Plato's Parmenides : The Structure of the First Hypothesis

Plato's Parmenides: The Structure of the First Hypothesis JAMES WM. FORRESTER THE PORTIONOF THE SECOND PART of Plato's Parmenides known as the First Hypothesis (137c4-142a8) has long been of great importance in the history of varieties of Platonism. The study of E. R. Dodds has demonstrated that Plotinus' conception of the One derives at least in part from Plato's arguments concerning the One in the First Hypothesis.2 Proclus' great commentary on the Parmenides goes no farther than the end of the First Hypothesis, after which, he all but says, the rest is silence. 3 Indeed, for two centuries the only portion of the second part of the Parmenides available to the general scholarly public was the First Hypothesis accompanied by Proclus' Neoplatonic interpretation. 4 In general, Neoplatonists have from the first seized upon the First Hypothesis as Plato's exposition of the nature of a transcendent, self-sufficient, yet characterless One. Thus for a philosopher of Neoplatonic inclinations, the First Hypothesis may well be the most important single text in the Platonic corpus. But any such confident positive interpretation which takes the First Hypothesis as setting forth a certain amount of Platonic doctrine in a straightforward manner, whether such an interpretation be Neoplatonist or not, must be made to confront a seemingly insuperable obstacle in the text. For the end of Hypothesis One is utterly negative. Parmenides, who is conducting the discussion, asks: "Then can these things be true of the One?" Aristoteles, his young interlocutor, replies: "I think not." 5 Then having dismissed 'these things', the two men proceed to give a wholly 1 Much of this paper has appeared in my doctoral dissertation, An Examination o] the Second Part o] Plato's Parmenides (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1968). I am grateful to my dissertation readers, Professors Edward Lee and Gerasimos Santas, for their assistance. Professor James Walsh has made several helpful suggestions for improving this paper. 2 E. R. Dodds, "The Parmenides of Plato and the Origin of the Neo-Platonic 'One' "; Classical Quarterly XXII (1928), 129-142. Cf. B. Darrell Jackson, "Plotinus and the Parmenides," Journal o] the History o] Philosophy V, 4 (1967), 315-328. 3 "But after going through all the negations, one oug!at to set aside this dialectical method also," Plato latinus, ed. R. Klibansky (London: Warburg Institute, 1940-1962);Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevi ed. R. Klibansky and C. Labowsky, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe and L. Labowsky, 1952, p. 75. I am intrigued by Miss Anscombe's apparent affinity for philosophers who end by "throwing away the ladder." 4 Cf. R. Klibansky, "Plato's Parmenides in the Middle Ages," Medieval and Renaissance Studies I (1941-1943), 281-330. For most of the fourteenth and fifteenth Centuries, Proclus' commentary was the only version in Latin of the text. s This, as well as all other translations in the text (unless otherwise noted), is my translation, [11 2 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY new and apparently more satisfactory account of unity--this time a unity which they explicitly atfirm to exist. Now Parmenides and Aristoteles seem to find nothing of value in the First Hypothesis. By what right do Plotinus and Proclus do so? It would seem that all Neoplatonic interpretations of the First Hypothesis must be incorrect, for they cannot account for the bleakness of the last few sentences in that hypothesis. If so, perhaps we should take the First Hypothesis as some sort of reductio ad absurdum, or even as Taylor's 'practical joke'. 6 It is my concern in this paper to vindicate the possibility of a positive interpretation of the First Hypothesis. I shall argue that a proper understanding of the final lines of that hypothesis leads one to see those lines as an insuperable obstacle--but an obstacle, not to a Neoplatonist or other positive interpreter, but rather to any commentator who holds that if the First Hypothesis teaches any lesson, it comes by reductio ad absurdum. Such interpretations as those of Cornford, Ryle, and Taylor, which find no positive doctrine straightforwardly expressed in the First Hypothesis, will turn out to be incompatible with a proper understanding of the end of that hypothesis. 7 I should...