Troubling Play: Meaning and Entity in Plato's Parmenides

Notes

Notes Prologue 1. The key text in which Heidegger formulates this claim is Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, translated as “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, ed. William Barrett and Henry Aiken, vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1962). 2. Compare Heidegger’s comment on the chomrismos: “Plato means to say: beings and Being are in different places. Particular beings and Being are differently located” in What is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 227. 3. Mitchell H. Miller develops an excellent account of Plato’s use of mimetic irony to facilitate insight in Plato’s Parmenides: the Conversion of the Soul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 4. Cf. 129a ff. 5. Parmenides, 137b3 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). For the convenience of the reader, my references to particular lines are from the Loeb Classical Library’s bilingual texts of Plato’s dialogues. Translations in what follows are my own. 6. Cf. Hegel’s observation: “Ancient metaphysics had. . .a higher conception of thinking than is current today. For it based itself on the fact that the knowledge of things obtained through thinking is alone what is really true in them. . .Thus this metaphysics believed that thinking (and its determinations) is not anything alien to the object, but rather is its essential nature. . .” G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic trans. A.V. Miller, forward by J.N. Findlay (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969; orig. published 1812–16), introduction, 45. Hegel was correct (but not in the way he intended) when he asserted that some ancient philosophers had a higher conception of thinking. Indeed, Plato’s negative dialectic is superior to Hegel’s positive version. However, this is precisely because Plato highlights the dimension of nonpresence—or transcendence—that culminates in the seeing-through of the limitations of logos and dialectic itself. 7. For a beautiful account of the conceptual system(s) implicit in the Parmenides, see John N. Findlay, Plato: the Written and Unwritten Doctrines (New York: Humanities Press, 1974), pp. 229–254. Findlay’s scholarship is impressive, but his Plato sounds like Hegel. He interprets the Parmenides as a conceptual exer179 cise in dialectic that articulates a system of the whole. The problem is that it is just such constructions that Plato’s Socratic Parmenides throws into question. For an account of ancient philosophy as the kind of spiritual exercise I find in the Parmenides, see Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 8. Cf. 134d–e. 9. Cf. Sophist, 241d. 10. See Parmenides, 152a–e. 11. Language is, as Plato recognized, crucial in isolating the unities in the manifold material presented in and through our interactions with entities. HansGeorg Gadamer makes this point in Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, translated by Robert M. Wallace, (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1991). On Plato’s conception of the task of dialectic, Gadamer writes: “The natural key to such an investigation is the logos. For the fact that genemcan be combined with one another is already evident from the fact that one says of all of them that they are, which means that they can be combined with being. It also seems clear that not all of them can be combined, indiscriminately, with all of them. What we are left with, then, is that some of them can be combined with one another and others cannot” (p.91). The Parmenides indicates how genem cannot be said to “combine.” That language was a central Platonic concern from early on is evident by reference to such modes of disclosure as chremsmos ‘oracular response’ (Apology, 21c1 ff), muthologemma ‘mythical narrative’ (Phaedrus, 229c ), enuption ‘dream’ (Crito, 44a), akoem, or ‘hearsay’ at Phaedo 61d9, and diapherom, ‘to differ’ (Euthyphro, 7b3 ff). 12. James R. Mensch develops this point in his interpretation of Husserl’s Logical Investigations. For example: “in direct perception we grasp an object both as existing and as bearing a definite sense; but in a report of this perception, we transmit, not existence, but the sense of existence. The hearer of our report, in other words, can only ultimately confirm its validity with respect to the object by a perception of his own. . .confirmation occurs not by matching sense conceived as one thing with existence conceived as abstracted from this, but by grasping both together.” The Question of Being in Husserl’s “Logical Investigations” (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981), p. 41. 13. For an excellent account of the interpenetrations of...