Plato and the Seven Dialectics:

The Harmonic Cutting of the Olympian Method

It remains a persistent question within Platonic scholarship just how many forms of

dialectic can draw support from the dialogues and what is the ultimate form of this scientific

method?

In the early dialogues, Socrates regularly relies on three distinct dialectical activities.

Eristic and elenchic are the two forms by which Socrates plies his interlocutors into logical

difficulties. The only substantial difference in the approaches seems to be in the outlooks of the

trapped prey. Those who cannot accept their own ignorance remain competitors and are

summarily defeated. ‘Friendly’ conversants are more amenable to their own limitations and

experience growth from the cathartic struggle.

Related to this positive reaction towards the recognition of ignorance is a third kind of

movement, that towards an ontological awakening. When the elenchic is utilized in its most

extreme form, a complete a poria is attained in which all paths towards resolution seem equally

blocked. In such dialectal ‘straights’ a safe passage between destructive shoals is managed

through the transcendental recognition of some greater ‘power’ which can uniquely unify the

diverse manifold. This ‘summoner’(Republic) is the Socratic method of locating the Good, the

one among the many. And the ascending to the grasp of higher ontological unities, equally leads

to the soul’s ascent to a higher ‘power’.

But this Socratic dialectic of transformation becomes seemingly insufficient in the latter

dialogues.
The Failure of the Two Dialectics

In the Sophist, the Eleatic Stranger searches for the nature of the family of sophists. In an

effort to locate and define the nature of their art, the Stranger utilizes the long anticipated method

of diairesis, or systematic division, to hunt down this elusive prey. He begins by demonstrating

a diairesis for capturing the nature of an angler, or fisherman. In this first exemplification of the

method, division works efficiently to progressively isolate each succeeding function of the

angler, until a complete definition is afforded by the listing of the ordered categories.

When, however, the Stranger attempts to apply the same method to capture the sophist,

chaos ensues. Six different definitions emerge, each with a distinct and unique pattern of

functions and properties. While all these sophists share many of the specific activities by which

they proceed, the priority of functions varies within each of the searches. In complete

resignation, the Stranger abandons the search for the sophist within the realm of acquisition and

resumes his search from within the realm of the productive.

We should understand exactly why the Stranger ventures into the realm of production to

look for the sophist. The arts of acquisition are exemplified by the art of angling. It is the model

of knowledge as something already fully "clothed" and "caught" or discovered rather than as a

doctrine taught or constructed. The problem with such a model of knowledge, as we witnessed

in the wayward divisions, is that unless we already know the essential activity or function of the

being we are seeking, its various identifying characteristics will have no organizing priority. The

diairesis of phenomena is inherently circular and therefore viciously self-referential.

 As soon as we move to the arts of production, we are already under the guise of

valuation. One cannot produce unless one has a end or purpose towards which one is working.

The model of good craftsman demands that works of production be guided by some idea of the

Good. But if we are to use diaeresis in pursuing knowledge of the Good, we will be stuck in the

equally circular hermeneutic of needing to know the Good to find the Good. Again we appear

mired in self-reference.

I suggest that the Stranger's subtle call to recollect what had been said before, is referring

us to a substantial clue. When the sixth division led to the sophist of noble lineage, Socrates, an

interesting distinction was made between two sorts of divisions. While the philosopher’s art,

diairesis, is supposedly concerned solely with distinguishing like from like, the art of the noble

sophist is that of distinguishing better from worse. But Socrates himself never extends this

method of divining the better from the worse beyond seeking the true forms that guide discovery

in the processes of acquisition. It seems that Socrates cannot be the true philosopher, who like

the true sophist, must ultimately dwell in the realm of the productive arts.

There is a problem here that I believe we are not meant to let pass. It is exactly the

philosopher's art of distinguishing like from like which has led us into confusion. If we are to

have knowledge of the sophist, we must be able to distinguish the true from the false - the better

from the worse. It turns out that this very condition, the valuation of our judgments, is that

necessary and sufficient criteria which determines the possibility of knowledge. It is the art of

the sophist of noble lineage that must finally be utilized to find both the philosopher and the

sophist. Diaireses cannot distinguish between essential kinds just because it cannot distinguish

between better and worse. It is only in the realm of production, with the creating of the
hypotheses of the Good under which functionality may be incorporated, that any essences at all

can be determined.

Plato is making a key distinction here between two dialectical options, the Socratic and

the Eleatic. The first can determine the difference between better and worse, and has its realm in

the eidetic world of the forms. The second can merely distinguish between like and unlike and is

utilized to order the world of phenomena.

The Socratic dialectic, elenchic, is a Transcendental Dialectic that locates the unity which

is common among distinct ideas or forms. As a summoner, it calls forth intelligence to resolve

the oppositions by which reason confronts sensation (Republic523b). But it seems inherently

limited in any attempt to completely grasp phenomena of the changing world. That is perhaps

why Socrates is “left behind” with the four failed sophists.

The Eleatic dialectic, diairesis, works down from the genus towards the species and

differentia. It is an Ordering Dialectic which assumes a common class in order to organize

phenomena with regards to their qualities, but it has ground by which to distinguish the better

from the worse. The lesson of the first parts of both the Sophist and the Statesman is that we

cannot define phenomena rightly or wrongly, until we have knowledge of how their being is

better or worse with regards to some end or telos in an activity of production or utility

(Statesman).

Neither of these two incomplete methods can truly be the "gift of the gods". The Socratic

elenchic is able to establish sufficient reason for the unity of an idea. But the order and

relationship of any necessary conditions for an individual phenomenon remain underdetermined

with respect to that unity. The Heraclitean nominalist will always be able to neuter the power of

such a technique in a logic of viscous dichotomies (Meno).

The Eleatic diairesis is equally impotent. It can locate and organize an unending set of

necessary conditions by which to distinguish comparable phenomena, but it is finally inept at

establishing which set is actually “true”. Like old Socrates' bones and ligaments, no one set of

these necessary conditions can be denoted the cause of a phenomenon, so diaireses is always

vulnerable to the logic of Protagorean relativism: The Stranger in the Statesman cannot

distinguish the nature of the human herd beyond that of a featherless biped.

I hold that Plato is going beyond a merely competitive evaluation of the two methods in

this dialogue, and is instead suggesting a radically new method, an hybrid between the two

legacies of his philosophical pedigree – a Platonic Dialectic. This “gift of the gods” utilizes the

reciprocal limitations of each of its parents to systematically eliminate complementary

indeterminacies.

The promise of such a tool is immense with respect to the largely unfulfilled claims of the

latter dialogues. What is at stake is whether there can be a philosophical logic, a true dialectic

that is completely determinate with regards to the phenomena it seeks to uncover.

Most philosophers, including Hegel, have believed that dialectic can never be so

determinate. But Plato’s claim that his dialectic can “cut at the joints” demands that we examine

more closely the details of this new method. The bond by which Plato will “force” the other two

dialectics into cooperation, is also the ground of such determination: it is Pythagorean.

Some might object that the suggestion of such an hybrid dialectic is a non-sequitor as a

category fallacy, since the two dialectics deal with absolutely different realms - forms and
phenomena. I would suggest that mathematics, and the human soul are both also such liminal

hybrids, and this double nature is what makes the goal of Plato's project so essential to the unity

of his metaphysics. I contend that it is precisely with a mathematical model, in the dialogue the

Philebus, that Plato teaches us how to proceed. That method, of finding the better and worse

from among indistinguishable definitions of resemblance, of applying the Socratic elenchic to

the Eleatic diaireses, is the true "gift of the gods", and it is a derivative of the analytical art of

porism.