended to his own doctrine of Ideas. Nor is there any want of poetical
consistency in attributing to the 'father Parmenides' the last review
of the Eleatic doctrines. The latest phases of all philosophies were
fathered upon the founder of the school.
Other critics have regarded the final conclusion of the Parmenides
either as sceptical or as Heracleitean. In the first case, they assume
that Plato means to show the impossibility of any truth. But this is not
the spirit of Plato, and could not with propriety be put into the mouth
of Parmenides, who, in this very dialogue, is urging Socrates, not to
doubt everything, but to discipline his mind with a view to the more
precise attainment of truth. The same remark applies to the second of
the two theories. Plato everywhere ridicules (perhaps unfairly) his
Heracleitean contemporaries: and if he had intended to support an
Heracleitean thesis, would hardly have chosen Parmenides, the condemner
of the 'undiscerning tribe who say that things both are and are not,'
to be the speaker. Nor, thirdly, can we easily persuade ourselves with
Zeller that by the 'one' he means the Idea; and that he is seeking to
prove indirectly the unity of the Idea in the multiplicity of phenomena.
We may now endeavour to thread the mazes of the labyrinth which
Parmenides knew so well, and trembled at the thought of them.