One and Many: A Comparative Study of Plato's Philosophy and Daoism Represented by Ge Hong

Chapter 2. Plato's Answer to the Pre-Socratic Debate

32 chapter 2 Plato’s Answer to the Pre-Socratic Debate The study of Plato has many starting points. I start from the book of Parmenides because of its obvious discussion of the one and the many. Having said this, one cannot ignore the current Plato scholarship on the subject. Yet reading Plato and reading someone else’s readings of Plato create two different issues. The former is the historical issue that Greek antiquity is far distant from the modern world. The latter is a methodological problem in that the analytical tradition of the Plato scholarship is very remote from the Daoists, who do not think cognitively through the mind but contemplate empirically through the body. To begin with Parmenides, we must know the complicity involved in reading and interpreting the book. The Parmenides in the book Parmenides is not the historical Parmenides, but Plato’s spokesperson for his own thought. Yet under Plato’s creative writing, the figure still resembles the distinctive train of thought of the historical Parmenides. Among all of Plato’s dialogues, the book is traditionally regarded as one of the most difficult books for two main reasons: Plato’s employment of the Parmenidean logic, which is mind stretching even for analytical philosophy, and Plato’s hidden intention in writing the book, which has been interpreted so diversely from being a masterpiece of metaphysics to a humbling selfcriticism . Against this complex background, therefore, the starting point is to understand Parmenides in the pre-Socratic debate of the One and the many, and his influence on Plato that led to the book Parmenides. The Pre-Socratic Debate Material Monism and Pluralism The Milesian school began with Thales of Miletus (625–545? BC),1 who lived about half a century before Confucius (551–479 BC). They were the contemporaries of the early Daoism of the period when one of the earliest versions of Laozi was circulated.2 Thales was the first thinker to argue plato’s answer to the pre-socratic debate 33 for natural evolution based on material change. The world derived from a single stuff called water, and the meteorological changes of the one produced the many (11B3).3 Almost all the Presocratic philosophies have been passed down as fragments . They are preserved as quotations in subsequent ancient authors, from Plato to Simplicius over a period of ten centuries. Scholars generally agree that Plato is relatively less faithful to his sources and often mixes paraphrase and exegesis when he recalls the works of previous thinkers. Aristotle, on the contrary, did valuable surveys of his predecessors’ arguments . Although his interpretations were often distorted by his view of the past, many Presocratic ideas are preserved in his Physics, Metaphysics, and De Caelo. On Thales Aristotle called the change one of “moist things” and applied his categorization to label meteorological change a “natural principle” (Metaphysics 983b17–27). When water evaporated, moist air emerged. When it solidified, stone formed. Because of the material nature of water, Aristotle interprets it as the material cause. However, Aristotle’s recollection of Thales involves his interpretation, which secretly transforms cosmogonical matter into one of immaterial principles of cause. The single stuff was meant to be unlimited in a cosmogonical sense,4 rather than the limited cause in a material sense. Aristotle explored the ambiguity and placed it in his own philosophical categories, turning water from a general One into a particular many, such as water as the cause of steam. The idea of unlimited stuff was later made clear by Anaximander (610– 540 BC?), a successor and pupil of Thales. On the one and many, he followed naturalism and argued the indefinite and limitless as the primal stuff, and fragments of the original thought were preserved in the early Christian records The Refutation of All Heresies (12B2).5 The limitless stuff was not Thales’ material monism, but contained plural “elements,” which were not four traditional elemental stuffs (earth, water, fire, and air), but rather more like principles (Physics 203b4–30). Anaximander was a pioneer in geometry, discovered the equinox and the solstice, and perfected the sundial. He also argued the biological theory that “from water and earth” animals arose under the “heated” condition.6 The combination of the limitless stuff and the biological theory makes his OM view more comparable to Ge Hong’s argument than Thales’.7 However, Ge Hong’s one and many is far more complex and Anaximander’s biology has little surviving evidences to pursue a meaningful comparison. Anaximander’s...