What is?

Randolph Dible

Abstract

The problem of the One and the Many is that of the reconciliation of the logic
of Being with the logic of Becoming. These are the forms of two distinct frames of
reference. Both ask the fundamental ontological question of what it is to be,
rephrased as the query into what is. It is left up to a frame which encompasses
them both to provide an account of the relationship between the ontologically strict
notions of Being and Becoming. The ancient Presocratic philosophers Parmenides
and Heraclitus, respectively, represent these former views, and I will provide an
account of how Plato’s doctrine of the forms (eide) encompasses them both. Plato’s
forms are eternal, unchanging realities behind the transitory world we experience,
and yet, this is the only reality there is. In Books Six and Seven of Plato’s Republic,
the Platonic metaphysical framework is presented. I will draw on the fragments of
Parmenides and Heraclitus from A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and
Testimonia edited by Patricia Curd and translated by Richard McKirahan, and the
Republic of Plato, translated by Alan Bloom.

May 2009

Hon. Rev. Randolph Thompson Dible II,

Sentinel, Tarati

What is?

Despite the epistemological problems of translation, there are better ways of

interpreting the meaning of ancient texts, but as this implies, there are multiple,
different interpretations of these ancient documents. For it is understood that what
they document is of a significance which we call philosophical, regarding general
inquiries into a range of topics, both theoretical and practical, general and specific.
Furthermore, it was only since the times of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton a mere
few centuries ago that many disciplines separated, losing their bonds to one
another, and so the intended subject matter of many ancient sayings and writings
goes debated. Philologists study the historical evidence of the people and their
frameworks (social, economic, religious, etc.) to better decide on the meaning of
ambiguous statements about matters outside the obvious context, and much of the
meaning of ancient metaphysics is far from obvious. But certainly we do have
meaningful translations, and much of it can be read at face value. From this we can
decide the significance we attribute to names and works such as the ones dealt with
here.

Parmenides says: “the only ways of inquiry there are for thinking:

the one, that it is and it is not possible for it not to be,

is the path of Persuasion(for it attends upon Truth),

the other, that it is not and it is necessary for it not to be,

this I point out to you to be a path completely unlearnable,

for neither may you know that which is not(for it is not to be accomplished)

Nor may you declare it.” (Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Timeaus 1.345.18;
lines 3-8. Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics 116.28 = 28B.2; rev.
Curd, A Presocratics Reader pp. 45-46)

Here it is clear that Parmenides calls his path that of Persuasion (for it attends
upon Truth), and it is not possible for it not to be. For me, it is clear that he means
to take being itself seriously, and indicates that the only intelligible option is to
follow the path of non-being, which is completely unlearnable and necessary for it
not to be, an admission which for me means that it is absurd to inquire any other
way than into Being. Furthermore, the next fragment in A Presocratics Reader has
him saying “…For the same is for thinking and for being.” (Clement, Miscellanies
5.15.5 = 28B4; rev. Curd, A Presocratics Reader pp. 46). When taken together,
these fragments reveal that for Parmenides the ideal is the real and so only being is
real, and it is the ideal of all thought. More content is given from Simplicius:

“There is still left a single story

Of a way, that it is. On this way there are signs

Exceedingly many—that being ungenerated it is also imperishable,

Whole and of a single kind and unshaken and [in]complete.

Nor was it ever nor will it be, since it is now, all together,

One, continuous….” (Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics 145.1-

146.25; 39.1-9 = 28B8; rev. Curd, A Presocratics Reader, pp. 49)

In other words, he says that there are exceedingly many reasons to believe
that it [Being?] is necessarily present, whole, outside time (as the present is), all
together one and continuous. Combined with the pervious excerpts of fragments,
we can assume that this eternal present “it” [Being] is the very subject of thought
and the necessary nature of reality. That it is “one, continuous” means that it is a
logical radicalization of unity. In his proem about his encounter with a wise mare
who tells him he must learn all things, she assures him that in the opinions of
mortals (Doxa, “beliefs” or “opinions”) “there is no true reliance.” This seems to
indicate that Parmenides sees a distinction between the opinions of mortals and the
knowledge of reality which is the continuous, eternal, way of what necessarily is.

For Heraclitus, reality isn’t Being, in the sense we receive from Parmenides,
but we could call it Becoming. While Parmenides seems to distinguish the mere
opinions of mortals from the true knowledge of Being he attains, Heraclitus is also
elitist, but says there is an ever-present logos which supports everyday things, and
if we attend to this logos we can avoid the evil trickery of polymathy and the naïve
impressions of mortals, and come to understand the true way in which all things are
one. But to be true to his words, we must quote him directly first:

“Listening not to me but to the logos it is wise to agree that all things are
one.” (Hippolytus, Refutation 9.9.1 = 22B50, A Presocratics Reader, pp. 34)

But this One is not to be conceived in the same way as the ‘is’ of Parmenides.
Rather than positing one side of a distinction, the two sides are taken together as
the model for unity, in Heraclitus. This may be justified in a following fragment: “An
unapparent connection (harmonia) is stronger than an apparent one.” (Ibid, 9.9.5 =
22B54) And the strongest way of putting this is by his famous example, given three
ways:

1. “Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different
waters flow.” (Arius Didymus, Fr. 39.2 (Dox. gr. 471.4) = 22B12, A
Presocratics Reader, pp. 36)
2. “[It is not possible to step twice into the same river]…. Its scatters and again
comes together, and approaches and recedes. (Plutarch, On the E at Delphi
392b = 22B91a, b, A Presocratics Reader, ibid.)
3. “We step into and we do not step into the same rivers. We are and we are
not.” (Heraclitus, Homeric Questions 24 Oelmann (Schleiermacher, fr. 72) =
22B49a, A Presocratics Reader, ibid.)

In other words, “all flows” (panta chorei), and in flowing it stays the same.
We are all flowers. The structure of flow is represented by the logos of the world,
found essentially in the soul.

Both of these Presocratics (or Preplatonics, rather) believe in a “reality

principle” by which there can be only one reality, or way of being, but they
understand it in completely opposite ways. Plato’s doctrine of the forms (eide) is
generally taken to be the belief in eternal prototypes which “exist” independent of
the empirical world, with the empirical world as a merely sensible particularization
of these universals. But it is not the case that Plato deviates from such a “reality
principle”, although many take him to represent a doctrine of two realms, for there
can be only one true realm; Reality.

Book VI of the Republic begins with “an image of our nature in its education
and want of education…” (514 a). This is the allegory of the cave. This presents
the model of Plato’s metaphysical system. In it he describes the journey of the
fortunate soul who is metaphorically freed from the imprisonment of ignorance and
comes to see higher levels of reality (the intelligible realm) until he finally sees the
source of it all, the metaphorical sun, which represents that which is; “the idea of
the good” (517 c). The way to see this is an art of turning around to see what is
(518 d), and to behold ultimately the good which is itself beyond being, “exceeding
it [being] in dignity and power” (509 c, Book VI). This turning around is an art
perfected by men who get to the point (517 c). Plato utilizes a Pythagorean
evolution from the mystical Monad to the sensible reality, as a model for an ideal
education program, in which dimensional increases from the study the one, number,
and calculation to the study of planar geometry and then to solid geometry and an
inner analog to astronomy where the mind’s eye can learn to see the idea of the
good by looking at the intelligible sun, which is reality. Parmenides is much more
ontologically strict as to the nature of reality, but in light of Plato, Parmenides seems
to have had a different manner of presentation in the fragments we have of him,
and it seems he was not abstracting an intellectual separation from being which
accounts for the ignorance of many. In the second part of the proem, the Goddess
tells Parmenides there is no true reliance in the opinions of mortals. This must be
why he doesn’t seem to construct a political system as Plato does, but rather sticks
to the study of being, the first study Plato proposes for the kalliopolis. But the
influence of Parmenides in Plato cannot be denied. The continuous nature of the
one which is being, which is what is, all comes from Parmenides. Plato refers to the
Pythagoreans (530 c) in discussing the place of harmony and number in the first
studies of the ideal students. Indeed, according to Diogenes Laertius, Parmenides
rejects the theories of the Pythagoreans, specifically their notion that opposites are
the basis of number (from the Introduction to Parmenides in A Presocratics Reader).
This makes Plato’s interpretation of these thinkers unique in embracing aspects of
them both.
 Plato wrote a piece called the Parmenides. After the first part in which Zeno
and Parmenides give their views (Zeno’s paradoxes as consequences of Parmenides’
view), and after a young Socrates reiterates the doctrine of the forms existing apart
from the empirical world of sensible, visual things, Plato, writing for his character
Parmenides, delivers potentially devastating arguments against the theory of forms,
but the example of paradigmatic dialectic consists of eight logical inferences which
in the case of the example are inferences ontologic, helpful to this thesis, and given
in defense of the Platonic doctrine of forms. For the title of this piece is “what is”
and can be taken to be semantically equal to the theme “to be”, but not necessarily
to “the one”, which is the subject of the dialectic gymnastic given in Plato’s
Parmenides. Indeed, in the course of suppositions of the one being and not, and the
not-one being and not, be it the many or the others, many conclusions are drawn,
the most significant of which is Plato’s conclusion that Being is itself distinct from
the One, and furthermore that Being is not in anything, itself included, so we may
be wrong to talk about being-in-itself. Or so it would seem, but I have found that
when he refers to being, it is always in the case of being predicated of, or objectified
being, usually used as saying that it [the One] “has being”, which is already more
than the semantic content of our modern notion of being-in-itself, which is more
akin to the abstraction of the one. He also does show how being and becoming may
relate at least in regards to time: “But that which is becoming cannot skip the
present; when it reaches the present it ceases to become, and is then whatever it
may happen to be becoming.” So in the course of time as the course of becoming,
whatever is the case reaches the present and ceases to become, now being what it
has once been becoming. If there be measures and parts, the one is always less
than the others (the many), but elsewhere we learn that the one is necessarily
without measures and parts for then it would be both one and other than one. “But
that which is in anything will be less, and that in which it is will be greater; in no
other way can one thing be in another.” And the one we learn cannot be in contact
with itself for that would require it to be next to itself which requires it to be other
than itself. And at one point, following Parmenides, we abstract the one: “But now,
let us abstract the one which, as we say, partakes of being, and try to imagine it
apart from that of which, as we say, it partakes—will this abstract one be one be
one or many?... Must not the being of one be other than one? For the one is not
being, but, considered as one, only partook of being?...”. Of course, Plato’s
dialogical other agrees what whatever he as whomever says. But it is clear here
that he is taking as an axiom, as an unquestioned hypothesis, in this case, that
being is not the one. Elsewhere, (these are all a page apart, reading the text
backwards from the unmarked online source:
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/Parmenides.html), Plato recognizes that being has the
same significance as one, “And when we put them together shortly, and say “One
is,” that is equivalent to saying “partakes of being” ”. And by this notion of being
taken as “having being” rather than merely being (analogous to the difference
between the one and that the “one is”) or Being (Being Itself, Being-in-Itself), Plato
acknowledges that sameness is demonstrated to be of a nature distinct from
oneness, treating sameness as some “thing” which some other thing (such as the
one) may be taken part in. It may be that Plato in his time recognizes possibilities
different from those presented in the few works of his we have, and certainly in the
case of the dialectic presented in Parmenides he sticks to the logical framework, not
to a broad speculative philosophy, which ought to be developed separately, by the
use of his dialectic method. “One and the same” is a common idiom, and it may be
wrong, as Plato points out: “if there were no difference between the one and the
same, when a thing became the same, it would always become one; and when it
became one, the same…. And therefore, if one be the same with itself, it is not one
with itself, and will therefore be one and also not one.” The essential supposition
that the one is formless I agree with, and so much of what follows, including the
absurdities of assuming that it has place, parts and is in time, but I contend that
Plato here uses notions of sameness and being which can be simplified to being the
same as the one, and this is where what we have of Plato diverges from this living
subject.