Troubling Play: Meaning and Entity in Plato's Parmenides

Prologue

Prologue “As things are I can, for example, invent a game that is never played by anyone.—But would the following be possible too: mankind has never played any games; once, however, someone invented a game— which no one ever played?” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations The Unity of Logos The Parmenides seems to lend support to Heidegger’s claim that Platonism is the beginning of a tradition of forgetting the question of being and privileging a ‘metaphysics of presence.’1 For the dialogue shows the eidos to be the one in many that that makes experience intelligible. However, Plato’s figure of Parmenides just as decisively undercuts the notion of ideal presence by making it clear that form is not in itself knowable; for if the eide m allow assimilation of particulars in complete synthesis, this formal universality would strip, not only sensible particulars but also the form of its singularity. In this pivotal Platonic dialogue, Parmenides makes time (chronos) thematic in order to show young Socrates how the notion of participatory being is decisively not to be understood: as if eidos occupies a distinct locus (chomra) apart from worldly entity.2 The key issue in this dialogue is time, for it is primarily by way of interrogating the being of time that Parmenides reducestoabsurditySocrates’initialconceptionoftheforms(whichwould have played into Heidegger’s critique), and develops paradoxes that effectively invalidate the notion of form as ideal presence. This recurring Platonic theme—that being cannot be thought— explains why the pivot of the Parmenides (155e–157b) is a demonstration for young Socrates that there can be no instant of univocity: we cannot intelligibly claim that a singular moment (exaiphnems) of time exists. A close look at Parmenides’ dialectical game (137c–166c) reveals its profoundly negative character, and shows how the failures of conceptual discourse— 1 especially in relation to time—ultimately justify Socrates’ analogical approaches to being and the good. At the outset, a young and enthusiastic Socrates attempts to resolve Zeno’s paradoxes by claiming that there exists an eidos in itself (kath’ hauto) of likeness, and another of unlikeness. Auto kath’ hauto (128e9) means “itself, according to itself.” Socrates distinguishes the form apart from the entity that instantiates it, and urges that real entities derive their being from these ideal entities. Socrates argues that he himself is many, insofar as his right side and his left side are different (hetera). He is one, however, insofar as he is one among seven persons in the room (129c–d). Since Socrates’ own identity and divisibility seem to him so obviously compatible, he is not overly impressed by Zeno’s paradoxes. Socrates insists that the intelligible form (eidos) of the entity is not subject to such minglings and divisions, although he believes that all the many other things (ta alla)—things other than the form—do manifest opposing characters (128e7–130a3). Socrates initially attempts to defend (at 129a–134e) a theory of ideas similar to that which was later criticized by Aristotle (the philosopher). It is this misguided effort—Socrates’ attempt to ground being and knowing in the positive existence of the form—that is the impetus for Parmenides’ remedial dialectical game. Parmenides’ demonstration will show that Socrates’ conception of the separate existence of the intelligible implies a hypostatization, or reification of the idea. In what follows, Parmenides successfully reduces to absurdity the notion that an eidos exists separately as the original of which the phenomenon is a likeness. Parmenides’ troubling performance is intended to show Socrates the impasses implicit to the dichotomy between intelligible meaning and entity. He leads Socrates to the insight that although existence implies analogical correlation, nevertheless, for intelligibility, such correlation is simply incoherent. And though Parmenides shows that intelligibility involves universal forms or types that disclose the inconsistency of analogical indications of existence, he also demonstrates that intelligibility itself implies a moment of pure particularity or singularity that cannot be thought according to universals. Parmenides names this singular moment of nonconsistency to exaiphnems, “the instant” (155e–157b). Moreover, in Parmenides’ dialectical game, meaning is produced by relationsofdifference;hisdemonstrationexhibitsanegativelogic,thegoal of which is the silencing of reason in a moment of paradox. This silencing is indicated both dramatically and argumentatively in the dialogue. Socrates’ last lines are at 136d—followed by thirty pages of dialogue in 2 TROUBLING PLAY which he is silently but actively engaged—for the purpose of Parmenides’ game is the training of...