Five Elements in Plato's Conception of Reality

2.
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Five Elements in Plato's Conception
of Reality
https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/uram.4.1.24 - Wednesday, September 22, 2021 2:37:14 AM - IP Address:103.164.47.210
George Kimball Plochmann, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Ill.,

U.S.A.
I. PLATO'S LIFE AND WRITINGS
I. I. Life and Interests of Plato

Authentic reports of Plato's life are meagre. He was born about 427 B.C., the son
of Athenian aristocrats, Ariston and his wife Perictione. After an education
typical of the time, during which he is said to have excelled in athletics and in the
composition oflyric poetry, Plato became the pupil (for about seven years) of the
intellectually powerful, subtle, provocative Socrates, whom he was later to
depict as at times approaching complete human excellence. Socrates' execution
in 399 B.C. was the occasion for Plato to undertake several years' travel
throughout Hellas (including Sicily), and probably some other nations overseas
as well. He returned to Athens as early as 393 or as late as 386, and organized the
Academy, the first public institution of higher learning in the western world. Two
additional visits to Sicilian Syracuse punctuated his 40-year headship of the
Academy; in each of these he endeavoured to influence the leadership of Syra-
cuse to adopt a more philosophic stance, but with little success. There is no
record of his direct intervention in political affairs ofany other city-state. He died
in or about 347 B.C. Upon his death administration of the Academy was en-
trusted to his nephew Speusippus rather than to the most brilliant of the students,
Aristotle, who later founded his own school.
Plato stands roughly midway in time between the origins of fresh philosophic
speculation in Miletus in the early 6th century and the rigorous Alexandrian
philological disciplines in the third, disciplines aimed at preserving and inter-
preting texts of those earlier thinkers. He inhabits a city midway between
western (Italian) Greece and eastern (Ionian). And he is a clearing-house for all
manner of ideas, arts, and science, which flow through him, revaluated, re-
phrased, and conceptually transformed. There appear to be few limits to the
range of his interests and capabilities: Mathematics, and earth sciences, moral
theory, politics, pedagogy, and the literary arts are all explored by Plato. Many
side-interests repeatedly engage his attention: medicine, music, practical arts
such as weaving and fishing, then again painting, armed warfare, gymnastics,
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and more. Probably his only rival in the acquiring of competence to discourse
about so many topics is his own pupil of 20 years' standing, Aristotle - though
Democritus too has frequently been praised for his many skills. Yet Plato is - if
the evidence is all in - without any rival in the ancient Greek world in the clear,
cogent, and endlessly affecting way in which he has expressed his understand-
ing.
1.2. System and Writings

Plato's system is open at the beginning because there is no one starting-point,
since the possession of any principle, however poorly grasped at first, can
generate a search for suitable consequences or for revisions that may resolve the
conflicts, confusions, vaguenesses, and distortions of ordinary unphilosophical
thought. It is open at the farther end because in spite of Plato's aim of transmut-
ing unclear formulations into clear ones, no one of them appears to satisfy him as
final, and no single method is warranted to reach indisputable certainties.
Significant philosophically is the prolonged, eager inquiry; what is ultimate is not
so much any given truth as it is the process of attaining it and the structures left
as bench-marks of the process. Each process, however, is set next to rival
processes in other parts of Plato's writings.
Plato's work may be called a system in spite of these divergencies because the
residual structures are, if examined in the light of the methods used to place them
in position, reasonably consistent. The system establishes principles advertised
as being in some one sense inescapably true; other interpretations of them are
wholly dubious. Two such firmly-held formulas - widely claimed by commen-
tators to be cornerstones of a philosophy they call Platonism - are the notion that
eternal forms are invariably objective realities, while bodies, qualities, and
actions are but evanescent imitations of these; and the notion that those who rule
the state must be philosophers. Yet both principles are pushed aside by Plato in
certain contexts, a fact which bespeaks either some unlikely lapse of his mem-
ory, or, better, a change of mind regarding his conclusions, or, better still, a
multiplicity of methods that finds a single flat answer unacceptable for all poss-
ible applications. If there is anything final in Plato, then, it is the great plurality of
relations holding between all the insights established, discarded, and recollected
along the way. The peculiar literary form in which Plato's philosophy is couched,
moreover, is one making summary statement virtually impossible.
Plato was not a voluminous writer; 1500 pages, more or less, suffice for all his
works in a modern printing. His compositions are in a dress derived by him (or by
some lesser figure and then borrowed by him) from the drama - that of the
dialogue. The participants are in their individual natures and in their collective
variety well suited to illustrate dramatically the intricacies of the methods Plato
sets in motion. Most are men prominent in the Athenian history of his time or the
age just past, i.e. from about 450 to 350 B.C. The philosophic hero is usually
Socrates. Some companions are men of military importance, Alcibiades,
Hermocrates, Nicias; men of political fame or notoriety, Charmides, Critias,
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Anytus; professional teachers of the arts, Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias;
philosophers, Parmenides, Zeno; a priest, Euthyphro; mathematicians,
Theodorus, Theaetetus; an astronomer and statesman, Timaeus ( = the histori-
cal Archytas of Tarentum?); poets and playwrights, Agathon, Aristophanes; and
many figures of lower attainment, but with multifarious enthusiasms, including
love of horses, or of eloquence, gossip, travel, elegant living. Most of them are
persons about whom other writers had something (often quite different) to say,
but a smaller group are thought to be Plato's inventions.
Scholars of the 20th century are agreed that something over two dozen
dialogues are genuine. Another dozen or so are doubtful or clearly inauthentic,
though certain of these show Plato's strong influence. Less agreement obtains on
13 letters bearing the philosopher's name; the seventh has been best received. If
read carefully, it is seen to be in harmony with the methods of the authenticated
dialogues, yet it has never enjoyed universal acceptance. One section is of high
philosophic importance, regardless of authorship. The other letters might be
dismissed, though some authorities trust the mystery-mongering second as much
as the seventh. Extant classical literature contains no references to now-lost
writings by Plato; he shares this good fortune of total preservation with no other
major author of ancient Greece.
A principal trend in Platonic scholarship ever since Lewis Campbell
(1830-1908), has been to explain divergencies of doctrine, method, and 'tone' by
means of biographical reconstructions, based partly upon historical references
to events also datable by other means, partly upon comparison of doctrines, and
partly upon statistical tables of stylistic peculiarities. The many successes of this
approach are to be accepted and applauded, but most of the scholars following it
- there are outstanding exceptions - have cast aside what seem legitimate
reasons for methodological diversities, thus leaving little ground for viewing the
dialogues as expressing varied but concordant aspects of a single system. An
opposed school, including Paul Shorey and others, assumes that Plato had a
closely circumscribed system - a set of doctrines which he repeated from
dialogue to dialogue, and in which differences are either trifling or explainable on
literary grounds. One way to resolve this conflict of opinions is to mediate
between them: No two dialectical structures are quite the same, and no one of
them mechanically implies any other, but instead suggests it. Such multiple
suggestive ties could be years in the writing yet be kept in mind by an author of
superior intellect, and could be rendered ultimately compatible. There can, then,
be firm knowledge without sacrificing flexibility, and there can be variegated
opinions without looseness or frustration of concentrated thought in the com-
poser of the dialogues.
These dialogues partly resemble stage plays, but the action is mostly interior.
Occasionally there is overt action as well - walking along a little river (Phae-
drus), joining an initially sober party which abruptly turns into a drunken.revel
(Symposium), visiting a prison where Socrates is about to be executed (Crito and
Phaedo ), watching a sort of outdoor circus celebrating a foreign goddess (Re-
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public), and so forth. The dramatic figures, all of them men (though two women,
neither of them onstage, dominate the Menexenus and part of the Symposium
respectively), are of widely different talents, previous experience, tempera-
ments, and run a wide gamut from profound understanding (Timaeus, the Eleatic
Stranger) to bufflle-headedness (Cleinias in the Euthydemus) and raw ignorance
(the Slave Boy in the Meno). They differ in family and wealth, and in the extent
of their political power, whether it be constitutional (Timaeus) or sideline

coaching (Gorgias, Protagoras, possibly Ctesippus). Their attitudes range from
outright conservatism (Anytus) to the potential subversion latent in Callicles (in
the Gorgias), not to mention another kind of subversiveness in the behavior and
utterances of Socrates himself. Some are orthodox in religion (the aging
Cephalus and the self-righteous Euthyphro), while others, notably Protagoras,
are evidently freethinkers or at least they use the state theogony for their own
purposes.
Halfway between the common custom of lauding Socrates as a perfect hero
(Taylor, Shorey, etc.) and the less-frequent habit of deprecating him as a slippery
sophist (Warner Fite) lies the view adopted here, that Socrates is constantly,
heroically struggling to learn and practice virtue, that he has many temporary
lapses of nerve or even loyalty to principle. (He confesses fright, e.g. Republic I
336d-3; he has a sudden access of sexual desire, Charmides 155d; he is content to
remain disrespectful to love, Phaedrus 237a-242d, etc.). These are signs that
Socrates is developing and never completely developed until the days of his trial,
imprisonment, and execution.
l.3. Co-operative Search

Important in most of those dialogues dominated by Socrates is the co-operative
search for a solution to some problem (Laches 197e), or a step-by-step agree-
ment even on a point that may be reached (Republic I 348a-b). This co-
operativeness, however, must often be taken in a loose sense, for in this give-
and-take we often find refutations of virtually all that a man utters and even (as in
the tense and militant Gorgias) the discrediting of what a man has held most
precious in his life. Yet without the stimulus of conversation such refutations
would not take place. In the Republic, after having queried three men and
refuting two of them, and after having heard two others express disillusioned
views of justice, Socrates is given 200 pages for replacing and improving upon
what his last two companions took ten to set forth. This is co-operative search of
a kind, though most onesided.
Those dialogues in which Socrates has a lesser role usually exhibit less
intellectual and emotional interaction between participants. The Timaeus and
Critias are basically monologues. Parmenides, in the work bearing his name,
uses a respondent, but merely so that he himself can rest his voice; and the
Eleatic Stranger (in the Sophist and Statesman) welcomes neither original
suggestions nor signs of opposition from his partners. The Laws is at first a
triangular conversation between representatives of the political systems of
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Sparta, Knossus, and Athens, but after the first quarter it becomes increasingly
an exposition of political planning by the Athenian Stranger, though his two
companions are also seasoned statesmen and what we might call constitutional
lawyers.
This parcelling-out of suggestions, proofs, disproofs between persons, though
sometimes limited, is both a reason and an indication that no final conclusion will
hold for all participants - usually not in a single dialogue, certainly not in all of
them taken together. In the Timaeus agreement seems assured more than any-
where else, but it is also pointed out there that the great monologue needs
supplementing by another (!fa different sort. In the Gorgias two respondents to
Socrates simply retire, silent, discomfited; only the third one voices grudging
assent at the end. In the Phaedo, after Socrates, about to drink poison, offers
several proofs of the soul's immortality, his follower Crito still confuses the
mortal body of Socrates with his real self (115c-d); and the recital of the proofs
by a sympathetic onlooker oddly concludes with the remark, 'Such was the end,
Echecrates, ofour friend .. .' (118a). The proofs seem solid enough; but they are
evidently forgotten when their propounder's earthly existence is concluded.
Lacking formulas agreed to by all parties and capable of being quoted out of
very special contexts, we must examine how knowledge and wisdom emerge
from sequences of thinking embodied in discussion between human participants
or, less often, between living men and now-dead or mythic personages, di-
vinities, or other agencies representing new points of view. Instances of the latter
are the laws of the state (Crito 50a ff.); a possibly-invented seeress (Symposium
201d-212a); Protagoras, posthumously recalled to uphold his man-the:measure
doctrine (Theaetetus 165e-168d); some giants and gods, so-called, who espouse
materialism and idealism respectively (Sophist 246a-248d). We must always
look behind this artistic indirection and apparent horseplay to explain how the
narrative and dramatic means contain within them rationally-grounded concep-
tions that comport with each other and point to a common end. The end, too, has
vitality only when it is shown embedded in this strange dialectical and mythic
symphony. If the science and characters and images can contribute, however
unequally, to the line of argument, we may discern a unity underlying all parts of
the dialogue. The interpreter of Plato then assumes two new tasks: to discover
the patterns within any single dialogue, and afterward to move between
dialogues and try to show some basic harmony, though by no means sameness,
of their patterns. This implies that to elicit Plato's meaning requires much
thought and much space. The author of the Seventh Letter says baldly that a
textbook summary of the philosophy is out of the question. To set two quite
different dialectical structures from two dialogues side by side and demonstrate
how these can be alternative expressions of the same underlying philosophy fully
and clearly stated by neither one, requires subtlety no doubt surpassing that
needed for the reading of more tightly-closed systems, such as those of Par-
menides, Lucretius, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and others.
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1.4 Dialectic
Plato himself offers a multitude of summaries of portions of his overall dialectic,
but they are, if taken too rigidly, oflittle help. The summaries occasionally are no
more than bland, simple reviews of some of the topics discussed, and otherwise
they are compact verbal renderings of schematic structures putting several terms
into relations with one another, contrasting, analogizing, subordinating, or iden-
tifying them. (Some of these structures will be considered in the next section.)
The generating of sequential, structured thoughts is dialectic, which in its most
proper sense is exhibited in tight, strictly-reasoned arguments, but which
elsewhere can be looser, more akin to mere association by likeness. In this way
dialectic can constitute a mode of discourse of universal scope, and can assume
many literary guises, breaking out of the restrictions of hard, apodictic logic.
Plato does not define dialectic in quite this manner, preferring to deal with it
through some of its special aspects - the objects upon which it operates
(Phi/ebus 57e-58a), or its advantages (Republic VII 539c-d}, or its likenesses or
contrasts to rhetoric (Gorgias 448e; Phaedrus 260d-272b; Republic VI 499a) or
to some other art (Phi/ebus 17a; Sophist 252e-253d) or its function in an educa-
tional or social system (Republic VII 531d, etc.), or its effects upon the user or
hearer (Apology 2ld-e). There are six expert, though very different, primary
users of dialectic. When persons other than Socrates and his fellow-dialecticians
(Timaeus, the Strangers from Elea and Athens, Parmenides, Critias) are made to
describe dialectic, they generally see it distortedly, and pass unfavorable judg-
ments upon it (Meno 80c, etc); when they try to use it, their employment is
ordinarily halting, curtailed, and even self-contradictory. Nevertheless what
they say should be considered, for it suggests its own corrections and improve-
ments.
As befits a philosophy whose structures are seemingly independent until the
reader grasps the fact that every structure forces upon its constituent terms
appropriate new meanings, the devices for expounding it are open to almost
limitless revision and correction. Our present purposes will best be served by
selecting a schema that finds its roots in several dialogues, that can include a
broad sweep of topics into which to inquire, and one that leads us to problems of
method as well as to explicit doctrines. The Seventh Letter, despite able schol-
arly efforts to bring it into disrepute, carries sufficient claims to rank as an
important formulation of some features of the Platonic methods, even if Plato
happens not to be its only author, or indeed its author at all. If it is a forgery,
which can still be vigorously doubted, it si!llply brings together lesser structures
stated piecemeal in dialogues incontestably genuine. In the course of its famous
discussion of Plato's philosophy we read:
There are three things necessary to generate a knowledge of each real entity; a fourth is the
knowledge itself; and as the fifth one must put the entity itself which is intelligible and true.
First is the name, second the definition (sentence, verbal account), third the image, fourth the
knowledge (342a-b).
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From other dialogues one could erect this hierarchy of five. Thus we have
reference to 'name' and 'image' or imitation (Cratylus 424b-c), to 'sentence' and
'knowledge' (Theaetetus 206c-d), to 'knowledge' and 'reality' (Republic VI
509b; 511b-c), and to 'name,' 'definition,' and 'thing' (Sophist 218b-c), though
sometimes the words receive slightly different significations. All five steps of the
method form convenient pegs for the account of Plato's philosophy about to be
given. They are not instructions for invariable practice, and much latitude is
allowed to the inquirer on the first three levels. Even if they were stiff prescrip-
tions, however, much more important for discovering his method would be
inspection of Plato's own practices in the dialogues. Beside what the participants
are made to say there are nu·merous interconnections between the utterances
that the dialogues can only show. 'Method,' which relates etymologically to a
way, a road, is the most elusive of concepts, to be grasped chiefly by noticing the
wide applications in Plato's works themselves. There is one ground for our
assurance, however; for Plato clarity and permanence in knowledge require
stability in the object of knowledge. Yet there is no way of cutting through to the
latter without first arranging the three elements from which the knowledge is to
emerge as if it were a light kindled in the soul.
The treatment of name, sentence, image, knowledge, and the real one by one
will give the impression of a heterogeneous collection of ideas, brilliant but not
more than possibly harmonious, and only suggestive of the nature of reality. It is
only when they are linked in pairs, as the present essay attempts to do, explicitly
in the final section, implicitly in those preceding, that the ultimate reality can in
any way be described, for then it is more closely bound with the rest of the
system.
2. NAMES
Naming in Plato's dialogues is not prior to silence. In every drama and every
ordinary conversation, muteness must cut some figure, if only because talk is
bounded by a silence before it begins and by another silence after it ends; and
there is obviously some deference to other persons while they are talking.
Beyond these kinds there are two others, that of ignorance or stark confusion
(Apology 24d; Ion 532b-c) and of attentive understanding, often on the part of
Socrates or some other master-dialectician (Sophist 217e-end); Timaeus 20b-
end; Critias 108c-end). There are still other kinds lying in between, silences
tinged with hostility, admiration, or personal diffidence. The most reasonable
silences in the dialogues, however, are made interpretable to the reader through
the discourse that is set over against them, and to the elements of the latter we
now turn.
2.1. Platonic Practices in Naming

The dialectical structuring in the dialogues lies in the successive relationships
developed within a given group ofnames (or terms), each group either constitut-
ing what might be called a primary or a derivative set ofnames. The distinction is
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not hard-and-fast, and is made in regard to the prominence and frequency with
which the names are employed. A primary set is easy to identify, yet its con-
stituent names often change their meanings. A set of this type might take the form
of a much-used dichotomy, such as 'body' and 'soul,' or a trichotomy, such as
'reason,' 'spirit,' 'appetite'; it might be an opposition, as between 'knowledge'
and 'ignorance' or between 'knowing' and 'not-knowing.' In many sets com-
parative values can have a place, so that 'reason-spirit-appetite' forms a hier-

archy, though we must determine in each of its appearances in the text whether
and why reason is held superior to the other two.
These are not formal groupings of any pairs of opposites, or groups of three,
etc., so we cannot profitably substitute the letters A and B ... for these names,
since letters are not immediately associated with images, nor can they be made
into intelligible sentences. Every set consists of actual names, which despite
their having meanings (and therefore relationships) that vary from one dialogue
to another or even within a single dialogue, are still capable through as-
sociation of being made clear each time they appear. (An alternative procedure
would be, as with Aristotle, to state a finite list of meanings ofa single name, the
reader then usually having to select the appropriate in each proposition.) For
Plato the number of meanings of a given expression is apparently without limit,
but this can only be partly exploited by him. 'Being' and 'becoming,' for exam-
ple, are a brace of names changing their relation from contrariety to overlap and
near-synonymity, as the case may be. At Philebus 58e-59c 'being' is accorded
higher dignity and importance, but in the Statesman 269c-274b 'becoming' gains
in prominence. Along with this pair we find others, such as 'interior' and
"exterior,' 'reality' and 'imitation,' 'natural' and 'conventional,' 'noble' and
'shameful'; triads such as 'knowledge,' 'opinion,' 'ignorance' and 'philosopher,'
'statesman,' 'sophist'; tetrads such as 'earth,' 'air,' 'fire,' 'water,' 'courage,'
'temperance,' 'wisdom,' and 'justice,' and occasional pentads. Derivative sets
are quickly allied with primary. Thus the trio 'external goods,' 'goods of the
body,' 'goods of the soul' is a primary set often met with, so that if 'household
wealth,' 'good health,' 'virtuous action' were to turn up, the six could be put into
a simple oblong. Plato's writings are replete with oblongs and squares and with
more complicated arrays, the most famous being the so-called Divided Line
schematism at the end of Republic VI. The reading of Plato is usually made easier
by looking for these arrays, some of which are implied in short passages, others
in whole sections of a dialogue. They summarize, as we have said; they give
shape and structure to both a doctrine and a method of arriving at it.
2.2. Platonic Statements about Naming

Plato often appears to take the word 'names' in some narrow sense, and to deal
with actual names in this way, by referring to proper names of men and women,
gods and demigods, but then again he broadens the word little by little so that
'names' includes all expressions that meaningfully and of themselves designate
things or qualities and conditions, actions, or other features. The Cratylus, the
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chief dialogue treating the general use of language, commences after a debate has
taken place between Hermogenes, who believes that such names are conven-
tionally applied, and the laconic Cratylus, who insists that names have a natural
connection with the objects they name; lacking such a connection a name
becomes a mere sound. Against Hermogenes Socrates now argues that the
designating of things by names is not wholly arbitrary but is an art, and offers an
extended series ofnames (of gods, demigods, and heroes, ordinary men, virtues,
qualities, etc.) as related to the character of each thing, which he alleges to be its
movement and power of change rather than its state of rest. Hermogenes is
forced to acknowledge that words imitate things to some degree - even foreign
words. The fixity on which he earlier insisted has turned out to be no more than
fashions of speech. In the last quarter of the work, Socrates restricts the doctrine
of Cratylus (a follower of Heraclitus), agreeing with him that names must indeed
penetrate the essences of what they name, but also contending that the Hera-
clitean teaching of universal incessant flux would destroy the whole basis of
language. The 'essence' espoused by Cratylus is vitiated; it refers merely to
alterations among things. Socrates suggests that something essential - real
goodness, beauty, and the like - might be the ultimate object of any fixed name,
despite shifts in relations, qualities, and conditions which an object undergoes.
Whether 'goodness,' 'virtue,' etc. refer to something ideal, something perfect, is
another question, left aside in the Craty/us.
In addition, Plato inquires into relations holding between two or more terms,
relations, of course, that are familiar to every logician of today but doubtless
were all but new when Plato included them in his writings. Regardless of some
ideal fixity of names, in practice words change their meanings, and Socrates
draws attention to this point (Euthyphro I lc-e; it seems also to be hinted in the
Parmenides 166c). As an instance of these meanings that change according to a
controlled plan we might mention the word 'judge' in the Apology; it alters in
application almost every time it appears or is implied. Even so, each time it is
used, certain dialectical relations obtain; a judge judges someone else, or he is
concerned with goodness or wickedness, or his judgment is a real force in the life
of the personjudged, and so on.
Assuming, however, that in a given utterance a pair of names can be deliber-
ately fixed, Plato can see a need for marking relations between such names.
Thus: (a) Socrates distinguishes broader classes from narrower, though he does
not systematically use names for genus and species, preferring to give examples
instead (Euthyphro 12b); (b) He distinguishes between what we might call
abstract terms such as 'justice,' concrete terms such as 'just man,' and ordinary
adjectives such as 'just' (Republic I 335c; IV 444b); (c) He notes that words can
be used in an 'accurate' sense, so that the ruler 'as such' never errs even though
the particular man who is ruler may make mistakes (Republic I 340e); (d) He
speaks of contraries having no mean between them (Republic IV 436b-e) and the
unknown Eleatic speaks of contradictories marked by private expressions
(Sophist 257d-e); (e) Socrates refers to the fact that up to a point names can be
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made to do service for each other but that opposites should not be thus inter-
changed (Phaedrus 262a); (f) He distinguishes between a fixed name and those
names that lose their clarity of meaning through being thoughtlessly applied
either to a part of what they should be (Euthyphro 5d-e), or else applied to a
wider class than is appropriate (Republic I, 337c-339b); (g) The Eleatic Stranger
uses what have since been called metaphysical categories, pointing out that they
are combined and separated in ways not always permitted to less general terms.
Thus 'Being is the same' is a defensible proposition, but 'Other is the same' is
not; 'Being is motion' might be accepted, and 'Being is rest' certainly could be,
but 'Being is not-being' could never be, not merely because of the nature of
propositions but because the six 'higher classes,' as the Stranger calls them,
mean as they mean (Sophist 252c-258c).
The Parmenides is partly an attempt to find relations between 'one,' 'many,'
'being,' 'non-being,' 'same,' 'other,' and several more pairs ofopposites; butthe
names keep shifting in the hands of Parmenides every time they are put into new
connections. Every effort to find exact general rules governing the names in the
absence of some suitable image is doomed to find its equally acceptable counter-
part in a statement contradicting the original. Wholly abstract logical rules are
thus unreliable, on the showing of Parmenides.
Plato does not commence with a set of general names, then find a way to apply
them once for all to the real world - the strategy of Whitehead in Process and
Reality. In the Philebus four names, 'finite,' 'infinite,' 'mixture,' and 'cause of
mixture' are proposed, and four others are set beside them as exemplifications:
'mind,' 'pleasure,' 'moderation,' 'proportion.' But the problem of the Philebus
even so is the judging of the greatest goods for men and animals, and the end of
the discussion supplies not so much a determination of finitude, infinity, etc. as
their use in erecting a hierarchy of goods. Nor is it suggested in the Sophist,
where the six highest classes are paired off in all permissible combinations, that
starting from mere terms we can learn much about the concrete world; we merely
learn which terms repel each other, which are compatible. This is a first step in
thinking about the real, but not the last.
Names and their parts are a passing topic in the Theaetetus, discussed for the
light they may throw upon the nature of knowledge (203a-208c). Syllables can be
grasped rationally, the letters composing them cannot, being irreducible, i.e. we
do not explain simples by reference to their elements for they have none
(stoicheion, 'element,' also means 'letter'). The syllable contains the letters, but
it is not those letters; it is a whole different from its parts.
2.3. Transition to Sentences

So much for Plato's express treatment of names in relation to being and to
knowledge. The dialogues show abundantly that despite the need to employ
names when we signify the elements of our experience or aspects ofreality lying
beyond those elements, single names have at best a suggestive power. They do
not, like ordinary sentences, assert or deny, nor do they, like definitions, clarify
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their own meanings, limiting these to one kind of thing. They must acquire a
context before being made true or false; they must acquire a still larger context,
containing applications, before they accurately delimit whatever it is they desig-
nate. Such contexts are supplied, of course, in a well-conducted dialogue, or
possibly in some other kinds of discourse, such as poems, though Plato has
doubts concerning the latter. The mere name 'Socrates' or 'wise' provokes in the
hearer (whether or not he be the bearer of the name or descriptive phrase) the
question, 'What next, what about it?' The answer to that is partly supplied by
sentences, to which we now turn.
3. SENTENCES
A single name or a phrase is, of course, not always entirely destitute of assertive
force. In answer to the question, 'Who is the teacher of Theaetetus?' the name
'Theodorus' can imply the full answer. 'Yes,' or 'Certainly not,' are frequent
responses to requests for agreement or disagreement. Even Socrates' occasional
oath, 'By the Dog,' while not commonly held to be a meaningful expression,
behaves much as if it were the proposition 'This is important to me,' or 'I
consider this incontestably true.' So there are borderline cases.
3.1. Kinds of Sentences

Sentences in Plato are of three chief types, the first being questions, which are of
many more kinds than can be discussed here. The other two types are definitions
and simple statements. (Prayers and demands would be added in a complete
catalogue, but are less important for our purposes.) The chief question which
Plato seeks to answer is almost invariably 'What is this (specified) thing?' Given
a name, say 'justice,' can the dialectic set up some formula enabling us to know
what it refers to in its own nature, setting it off from its opposite, injustice, and
from partial surrogates as well. To this end, which is more elusive than it might
seem, the dialectic must distinguish the name 'justice' from, or ally it with, traits
with similar names such as 'virtue,' 'courage,' 'advantage,' etc., or formulas
such as 'doing good to friends and harm to enemies,' or 'minding one's own
business,' and the like.
The second, or secondary, question is, 'What are a thing's qualities or other
determinants?' - 'Is justice desirable, is it desirable for its own sake, is it dear to
the gods, can it be taught, etc.?' Other subsidiary questions, which nevertheless
rise to prominence here and there, are, 'Can we measure the thing - can we
specify its quantitative aspects?' 'Do we have any other incidental information
about the thing, such as whether justice is the attribute of any one class of
citizens in the state?'
3.2. Definition and the Unity ofa Dialogue

'What is the thing?' can be answered only by that kind of sentence which is a
definition, the second and other questions being answerable by sentences not so
restricted in form. So complicated are the qualifications needed to ensure accu-
34
racy and adequacy in a definition that many other sentences must be set beside
the original definition to secure it from misunderstanding. Ultimately, the whole
of a dialogue serves as a support for a statement of the essence of a thing. It
follows that although certain formulas are pre-eminently definitions, there is a
shading-off so that in some way every sentence helps to carry, or actually
carries, a hint of what the thing defined actually is.
From this it should be apparent that a Platonic dialogue must have a unity
different from that of most other types of philosophic discourse. Strands of
thought embodied in the matrices of names and sequences of sentences lead
either to or from each definition. Of these definitions, there may be as few as one
or two (Phaedrus) or as many as six or seven (Hippias Major) relating to one
name in a single dialogue. Usually not more than one name receives attention of
this sort in each work, but in some there are subsidiary names also defined (as
with 'color' in the Meno, whose main effort is for a time to define 'virtue'), or
there are sets of related names (as in Republic IV, where 'wisdom,' 'courage,'
'temperance,' and 'justice' all take on definitory formulas).
Questions leading to a definition, the definition itself which is the response to
queries, and further questions aimed at confuting the definition proffered are
part of a dialectical sequence, to be sure; but they do not form any simple linear,
logical series. The relations between sentences in Plato, like those between
larger segments of discourse, are based upon an affinity of content which later
logicians have found too loose and poets too restrictive. The reader is forced, if
he wishes to gain real understanding, to put himself in a position equivalent to
that of a perceptive, closely-attending participant who, though he cannot antici-
pate, can at least follow the windings and turnings of the dialectical route. To
look for a single prominent term which designates a 'subject matter' ofa passage,
or worse, of a whole dialogue (as in saying flatly that the Republic is about
justice) is ordinarily an unfruitful way of reading the work.
Although the search for a definition marks one of the most important features
of many of the dialogues, it is not the only one, at least when taken in its narrow
sense. The dual or even multiple topics most prominent in some individual
dialogues give evidence of another fact - that because of the shifting of mean-
ings, and because of the shading-off of what a definition really is, the final
identification of a thing through discourse rests upon connecting that thing and its
definitory sentence to all else that exists and to all else that is said. Thus a plurality
of topics is a mark not of Plato's carelessness but of his conviction that to define
some one thing the dialectician must in the end relate it to others and even to the
world at large. Every dialogue occupies a finite time; but Plato's art is to suggest
an infinite stretch ofreality, in time, in space, and in content, with ever so many
connections between what he is explicitly seeking and what lies farther on. For
Plato a good definition ofa virtue, for example, becomes true or false, not merely
from subsequent practical considerations (as it would in modern pragmatism) but
through the dialectic that shows its connections to all virtue, to the soul, and to
the cosmos.
A sentence loses its crispness, its precision, when it exists in isolation.
35
Thrasymachus, the truculent sophist of the Republic, loudly proclaims justice to
be the interest of the stronger, then wonders why his audience does not applaud
his one formula (Republic I 338c). Socrates finds this definition so vague that
Thrasymachus is forced to reconsider and amplify. What is meant by interest? Is
it some conscious desire or is it one's hidden but real interest? Who is the
stronger? The wrestler? These are questions needing careful thought on the part
of the sophist; but Plato has also indicated that Thrasymachus is obstinate, vain,
hardly the man to insist upon 'the stronger' as one possessing a balanced
character and mind, or to hold 'interests' to be of a long-range sort. For that
reason, the refutation ofThrasymachus (which takes place verbally on the issues
which he raises) at the same time proceeds upon the basis of Socrates' percep-
tions of the character of the man he is refuting.
On the personal side, Plato requires that a definition be uttered with sincerity,
that it must grow out of the important experiences of a man, since otherwise it
will be found out for the empty recitation that it is, by Socratic refutatory
procedures. Meno has picked up his notions of virtue from Gorgias on the
occasion ofa visit (Meno 76b; 96d); Theaetetus connects knowledge and sensa-
tion not out of his own thinking but (indirectly through his teacher Theodorus)
from the sophist Protagoras (Theaetetus 152a; 161b); and Euthyphro mouths
confused pieties apparently drawn from official religious sources (Euthyphro,
passim). Not only must a definition clearly relate to the thing defined, but it must
also conform to the real nature of the mind proposing it.
3.3. Assertions and Refutations

Nearly all of the dialogues actively seeking definitions fail to attain a satisfactory
solution in the minds of all the participants. Midway between our holding that
these dialogues are wholly skeptical and our holding that although outwardly so
they carry a hidden positive message, lies the claim that they are illustrations of
the incomplete use of the Socratic phases of Plato's methods. (The five other
major dialecticians, whose directions of inquiry partly do and partly do not
parallel that of Socrates, are represented only in their complete stages, unless
one wishes to interpose that the Critias is an unfinished work.) The co-operative
Socratic method cannot quite prevail over youths unformed (Polus, Charmides,
Lysis) or over hidebound men (Ion, Euthyphro, Anytus, Hippias). It can
scarcely do more, being a method confessedly beginning from Socrates' position
of ignorance (Meno 71b; Laches 186b-e; Euthydemus 295a, etc.), than suggest
ways to approach a problem to the young or commence breaking down
prejudices in the conservatives. In the Republic, however, the issues raised in
the Laches, Protagoras, and half a dozen other dialogues are again tackled but
this time, because of the greater competence and broadmindedness of the two
chief respondents, the colloquy proceeds in a more positive way. Despite some
hesitations and new teachings, most of the deficiencies of the other dialogues are
made good. It is, on the other hand, quite a new context, that of the best state,
which permits Socrates to complete his task; a state superior to Athens and
neighboring cities is hardly dreamed ofin the less affirmative dialogues.
36
It is overly sanguine to suppose that the negative tendencies of so many
dialogues are not more than a passing phase, for Platonic refutation covers a
much broader acreage than that plowed by Socrates alone. The other master
dialecticians object or offer alternatives to much of what he affirms and secures
agreement to from his respondents. No single formula is definitive, and notions
most cherished by commentators as being essential to 'Platonism' are charac-
teristically upset by substitutions, variants, or outright rejections which have the

effect, if we see clearly enough the distinctions in meanings, of winnowing out
false senses of propositions asserted on other grounds as true. Thus the view that
philosophers must be kings and kings philosophers (Republic V 473c-d)- which
means in context that they must practice dialectic unceasingly and at a high level
- is altered in the Statesman (300a-30lb) and again in the Laws (XII 965a-968b),
where the lawgiver is shown to need the mathematical sciences but not the
dialectic capping them in the Republic. The doctrine that ideas (forms) are
separate from and superior to physical objects is eviscerated in the Parmenides,
even though Socrates (depicted in that dialogue as a young man) is present to
defend it. The effect of the Parmenides, however, is not to deny the existence of
forms in any sense but only to deny forms as they are considered in the working-
out ofa dialectic sharply opposing 'one' and 'many,' 'being and non-being,' with
the latter pair made roughly equivalent to 'rest' and 'motion,' respectively. In the
Phaedrus the sentence 'Forms are directly apprehensible' could well be main-
tained (247c-e), but only for disembodied souls on a quest for truth in the eternal
heavens; in virtually every other setting it is patently wrong or irrelevant. Even a
definition which appears final and inescapable is subject, given new dialectical
surroundings, to revision and possible rejection. Thus the statements of the
nature and value of dialectic itself in the Republic VII and the Phaedrus are
heavily modified in the 'eminently practical' Laws.
From this it appears that the refutations, like the definitory sentences, are not
interchangeable gambits applied on any occasion that looks promising, but are
instead devices, specialized almost to the point of uniqueness, for removing
unworkable, inappropriate meanings of names and the assertions containing
them. This is almost wholly true of the refutations by Socrates, less true of the
Eleatic Stranger, and least true of Parmenides, who has rehearsed his arguments
before.
3.4. Transition to Images

Names are paired with other names to create sentences, and sentences are paired
with others to generate arguments. But sentences and arguments are no better
than young men's disputations (Republic VII 539b) or old men's games (Laws VI
769a) if not attached to experience, either in fact (the dialogic and dramatic and
historical aspects of Plato's writings) or in discourse. The sentences, tested for
internal consistency, completeness, and exclusiveness, are still defective. In
spite of their excellence as formulas we, the hearers of Socrates and Timaeus, or
we, the readers of Plato, do not know exactly to which items of sensation and
experience these formulations should be attached. This is one reason why Plato
37
regularly puts the definitions into the mouths of men whose family connections
or careers touch the things named and defined very closely; their life-experience
early or late is instinct with their words, although their capacities for reasoning
about this experience may be circumscribed. When, therefore, the query is about
some matter of daily experience, such as piety, courage, or love, something
further must be exhibited: An image must be connected to a sentence, or even
embodied within a sentence. Later, one can well raise the question whether these
images are true or misleading, but at the moment it suffices that they rest upon
the stuff of sensory presentations.
4. IMAGES
Images, whether they be actual objects or mere mental pictures, are at least
loosely associated with many names -perhaps all of them. Philosophic talk in the
dialogues, with the exception of much of the Parmenides and some isolated
passages elsewhere, presents images closely attached to the intellectual content
of those works but which also change and in the very changes reflect upon the
content. The grabbing of Socrates by his cloak to force him to attend a social
gathering (Republic I 327b) helps to reveal ambiguities of political justice and
civil order, which are among the principal topics of the dialogue. The grabbing is
connected in time and place with Socrates' going down to the Piraeus harbor to
attend a stagy religious festival (Republic I 327a-328a), and this in tum is
associated by likeness to the ancestor ofGyges, who goes down into a cave and
finds an instrument of unjust power (II 359d) and again to the descent into the
cave in which strange prisoners (who are like ourselves) are chained to prevent
their discriminating appearances from real bodies (VII 514a-517a), and again to
the descent of wicked souls into the lower part of the afterworld to make one
consummatory discovery of the cosmic ground for hilmanjustice (X 614b ff.). In
each figure, descent and seizing or confining are juxtaposed. These images also
signal important junctures in the dialectical exploration of justice and indeed
constitute integral elements of that exploration. It remains, however, that Plato's
presenting of an image is inherently twofold, for Socrates is a living man to his
face-to-face respondents in the dialogues, while he too becomes a mental image
on the same footing with his caves and dark places for souls, as we read the books
about Socrates that Plato has composed.
The most obviously impressive images are the myths that crown several
dialogues. Especially awesome are. those dealing with the fate of the soul in
eternity(Gorgias 523a-526d;Phaedo I08d-l 14c;Phaedrus 246a-257a;Republic
X 614b-621d). Of more restricted sort are little tales of violence in the Phaedrus
(229c-e) and Republic (II 359c-360b). Most of the myths are put into the mouth
of Socrates, but there are exceptions (Protagoras 320c-328d; Statesman
269b-274e; Critias 108c-121c, etc.). Some images contain rather little overt action
(the image of the cave, Republic VII 514a-517a; of the personified Jaws in the
Crito 50a-54d; of the magnet and rings in the Ion 533c-535a; of the previous
38
existence of the soul, Meno 81a-d). To all these images we might add many
historical and biographical allusions and descriptions, such as the extended
account of the cycles of civilization and primitive existence in the Laws III
(676-702e), the portrait of Socrates by Alcibiades in the Symposium (215a-
222b), the somewhat deprecatory accounts of the sophists and others (of
Prodicus, for instance, in the Protagoras 337a-c; of the two predatory brothers
in the Euthydemus 27la-274e; ofHippias almost throughout the two (genuine?)

dialogues bearing his name, of Pol us in the Gorgias 448a-449a, 461 b-481 b; of the
over-armed, inept military instructor Stesilaus in the Laches 183c-184a). And
many more. Sometimes the little images are about arguments or their results:
Socrates has the numbing effect ofa torpedo ray (Meno 79e-80a); in the hands of
Euthyphro, words are said to be like little mechanical men running about in all
directions (Euthyphro 1lb-e); dialectic is the hunter's art of surrounding game
(Republic IV 432b).
An image can be either a figure (or connected series of figures) of speech, or it
can be a simple presentation in words of what is at bottom apprehensible by the
senses. The sun taken as a stellar entity is an image, in Plato's view; taken as the
figure for the eternal form of good (Republic VI 508a-509d) it is also an image,
this time of a different sort. If the sun, beside being an image of reality is also a
real object, it is so because it embodied mathematico-physical or other principles
as well as being a mere globe offire. In either case, an image suggests but does not
articulate and fix once and for all the nature of any reality.
4.1. Image of the Cosmos

The most difficult and elaborate of all Plato's images is that of the cosmos in the
Timaeus, which the distinguished speaker calls a likely or probable myth (30b,
40e, 72d, etc.). Neglecting here its many methodological subtleties, we may view
the recital of Timaeus as being concerned with the vast process of the making of
the greater animal, the cosmos, populated by lesser animals such as men and
beasts. The greater animal is more nearly perfect, as well as all-encompassing
and, once created, is henceforth eternal. Needing nothing beyond itself, it lacks
exterior senses and organs of ingestion and excretion (33b-d). Its soul is the
orbital movements of stars in a great circle and the planets on its obliquely
intersecting circle and lesser concentrics (34b-36d). Its body is fire, air, water,
and earth, all set into their proper places (3 lb-32c). The divine craftsman of this
most beautiful world-animal fabricates it from pre-existing but chaotic materials,
separating them into the four elements, then accommodating them to four of the
regular geometrical solids - fire to tetrahedron, air to octahedron, water to
icosahedron, earth to cube. The fifth, the dodecahedron, is inflated like a modern
soccerball to envelop the whole cosmos (55b-56b). Into this grand framework
many lesser comparisons and images are fitted-time as the moving image of
eternity (37c-e), space as gold to be shaped or as the nurse of becoming (49a),
again as the odorless oil perfumers use as a base for their scents (50e), the human
soul as three-tiered, occupying the head, thorax, and abdomen (69c-71d), man's
39
respiratory-digestive-vascular system as a double fish-wheel with intertwined
quasicircular motions in some degree imitating those of the cosmos (78a-79a),
the soul as riveted to the body (43a), and numerous others.
The Republic can be read not only as an argument about justice and whether it
is better than injustice but also as a great image comprising many lesser images.
The Timaeus is built upon the analogy of the human species to the cosmos, while
the Republic rests upon the analogy of the individual human soul to the state. No
one dialogue is wholly devoted to the missing link here, namely the analogy
between state and cosmos, though there are many briefer statements of this in
the Critias, the Republic, and the Statesman.
4.2. Images of the State

The Republic's imaged states are formed partly out of diverse contemporary
city-states, Athens and Sparta being prominent among them. Athens is depicted
as a city near its seaport, perhaps too near to remain uncorrupted by foreigners,
and it supports a few men made very wealthy through enterprise or inheritance; it
plays host to sophists and rhetoricians, and is content with a system educating
even its most advantaged citizens to espouse dubious, risky doctrines. In the
long discussion, Socrates (vainly) seeks justice first in a natural state in which a
few men, all artisans and farmers, barter their goods and skills to ensure common
survival (II 369a ff.). When he introduces merchants, moneylenders, cooks,
doctors, lawyers, and others not directly occupied with meeting natural needs,
what follows is sickness in the state - a city wealthy as a whole but split between
have and have-not inhabitants, filled with busybodies who do anything but
perform the one task for which they are best fitted and which will presumably
contribute to general welfare (II 372e ff.). Such a city-state must be protected
from within and without, and soldiers are recruited, (373e ff.); but lacking proper
training there will be assurance that they would fight external enemies rather
than their fellow-citizens. The step-by-step reform of this second, fevered state
produces a third, in which justice is more easily perceived. The reform is
accomplished chiefly through the institutionalizing of right education in 'music'
(i.e. the liberal arts) and gymnastic (376c ff.), but the best-educated soldiers
become custodians not merely of weapons but successively of the arts (II 376e
ff.), of the laws and constitution (III 412a ff.), of economic equality (IV 421d ff.),
education (423e ff.), and of the virtues (428c ff.). To foster such a condition,
Socrates advances three radical proposals for the ruling class: Women must be
accorded the same duties and functions as men, in the select circle of guardians
of the state (V 45le-457a); the family must be disbanded and the children
brought up by the state (458e-466a); and philosophers must be the rulers
(473c-d)- this last is the least change by whichjustice can be guaranteed in the
state, and the survival and good fortune secured for just men. The institution of
this splendid state depends upon the selection, training, reselection, and further
training of its best members (VII 521d ff.); its maintenance depends upon the
inheritance of their traits in filial generations; its breakdown hinges upon disre-
40
gard for the breeding of these sons and daughters (VIII 545c, ff.), and the
generation-by-generation decline into timocracy (547c ff.), where a principle of
honor governs, thence into oligarchy (550c ff.), predicated upon government by
the richest, thence into democracy (555b ff.), where the crowd is free and largely
unmoderated, and finally into the lowest degradation, tyranny (562a ff.), where
everyone, even the tyrant himself, at length becomes enslaved.
A quite different image is projected in the Laws, in which emphasis is placed

upon regulation and upon persuasion of the populace to obey, rather than upon
education and inner virtue. Ordinances for property distribution, voting, military
service, government control, and the rest are laid down for a state admittedly
second best (V, 739a-d), and they differ, in some cases widely, from those of the
Republic. To pick one obvious example, the most suitable person to use for
inaugurating the new plan is a young tyrant. (See IV 799e.)
4.3. Images of the Soul

Two dialogues especially concerned with the human soul view it as typified in the
soul of Socrates. The Symposium, an engrossing masterpiece, describes a party
whose guests, a little the worse for an earlier celebration, agree that instead of
more drinking they should deliver speeches honoring love - Eros, the desire, the
aspiration that drives men, one may hope, to better efforts. The subtle portraits
are revealing; each of the first six speakers fits his speech in some fashion or, to
put it otherwise, constructs his speech by giving expression to important secrets
of his soul. The rather timid Phaedrus sees love as conferring courage. The
sophisticated, well-traveled Pausanias thinks ofit as something to be approached
temperately. The doctor, Eryximachus, presents it in pedestrian scientific lan-
guage as a wisdom of nature and of man's arts in a natural world. Aristophanes,
exchanging topics with the doctor but keeping his own literary style, talks of the
Jovian surgery that long ago split men in two halves, each of which then sought
its old partner; he stresses man's need to find his just position in the hierarchy of
men and gods. Agathon, a tragic poet, rhapsodizes on love as young, beautiful,
and holy - holiness being the fifth virtue. Socrates, brilliantly putting together a
pattern of elements from the preceding speeches, shows that the stages of love
are ranged in a much fuller hierarchy than any previously considered, culmina-
ting in love as search for the unity underlying all bodies, laws, arts, virtues, even
of beauty itself. The image of Socrates has thus been presented only sketchily in
the Symposium, and his speech seems ambiguous; he has begun with love
between the sexes and the generation of offspring, and has then shifted none too
obviously to love of wisdom and the generation of thought. His audience has
applauded, but has it understood whether love is wholly spiritual or not? The
intoxicated general Alcibiades breaks into the party and with frankness both
disarming and irritating depicts Socrates as a friend despite his impersonality, as
a wise man despite his peculiar modes of speech. As the frustrated sensual lover
of Socrates, he unwittingly repeats the five virtues the others have already
separately ascribed to love, and which Socrate.s has connected together. He
41
makes it clear thereby that his philosopher friend is the best living embodiment of
the higher conceptions of love to which the thinker himself had earlier given
expression but which could only inadequately be grasped from the argument.
In the Phaedo Socrates dominates both as dialectician and as image of a man
about to die. He offers four proofs that the soul does not cease utterly to exist
after death. Shortly to be executed, he sits upon his rough prison bed rubbing his
leg aching from the irons just struck off. After reflecting upon death and
philosophy (both represent the separation of the soul from its bodily surround-
ings), he launches his first three proofs for immortality, but is temporarily halted
by objections from Simmias and Cebes, two latter-day Pythagoreans. Socrates,
alone cheerful in a gloomy 'company, refutes the misapprehensions, then em-
barks upon a fourth and most definitive proof, which nevertheless leaves it clear
that the intellectual part of the soul, in a sense identical with the eternal forms it
knows, is the only part enjoying immortality. After an abstruse demonstration he
adds two more informal appendices, the first about the growth of his own
philosophic thinking, the second about the fate of souls after their separation
from the body. The first is a reproof of his predecessor Anaxagoras, who
promised to explain nature through mind but inconsistently adverted to body as
the cause. Socrates has endeavored to re-establish mind as a cause. The second
is a sober myth, the telling of which creates a lesser picture connected with the
total image of the great Socrates. The earth is an otherwise solid ball, bored
through to hold subterranean rivers which become abodes of souls of the dead -
punished or simply held in marshy limbo according to the seriousness of their
earthly failings. The soul's goodness bears directly upon the quality but not the
duration of its afterlife.
It is now time for Socrates to die, and after a bath he is brought a cup of poison,
just enough, the attendant says, to end his life. He cannot, therefore, pour a
libation (the poison which kills man cannot honor the gods, and our death is not
for their glory). His dying request is that a cock be paid to Asklepios, demigod of
medicine; the hemlock heals all pains. Socrates dies quietly, and his weeping
friend Crito closes the mouth and eyes of the strange prisoner; the mouth that
was for communicating with the world, the eyes that were coming to know it. Our
friend, says Phaedo, narrator of the scene, was of all men of his time, and of
whom I have known - a wide claim but not too wide - the wisest and justest and
best.
4.4. Transition to Knowledge

These four major images are true, Plato seems to wish us to believe, not in the
historian's sense but in the sense that they are concordant with the truths
reached in the great debates accompanying the images. The truth is, of course,
subject to revision as are all Platonic truths, hence the images themselves are not
unique and definitive (Timaeus 19b-e).
Some other images are less useful in leading us (when joined with the right
names and sentences) to knowledge. Plato speaks of a sensuous image that
42
deceives because its parts distort or even reverse the order of parts of the whole
that is imaged (Timaeus 46a-c), or that, being unlike the natural object imaged, is
yet made to seem good in its proportions (Sophist235e-236c). Shadows cast by a
fire, reflections in a pool, and the like, are not essentially, absolutely false, but
remain false so long as we make inadequate allowances for them. For a shadow is
in itself something rather than nothing, but when we think it real in what it
represents then it is no longer a way-station on the road to knowledge (Republic

VII 514a-515d). It is an important aim of Plato to show that a true image is,
insofar as true, real not only as a collection of parts but also for what it relays; a
misleading image, insofar as it is false, is only imitative of real images, and not
wholly imitative of the reality which it purports to transmit to us. For this reason,
it cannot lead to knowledge; but it is part of Plato's paradox that when the
knowledge is gained, the images can be sorted out so that they become clear.
5. KNOWLEDGE
Students of Plato widely trumpet a doctrine that intellectual processes are

distinct from sensory, the former laying hold of a real world, the latter falling
short and having to settle, not for outright non-being and ignorance, but for
evanescent aspects of things that change, grow, decay, and pass from existence.
This simple reading of Plato is not wholly wrong, and can be justified in first
approximation by reference to, among others, the well-known Divided Line
passage (Republic VI 509d-51le). Consider a line, says Socrates, divided un-
equally into two and again subdivided by proportional inequalities into four.
(That is mathematically impossible, it happens, as Plato was probably aware; he
may have introduced this oddity with bivalent interpretations in order to with-
hold from it any finality.) The bottom segment (it might be either the shortest or
the longest, Plato does not say which, and this is another bivalence) represents
conjecture, obscure and indecisive, whose correlates are all confusing shadows
and images of bodies. Together these two modes of cognition make up opinion,
whose sphere is the changing. The third segment represents hypothetical under-
standing that commences from an arbitrarily-chosen postulate and argues for-
ward to conclusions having no higher assurance than the starting-point. A typical
object of such reasoning is geometric figures and proofs. The fourth segment at
once supersedes, excludes, and sums up the others: It is dialectical reason,
cognition that moves backward from the hypotheses, finding the unitary princi-
ple underlying them and thus connecting together diversities that otherwise pull
the mind in many directions. Together the highest two segments, understanding
and reason, make up knowledge, whose proper object is of course the unchang-
mg.
Other ambiguities remain. The top segment seems to be discursive, but in a
figure just preceding the line (VI 508a-509b), the highest source of light and
cause of life (analogized to the source of knowledge and power to exist) is the
sun, which represents the form of the good, ineffable, beyond any language but
43
the most hyperbolically figurative. The image of the line is also ambiguous in
another way: Is the line itself an object of conjecture, belief, hypothesis, or
dialectical reasoning? Certainly it can be taken in all these ways, so that each
subdivision can be read on four levels, making a total of sixteen. Was this Plato's
intention? If so, his indications of it are the slightest. It may therefore be that the
utility of the line can best be seen not in formal argument but in approximations,
clarifications, and applications, of which Plato furnishes many.

Immediately after the sun and line, for example, is a third image (VII 514a-
517a), suggesting an explanation of those two together. We are prisoners in a
cave, chained so that visual and aural distortions and illusions (the bottom
segment) cannot be corrected because we have no direct sensation of bodies.
Once released, we can turn and see these objects, first by firelight in the cave (the
second segment), then by sunlight outside, where, temporarily unable to look at
it directly, we can but view the sun in pools of water, etc. Gradually our vision
adjusts itself to the ultimate source of light, and after gazing upon this we return
to the cave, to liberate the other prisoners. Knowledge once gained must be
made available to others.
Plato then outlines a program of mathematical and dialectical training to be
given those few best intellects suited to be philosopher kings (VII 521d-541b).
This training closely but not altogether parallels the distinctions made between
the third and fourth segments of the line: For instance, astronomy, the highest of
the five mathematical sciences necessary for the king, deals with moving bodies,
though not so much qua visibly moving as qua apprehensible in some formula.
Not only that, but the dialectical training (during years 30-35) which clearly
answers to the topmost segment, must itself be topped off and completed by the
practical discipline of living in society, before undertaking the duties of ruler of
the state.
In the Timaeus, probably meant to follow the Republic despite some con-
tradictions, the eponymous speaker commences his extraordinary monologue
by laying down the distinction between knowledge and opinion, proposing the
changeless and the changing as their respective objects (27d-28a). Yet he care-
fully develops this in a way that allows for the overlap of permanent and
fluctuating and for the varied applications of these four principal terms as he
moves downward in the scale from the cosmos and its parts to man and his
physiology and its failings. Timaeus loosens without abrogating the Republic's
distinctions in a setting of alternation and growth, and of compromise between
unlike and only partly harmonious causes.
Another supplement to the account of the sun, line, and cave is the reexamina-
tion of the purely epistemic bases for the distinction between sensation and
knowledge. In the Theaetetus the difficulties of the question, What is knowl-
edge? arise from the fact that a gifted young mathematician, capable of many
abstract intellectual operations, is yet willing to define knowledge as sensation
(151e). This formula is then coupled with the Protagorean view that man is the
44
measure of things (152a), thereby reducing knowledge to individual opinion, and
then with the Heraclitean view that everything (and consequently everything as
known) is in perpetual flux (152d-e), thus further reducing opinion to what is
individually sensed.
The challenge to Socrates is more pressing here because he seems reluctant to
step outside his opponent's position before having shown that to be internally
contradictory. So he must stand at first on a level of fleeting cognitions that only

gradually become stabilized to defeat the doctrine that all cognitions are fleeting,
instead of immediately adopting a 'higher' viewpoint and insisting upon
stabilities not conceded by Theaetetus and his unseen cohorts. To set the young
man straight, knowledge-as-sensation must be not so much demolished as built
up, for some stability must be found in sensation or there cannot be any basis for
stable opinion and knowledge either. Knowledge is not mere sensation, but must
use sensation. Nor is it (true) opinion, for this too cannot account for the
permanence of things; yet knowledge is in a general way about those things on
which we opine (187b-200c). Noragain is it true opinion plus some 'account,' in
any sense of the word, for even though the opinion may be true, it is still liable to
falsification (20lc-210b). Theaetetus in proposing these three definitions has
taken no account of sequences; each of the sensations and the opinions are
viewed as separate items. The dialogue itself is, of course, just such a sequence,
and so is the example of mathematical reasoning with which it commences
(147d-148b) and which Plato uses to display Theaetetus' exceptional powers.
But the youth is inexperienced in fitting these two aspects of knowledge together
and drawing the proper generalizations, i.e. finding the underlying unity.
A further appendix to the Republic is found in those dialogues, especially the
Protagoras, which try to link the excellence of man with knowledge. The
Republic, with its heavy concern for justice and human goodness generally,
furnishes this as a context for the Divided Line, in which the highest level
represents what is already settled as the best. The other dialogue, an encounter
between Socrates at age 35 and Protagoras, the leading sophist of Hellas, turns
on the double question whether virtue can be taught and whether Protagoras is
the man to teach it. Clearly if Protagoras himself affirms the latter he niust uphold
the former; but if so, then he must admit that he is by l)O means the exclusive
teacher of virtue. Socrates, at first wary of allowing that virtue can be taught, in
the end realizes that he must force this conclusion, not as a mere tactic against
Protagoras but because in fact the doing of good always requires right thinking -
for example the right judging of a potentially dangerous situation in which
foolhardiness must not be mistaken for courage (349d-350c, 359a-360e). The
overall conclusion is that on any level and in regard to any of the virtues,
goodness cannot be practiced without knowledge of both circumstances and
principles of action. Whether we can also say that simply knowing what is right in
a particular situation is sufficient to cause us to act virtuously, is not in issue. On
the other hand, Plato elsewhere (Gorgias 479a-c) supplies arguments to show
45
that one would not come to know the principles ofright action were one not the
person to act rightly - poor habits of acting would cloud one's reason. Right
thinking and wicked behavior do not co-exist in the same soul.
5.1. Dialectic and Other Methods of Acquiring Knowledge

It is fair to say that dialectic is both the form of knowledge, in Plato, and the
process of acquiring it. As a process, dialectic is the art of moving from what is
known or believed to what is not yet understood but which when attained will
make whatever is now known even clearer, more intelligible. In the sequential
development of truth, what emerges alters retrospectively the statements and
even the questions earlier proposed, by indicating what they must more properly
have meant than the speakers were aware of at the time of first utterance.
The statements and the questions originate, for different reasons, from the
stream of ordinary life: (a) we reach some contradiction even in the simplest
objects ofour senses (Republic VII 523c-d; Philebus 46a-50e); (b) we discover a
confusion between a name and its contrary, as in trying to unravel the pro-
nouncements of Thrasymachus (Republic I 343b-344c), of Charmides (Char-
mides !60d-164c) and ofLaches and Nicias (Laches !96c-199e); (c) we test the
consistency and insight of a respondent, not to discredit him but to assess his
abilities (Theaetetus 145b); (d) we wish to find out what a thing is, so that we can
learn how to assess its qualities (Symposium 198d-e; Meno 71b, 86d). These are
not trifling puzzles except at first; we see, as the dialectic progresses, that they
have given rise to inquiries and formulations of utmost importance. We can wave
them away, as many participants in the dialogues do, but if we are to acquire
understanding and not merely relieve headaches for the time being, we must see
how the annoying little puzzles really fit into a larger whole - not some one fixed
and all-embracing whole - but a wider structure representing a solution of the
constellation of problems at hand.
Dialectic is a 'talking-through' of a topic - when well practised, we might add -
to the point where not only is truth attained within the argument but all active
participants have reached common understanding of the final formulations.
There are, however, a number of methods, some quite close to dialectic and
valuable in their own right, some with less worthy aims and likely to deceive. All
of them fall short of dialectic in one way or another: poetry and myth because
although rich in interpretable materials they cannot interpret themselves; the
individual sciences, including mathematics, because they too are unable to
reexamine their own principles; history because it explores only what was, not
what must be or what is best; rhetoric because it rests upon the hope that the
hearer will prove ignorant sufficiently to be led to believe some new assertion,
irrespective of or even against his former beliefs. All these lack any checking
with what was agreed to earlier, nor is there a retrospective reordering of those
former statements to put them in a new light and give them, as it were, a new and
truer value. For these reasons those substitute methods, while not wholly
46
misleading, fail because they cannot widen the perspective; each in its own way
narrows the dialectical view. On the other hand, these secondary methods can be
put into the service of dialectic - history, for example, can teach philosophical
lessons when rightly phrased, and rhetoric can be persuasive of truth and not of
mere passing fancies or selfish purposes. In these latter cases, they become
means in a total philosophic discipline. Sophistic, the art of arguing on either
side, but with a view to displaying one's own skill to personal advantage, and
eristic, the art of disputing merely to gain victory, are less noble, but still very
hard to disentangle from the dialectical art (Sophist 230a-23Ib; Euthydemus
passim). The difficulty with sophistic and eristic is not so much that they make
distinctions false in themselves as that the lines of argument eventuating in or
ensuing from these distinctions contain contradictions or non sequiturs, together
with unsuitable applications and images. Thus 'knowing' and 'not knowing' can
be employed as dialectically respectable opposites, but to ask whether one learns
what one knows or what one does not know is a question that cannot be answered
in sharply either-or fashion, though this is precisely what two eristics ask a
helpless youth, and they guffaw when he blushes and cannot reply to this and
similar queries (Euthydemus 275d-277c). The success of each eristical gambit
turns upon deliberately confusing essential with accidental, part with whole, one
with many.
Sophistic, a notch higher, is tricky in another way. In pretending to assert, it
evades or at least casts doubt upon an argument's real issues, reaching a seeming
conclusion in the private interest of the sophist himself (Hippias, Gorgias,
Protagoras, in the dialogues named after each man). Both sophistic and eristic
pay little heed to the native equipment of the respondent, being content with his
day-to-day answers rather than with uncovering his basic character and grasp of
defensible verities.
It is a peculiarity of dialectic that it seeks, by developing an argument to which
sincere assent must be given (Gorgias 486e-487a), to uncover at the same time
the innate comprehension of principles lying deep in the soul. In two explicitly
mythic passages (Meno 8Ia-d; Phaedrus 246a-248b), Socrates is made to say
that imprinted upon the mind is knowledge of truth, and that learning in our
earthly career is a recollection of that pristine lucid vision. The dialectician
derives his assurance from his capacity to make a respondent aware of what he
already knew, from the very beginning of his deathless soul.
5.2. Knowledge and its Objects

In one respect an order of things is not imposed by the mind, in another it is. (I)
The mind cannot impose it, for though we can invent many patterns, most of
them will be arbitrary and frivolous because, knowing neither the underlying
unity behind a plurality nor the proper partitions of that unity, we are taken in by
their more easily perceptible qualities. The skilled butcher cuts at the natural
joints (Phaedrus 265e). (2) Yet Plato is not saying that one cut is all that can be
47
made. Names, sentences, and attendant images vary greatly, and with such
changes new patterns can be constructed which if correctly made can still fit the
facts of nature.
Plato's overriding aims in his account of knowledge are evidently to show that
despite our drawbacks of temperament, education, and character, the principles
of true thought are at the same time the principles of reality, and also that such a
reality includes and transcends that of invididual bodies and their changes in
places and qualities. The true thoughts emerge from discourse or cogitation little
by little. Correspondingly, reality is not all ofa piece, a single kind of being, small
chunks of which are attached to individual objects; rather it is layered, for what is
more general, more positive, more self-evidently necessary transcends and
subdues what is less so. The being ofa house is multiple; as it is a mere object for
our senses, as it is a topic for our judgments regarding its convenience, its
healthfulness, or its cost, and as it enshrines unchangeable proportions, beautiful
beyond the beauty apparent to sighted but thoughtless men, orderly beyond any
placing of its walls and apertures. This last aspect is superior to individual facts,
not only because it can be predicated of them but also because in its very unity it
gives them their own uniqueness and simplicity. In the same way, the knowledge
aroused in our souls improves upon the swarming sensations that are so hard to
put aside, the scattered opinions that veer about in our heads, and even the
vaguer recollections of truths implanted in our souls from their very inception in
the divine life, and never to be entirely withdrawn or erased. All three of these
are brought together in the best practice of dialectic, making the sensations
indicators ofreal qualities, the opinions pointers to real relations, and recollec-
tions the signs of real essences.
5.3. Transition to the Real

In striving to eliminate the inadequacies with which it begins, dialectical thought
should first point out the inconsistencies arising when the earliest formulations
are applied to hypothetical situations in life. As an example, ifjustice is defined in
part as paying one's debts, Republic I, 33la-b, then it is proper to ask whether
the returning of a knife to its owner who after lending the weapon has gone mad is
an act of justice. Originally the respondents to Socrates try to define it with
respect to their own inclinations, habits, choices of friends and enemies, and to
no doubt temporarily-held positions of power. In fact, however,justice cannot
be defined successfully until, in Book IV, it is connected with the classes in the
state, with the parts of the soul, and with all the other virtues.
Dialectic begins with commonplace opinions asserted sometimes half-
heartedly and sometimes with dogmatic conviction, then progresses through
paradoxes and improbabilities arising as soon as the ordinary assumptions are
scrutinized. As the discussion advances topics akin to the principal one in
contention are introduced, but rarely twice in the same way. There is a cycloidal
movement in the Laws, the early speeches in the Symposium complement rather
48
than supplement each other, there is a confrontation of potentially hostile parties
in the Gorgias followed by the disposing of successive losers. The Philebus very
carefully examines and then applies explicit principles, while the Meno arranges
a series of compromises, when possible, in the interests of practical leadership
and civic virtue. The latter stages of dialectic are marked by tighter and often
more affirmative arguments, in which distinctions are cut finer yet show the way
to inclusion of wider propositions in which to frame knowledge of the topic in

hand. This is the method in the climactic parts of the Symposium, in the
Republic, Gorgias, Cratylus, Theaetetus, and kindred dialogues.
A culmination is reached, but this too takes different shapes - an access of
prophetic insight, a rousing paean to the virtues and the philosophic life, a
biographical or autobiographical confession, a myth, or even an agreement to
disagree at present or in the future. All of these serve, however, to signal the
ascent to some new level of understanding. But because of the many dualities in
Plato's philosophizing, this understanding, this thinking, both is and is not
discursive. At the juncture where it becomes clear at last that there is a radical
identity of thought and reality, the best that can be said is that although there may
be some one best formulation of a truth under the special conditions set by each
dialogue, still it is only as that formulation is included in the sequence of
utterances that it has a correct and clearly-interpretable meaning. Even so, it is
the sequence itself, with all its backings and fillings, its assertions and counteras-
sertions, its sometimes tiresome reiterations, its clashes of temperament, that
constitute the real statement of truth. And because that statement is very long
and moreover suggests other and perhaps_infinite ramifications, it follows that we
must, having exercised our intellects to the fullest in making out the sequence, be
inspired by a kind of intuitive flash, a heaven-descended feeling, which
epitomizes without literally summarizing what has been said. This feeling is so
closely related to one's growing personal involvement in the dialectic that it can
be called self-knowledge. The oracle at Delphi enjoined this self-knowledge
upon everyone, but it is not a narcissist hypochondria of the soul; it is a
realization that the limits of dialectic are at the same time and always the limits of
my dialectic, and that the limitations on both sides must be further thought and
further intuition be transcended.
In this little account it seems as if no distinction were being made between the
participants in the dialogues and the readers of those extraordinary works. If so,
this is all to the good, because Plato's aim seems to be to grapple with his reader,
make him listen to what is being said, make him assent to it, deny it, become a
participant himself, much as Socrates grapples tirelessly with friends and
enemies. The reader is not expected to become Anytus or Ctesippus or the
magisterial Timaeus, but he approximates these, sees their points of view in turn,
and perchance moves on. Plato voices his suspicion of the written word (Phae-
drus 275c-e) because it cannot engage in question and answer; the dialogue is the
closest approach to conversation possible, the most nearly satisfactory way to
49
draw the reader into the same dialectical passage, the same tussle with Socrates
or with the ponderous but magnificant Stranger from Elea, or the few other
leaders, or dozens oflesser members of Plato's company.
In summary, thought is both an immediate intuition of truth and a rough
discursive pathway to truth, and the discursive precedes the immediate in time; it
is a laborious precondition for every spontaneous act of illumination. Discourse
little by little takes on a certainty guaranteed by the conjoint suggestions pointing

to it, the suggestions afforded by all the premises, i.e. all statements, queries,
images, that it be true. (The best that Aristotle could say, Politics II, 6, 1265a8,
was that the dialogues showed originality, but as the author of the Prior and
Posterior Analytics he must have shuddered.) The objective of knowledge in this
journey is to find the purest, most unalloyed account of virtue, or a given virtue,
or political relation, psychic activity, phase of being, or whatever, and this last
intellectual purification is ordinarily found in what Plato calls forms (eide, ideas).
These have both a cognitive and an antic side. The form, as that by which
changing instances are known, has a fixity imposed upon bodies, acts, qualities,
as we perceive these sensuously and apprehend them through discourse. There
is thus a discrepancy between a form and its instances, but this is no reason for
impugning knowledge, for the latter, being permanent, must be of the perma-
nent, though this can well be abiding aspects of bodies in flux. Such aspects are
the essential relations between changing features of bodies, i.e. what we would
call their laws of being. Perfect knowledge knows the forms directly and through
them the things imitating and manifesting those forms. The knowledge thus fits
the changing world if developed with sufficient flexibility so that it can move from
the unchanging to what flows, and discern the former in the latter.
It would be shortsighted to complain that forms, being altogether mental,
distort our world by being imposed upon it. Plato says repeatedly that forms are
also real, and that changing things are not only known through forms but exist by
reason of them. (For the chief accounts, see Phaedo 73c-79c; Republic VI
504e-511e; VII 514e-518b; Phaedrus 246d-250c; Timaeus 27c-40d; and the
arguments he himself brings against their too-rigid interpretation in the Par-
menides 128e-135d.) As prototypes, forms cannot be less real than other things,
indeed they have an invincibility surpassing all else. As known, they are per-
fectly general; as existent, they are causes of what things partake of them. Plato
speaks guardedly of these forms and is concerned not to overpopulate the world
with them (Parmenides 130c-d; 13le-132b); nor does he wish to deny them
communication with things of sense (133c-134e). Nevertheless, he can think of
no better explanation for being and knowledge (Phaedo lOOa-b).
6. THE REAL
We must now attempt to reconcile our assertions about the heterogeneous

tactics, the roundabout approaches, the whole sequences transformed and
superseded by others, with the seemingly opposite claim that the absolutely real
50
consists of simple forms pruned of all fleeting qualities and requiring direct
intuition to be apprehended. This, in Platonic terms, is a reconciliation of the
many with the one. The overriding aim in the manifold sequences is not
heterogeneity itself, but the discovery, planned for by the master dialectician but
diffidently stumbled upon by the respondents, that there is some unity at the
bottom of the seemingly endless arguments and counter-arguments. Turn about,
the sudden grasp of a singular form is not kept unmoving as in the ecstatic hours
of a mystic; it is applied to and remembered in plural experiences of plural bodies
and halting minds, and is always subject to re-examination in its manifold
relationships to things.
The dialogues, then, have a single theme, to arrive at a grasp of being which is
often and appropriately lodged in the forms. The more single-mindedly they
pursue this, however, the more the dialogues lose their nature as simulacra of
conversation; but the more they reflect life and people, the less clearly do they
sketch a system of forms. The refutation of erroneous opinions, provincial and
selfish, must be adjusted to the preconceptions of all-too-human respondents.
The protestations of ignorance by Socrates (Meno 71b; Euthydemus 295a; Lysis
223b; Republic I 354b; and many more) are rooted not in a consciousness of his
generally inadequate powers but in his realization of the difficulties in using or
helping his companions to arrive jointly at a concept of the form that gives both
existence and clarity to the subject under discussion. The attempt, moreover, to
expound a form, defining its nature and relations, is doomed to run into pre-
judices which even a master tactician cannot control. Thus a form often becomes
diffused, fractionated when tested in discourse; a dialogue must record this, at
the cost of losing some of its straightforwardness and coherence. This is true
even of the Timaeus, where forms serving as models for all creation are at first
copied with some exactness but finally, in the more earthbound phases, perforce
suffer looser and looser imitations, making their instances less reliable indicators
of what simple perfections, mostly arithmetical, are really like.
6.1. Dialectical Structures and Being

Plato would be easier to read were all his dialogues based upon the same basic
dialectical structures. The triadic sequence of two mutually cancelling opposites
and their unifying synthetic stage, so often found in Kant's Critique·s and in
Hegel's Encyclopedia, is somewhat like one of the ways Plato relates names
(Timaeus 69a-92c); but because it would make reality appear invariably
threefold he avoids using it without alternatives. These alternatives include
bipartite distinctions (Sophist 218d-236e; Statesman 258b-285c, especially
262b-c); and an odd dialectic in the Critias, in which oppositions (such as obtain
between the lands of Athens and Atlantis) are not between qualitative counter-
parts but between different measures. The Meno oftenjoins two unlike extremes
by a single mean, and in the Timaeus extremes are joined (3lb-32c, 55d-56b) by
two means. In the Philebus there are the finite, the infinite, the mixture of the
two, followed by the cause of the mixture, which is on a different footing
51
altogether. The universe obviously cannot comport with all of these if they are
intended in the same way, regardless of what the individual topics are, since the
applications of these methods are presumed to be extensible. Plato seems con-
vinced, however, that no one of them could exhaust or even literally express
reality at all, so every approach must be tried and only provisionally accepted for
its closeness of fit.
Putting together the two notions of multiple dialectical structures and the
simultaneous simplicity and complexity of the forms, we see that the latter
emerge in different relations to bodies and to mental operations as a result of the
very dialectical schemata used in examining them. If one commences with a rigid
dichotomy, the forms must enjoy either absolute being (as in the Phaedo) or, a
little more tentatively, non-being (as in the Parmenides). When intermediates are
permitted, or overlapping classes, we find that the forms can communicate in
various ways with things and minds, as in the Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Republic.
Except in the Timaeus, the forms do not give the cue to the dialectical structures;
they are not posited at the outset but arise as a possible solution to some problem.
In the Parmenides they are viewed principally as a stumbling-block to which
exception must be taken, if they are mere hard-edged entities.
Forms are often the chief exemplars of being. That which has being is both
contrasted with and inclusive of its own becoming (Statesman 269d-270a); a tree
is no less a tree just because it grows or will die. Being is also contrasted with, yet
inclusive of, nonbeing (Sophist 256d-258c). Regardless of this, what distin-
guishes being is always a fixity, a resistance to change not in a mechanical sense
but resistance because the real is primarily a type, such as mankind, or a quality,
or a relation between two types, or possibly a mathematical entity. Ifjustice is a
real quality it is also a type, it is always that in virtue of which the just man is
properly called just; and although a law of the state may specify different sorts of
just acts, nevertheless the real justice, the form, is forever a particular kind of
relation between parts of the state and between parts of the soul of man;
otherwise an act could be just and not just at the same time and in the same
respect.
Plato uses many terms to show complex interrelations between being, be-
coming, and nonbeing. Because being is one, it would seem proper to say that
becoming is therefore many; but what then of nonbeing? Is it just zero? The
Eleatic Stranger in the Sophist argues that nonbeing is not absolute, but is really
another kind of being. So non being too appears to be allied with the many. Again,
being is a good, in the sense of remaining stable, whereas what becomes can
become bad, and what does not exist can never be good in any plain sense.
Again, becoming is imitative of being, and so in a way is nonbeing, insofar as it is
less than the real. An imitation is not nothing, it has reality in some way -
Timaeus assumes this throughout his account of cosmogenesis. If Plato himself
were to deny all reality to what changes and is experienced, then a tree would be
but a passing image of the wholly real, wholly ideal Tree, Gorgias would be an
52
image of the real Rhetorician, and Socrates no more than an imitation of the real
Philosopher- an impression Plato tries to remove. Ifwe can grasp the being ofa
thing, through a defensible definition, then the shadows of this world turn out to
have substance. If flesh-and-blood men are oflittle worth without the forms they
participate in, these very imitations are also what rescue the forms from
abstractness, vagueness, emptiness. The many methods Plato uses lay bare all
contrasts, yet at the same time they show communications between what is
divided.
7. SUMMARY WITH TWO CONCLUDING QUESTIONS
7. I. Summary
We may now summarize and at the same time put our materials in a slightly
different light by charting some of the relations between reality and its ap-
proaches. This is but one way of representing a system both complex and
ultimately open. We commenced with names, divided as we saw into personal
and general, the differences between these two sorts not being altogether fixed as
individual things and classes. At the next higher stage there are sentences
divided, but only roughly, between true and false, for no sentence is wholly true
or false, and both kinds alike must be carefully interpreted to yield meanings
which make them true or false - in the specific contexts of the interpretations.
Images are either exact or distorting, which is not the same as true and false, for
although both images and sentences need interpreting, images are in a sense part
of a natural world in a way that not even Cratylus himself would claim sentences
to be. On the next level, knowledge is divided into intuitive and discursive, as we
have seen - but is this distinction itself justified intuitively or known only
discursively? The verbal arguments necessary to justify one side or the other
would run the risk of killing off the intuition needed to grasp the conclusion from
the inside. Finally there is the real, divided, again only roughly, and with subtle
interplays, into the unchanging and absolute against the becoming and relative.
We can make combinations moving directly down this five-step ladder. If we
pair the real and knowledge, what focuses both together are the forms, which
from one side exist independently of mind, and from the other exist only as
known. Ifwe combine knowledge and images, that which unites them is the soul,
one aspect of which is pure, abstract, so to speak (Socrates and Timaeus would
say it is the immortal part), the other being shot through with sensation and
everyday feelings. If we combine images and sentences, what we have are
myths, one aspect of which is verbal, the other being the picture of reality or
whatnot that they provide. Again, ifwe properly combine sentences with names,
what emerges is definitions, continuing names that one hopes can be seen in full
clarity and phrases attaching the names to things.
Such a limited set of combinations, which at least resembles the pairings that
53
Plato used, would result in a rather tight, closed system, in which the combina-
tions would be as it were self-limiting in application and capable of being
explored with no hint that they could be superseded by others. But one can also
combine the real with images (moving down our scale by skips instead of taking
adjacent items), and this will force a change of meaning of both terms, as we
would also find if we joined knowledge and sentences, or images and names, or
the real with sentences (moving now with a longer skip). Introducing trios of
terms would alter every relation again. All this Plato did here and there in his
dialogues, regardless of whether he was consciously applying the little conveni-
ence of our summarizing list. This seeking for new combinations, and with them
new meanings, for ways to turn an idea on its side (to borrow a phrase from
Kant), is characteristic of an open system in which the disconformities between
any two analyses suggest a need for the further exploring and resolving of
disparities, real or seeming, in the dialectical advance.
Two nagging questions remain, one regarding romance and reason, the other
regarding the relation of the dialogues to Plato as author.
7.2. Expressible and Inexpressible

If the summary givenjust now seems too pat, we must remember that Plato fills in
all his schemata with what Dewey and Whitehead would approve as color and
fact. Through reading the dialogues one also becomes better acquainted with a
world of men and women, of habits of acting and thinking, oflands and wars and
seasons, of the historically past, the future projected, the geographically near or
far away. One may pick out remarks that play up sudden insights, dreams, lucky
guesses, mythic figures, the force of daimonic love, prophecy, and much else,
concluding that Plato is romantic, even anti-intellectual. Because his work is
replete with poetic expressions and because he has, even with his reluctant
dismissal of the poets from the innermost circles of government in the best
possible state (Republic X 595a-608b), an abiding respect for the poetic temper
and its arcane powers, the poets of later ages have, in spite of occasional
grumbling, taken him into their number.
On the other hand, there are passages of aridity that appall everyone but the
most confirmed philomath, there is relentless rigor that presses on to establish
highly impersonal principles (especially in the Philebus, Sophist, Statesman,
and Parmenides), and there is a profusion of mathematical paradigms, often
cropping up in unexpected places and almost always obscure in wording, recon-
dite in application, if one is to judge by the wealth of interpretations that critics
have made of them (Meno 86e-87b; Republic VIII 546a-d; IX 587e-588a;
Theaetetus 146d-148b, etc.). His insistence upon the need for order and measure
has thus caused the word 'Platonism' to connote a hegemony of mathematics,
and to persons reading Plato with this prominently in view his 'poetry' seems like
mere literary flavoring. But it is not hard to see those two extreme aspects of
Plato as essential counterbalances, the formulated and the suggested, the ex-
54
pressible and the inexpressible, in the whole of his work. They are both elements
in his sinuous dialectic that like the river Alph meanders with a mazy motion -
and always goes straight to the heart of things.
7.3. Whether Plato had a Philosophy

We must still address the ancient supposition (held by some critics) that Plato
wrote in dialogue form so as to prevent his readers from directly becoming

acquainted with his own views, or lack of views. Obviously Plato could not have
believed equally in all the utterances put forth in the dialogues, in spite of the
point that every sentence is in some (perhaps remote) sense true. Nor could he
have disbelieved them all. Did he, then, have a secret doctrine which never
appears in his writings, or at any rate shows itself only in masked and cryptic
form? Or was he without a philosophic view altogether? To fall back upon the
dialogues themselves as evidence for affirming or denying either of these soon
entangles one in question-begging and paradox. The dialogues are the only real
evidence we have, since Aristotle's account of Plato's lecture on the Good can
hardly be classed as revealing reminiscences. The present essay assumes that
the dialogues, despite their exterior dress, really contain a philosophy, even if
one of unusual, never-duplicated sort. If they do, it is hard to believe that the
writings are brilliant stage-shows to disguise either their author's private empti-
ness or his espousal of a totally different set of opinions. Nor is it easier to believe
that Plato's own personal philosophizing, if there were such a thing, could have
followed the methods of the dialogues yet somehow ended with quite different
conclusions, for in context the many conclusions in the dialogues are fairly
inescapable, granting the warranties of person, situation, and argument from
which they stem; and where they are not, this fact too is carefully marked. The
notion that Plato's own thinking might have followed other patterns, not dialecti-
cal in character, is scarcely more attractive - is there any reason to believe that
locked in his chests at home was a method resembling that of Aristotle, or
Hobbes, Spinoza, George Boole, or someone else a couple of light years away
from what he devised in the Symposium, or the Phaedo, or the Republic?
That there is a philosophy, complete or not, in the writings, has been stressed.
We should not be misled into thinking that because of multiple patterns ofnames
and sequences of sentences (and their related images) there is never any positive
doctrine in the dialogues. Nor should the split between those Hegelians who
attributed primacy to a succession of statements and those who attributed it to a
method of generating such statements agitate the ranks of Platonists. The
methods and what is said are of a piece, since the methods are in themselves
much deeper than mere 'question and answer,' 'aiming for the ideal,' 'dramatiz-
ing ideas,' or something of the sort. These conceptions and others like them all
have a place, but they are secondary to the setting up of schemata and exhibiting
their strengths and weaknesses and then transforming and superseding them.
When Plato devises additional schemata, adjustments must be made between the
55
new and old. The adjusting of two or more slightly dissimilar schemata, how-
ever, is precisely what is meant by an open system, to the creation of which
Plato's singular genius was dedicated.
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57

Five Elements in Plato's Conception of Reality

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Five Elements in Plato's Conception of Reality

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George Kimball Plochmann, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Ill.,

I. PLATO'S LIFE AND WRITINGS

I. I. Life and Interests of Plato

1.2. System and Writings

of their political power, whether it be constitutional (Timaeus) or sideline

l.3. Co-operative Search

2.1. Platonic Practices in Naming

parative values can have a place, so that 'reason-spirit-appetite' forms a hier-

2.2. Platonic Statements about Naming

2.3. Transition to Sentences

3.1. Kinds of Sentences

3.2. Definition and the Unity ofa Dialogue

3.3. Assertions and Refutations

teristically upset by substitutions, variants, or outright rejections which have the

3.4. Transition to Images

in the Euthydemus 27la-274e; ofHippias almost throughout the two (genuine?)

4.1. Image of the Cosmos

4.2. Images of the State

A quite different image is projected in the Laws, in which emphasis is placed

4.3. Images of the Soul

4.4. Transition to Knowledge

represents then it is no longer a way-station on the road to knowledge (Republic

Students of Plato widely trumpet a doctrine that intellectual processes are

clarifications, and applications, of which Plato furnishes many.

contradictory. So he must stand at first on a level of fleeting cognitions that only

5.1. Dialectic and Other Methods of Acquiring Knowledge

5.2. Knowledge and its Objects

5.3. Transition to the Real

to inclusion of wider propositions in which to frame knowledge of the topic in

little by little takes on a certainty guaranteed by the conjoint suggestions pointing

We must now attempt to reconcile our assertions about the heterogeneous

6.1. Dialectical Structures and Being

7. SUMMARY WITH TWO CONCLUDING QUESTIONS

7.2. Expressible and Inexpressible

7.3. Whether Plato had a Philosophy

wrote in dialogue form so as to prevent his readers from directly becoming

D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

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