Form and Good in Plato's Eleatic Dialogues Chapter Five An Overview
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Kenneth Dorter

Form and Good in Plato’s Eleatic Dialogues The Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman

Chapter Five An Overview

Chapter Five

An Overview

1. The Trilogy and the Problem of Value

After the critique of the Parmenides , the theory of forms has been re-established in its essential features by means of an implicit use of the method of hypothesis throughout the Eleatic trilogy. The method operated, on one hand, within each dialogue: in the Theaetetus , Theaetetus’s hypotheses about the nature of knowledge were progressively superseded by means of the hypothetical method’s procedure of testing consequences and seeking a higher or more inclusive starting point; in the Sophist the same was true of the hypotheses of the monists and pluralists, and of the friends of the forms and the materialists; in the Statesman the method of hypothesis led to the replacement of the statesman-as-shepherd hypothesis with the statesman-as-weaver hypothesis, and the mutually exclusive hypotheses about virtue, of the moderate and the courageous citizens, were replaced by one that reconciled their polarity. On the other hand, the movement among the dialogues, too, was characterized by the dynamic of the method of hypothesis: the Theaetetus foundered in an attempt to provide an account of knowledge without reference to anything but sensory particularity; the Sophist resolved this difficulty by means of its theory of value-free universal “kinds,” but without being able to distinguish philosophy in its truest sense convincingly from the imposture of sophistry; and the Statesman accomplished the latter by means of the reintroduction of value, especially in the form ― 229 ―
of the “mean.” Thus the method of hypothesis continues to function, as it had in the Phaedo , as an indirect approach (

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) in the progress toward an understanding of the nature of the good.

In the Theaetetus at its most radical, we were plunged into the “sea of dissimilarity,”[1] the sensible world’s welter of particularity, where not only are universal kinds absent in favor of nominalistic individuality, but even individuals collapse into rivers of ceaseless change. All that exists are motions, not even individuals, and even less universals. It is a world familiar to us also from the second part of the Parmenides , where unity collapses into the fathomless multiplicity of the apeiron . Rescue is possible only if “the same” can be found amid “the different.”

Accordingly, the importance of the philosopher Parmenides, the apostle of the Same, is stressed in the Theaetetus despite the absence of any discussion of his work. The positive discernment of the Same amid the Different is the thesis of the Sophist . Indeed, the difficulty for the Sophist is no longer how to account for sameness, as in the Theaetetus , but how to account for difference, “nonbeing.” The discernment of sameness is the role of collection, which first affirms the integrity of individual instances, and then affirms the objective reality of the qualities common to diverse individuals. Questions that could not be answered without hypothesizing the reality of the Same can now be answered as a consequence of that hypothesis, even though the Sophist makes no explicit reference back to the aporiae of the Theaetetus .

Today we might oppose the Sophist’s line of argument by appealing to the familiar distinctions between metaphysical and epistemological, or linguistic, form, that is, between objectivity and subjectivity. However true it may be that we are constrained to organize our experience into sortal categories, this fact may tell us something not about the working of reality in itself, but only about that of our oven mind, or perhaps not even that but only about the way language works. And there are some who challenge even the necessity for language to work in this way, who emphasize as much as possible the way sameness is permeated by difference even within linguistic structures. Against such challenges no definitive defense is possible. Plato may point out that without universal referents neither logos nor knowledge is fully possible, but Kant and his successors (like Protagoras but unlike Theaetetus) willingly accept the unattainability of “objective” (noumenal) knowledge. Knowledge today is readily acknowledged to be like a con-

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struction, or even like a conversation, but not like a mirror. Logos itself is not an image of something beyond itself, but more like a pharmakon , a drug.

If such objections cannot be refuted, however, they can be deprived of the appearance of primacy, once it is pointed out that the objector assumes no less than the defender. Plato, it is true, assumes that our urge toward conceptualization reflects the structure underlying reality itself. This is, in fact, a deliberate hypothesis (Phaedo 100b), for he is well aware of the limitations of demonstration. The attempt to overcome the hypothetical nature of thinking is a rewarding but uncompletable task.

Moreover, as the Statesman emphasized, when we try to reflect on the highest, most elusive things, analogical thinking (paradigms) becomes indispensible, and so philosophical speech carries with it an unavoidable metaphorical aspect, the limitations and dangers of which were vividly displayed in the Parmenides , and reaffirmed in the stranger’s condemnation of all image making as a form (however unavoidable) of sophistry (Statesman 303c).

But if Plato cannot avoid making certain crucial assumptions about the correspondence of the forms of language or thought to those of reality, it is no less an assumption when Kant or his successors insist that our epistemological or linguistic imperatives do not correspond to the constitutive principles of reality. The hypothesis that Kant calls his “Copernican revolution” is defended only by contrast with the empiricist hypothesis, and holds no advantages over the realism of the classical philosophies.[2] The same is true of the more radical post-Kantian positions. The success of modern science has allowed it to dictate the criteria of knowledge to a degree that almost no thinkers have been able to escape. Even those who least accept the goals of modem science find themselves allowing it to define the terms of what is possible. Descartes (who does accept the goals of modem science) captures this spirit in his resolve to count as false whatever cannot dearly and distinctly be shown to be true. It follows from this that if our “innate ideas” cannot be proven to be true of independent reality, they must be regarded as false to it and merely subjective. It eventually follows from this principle that if language cannot be proven to mirror the world in itself, then it must be regarded as mere conversation, inscription, and potion.

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Even Nietzsche’s anti-Cartesian rejection of the concept of “truth” rests on this Cartesian foundation: truth is impossible because certitude is impossible.

However, these argumenta ad ignorationem were explicitly rejected by Plato and Aristotle.[3] Those thinkers were not unaware that their own positions contained indemonstrable assumptions, but they were more aware than many of their successors that the alternative positions were no less hypothetical. If Plato’s position in part reflects a choice that he made and can never justify with mathematical rigor—a choice about what difficulties he was willing to live with in order to resolve others—the same is no less true of his rivals, ancient and modem. Such a choice is not merely a matter of “aesthetic” preference. The questions of whether there are in fact structural forms by which we organize our experience, and whether such forms are to be regarded as revelatory of the nature of Being or only of the nature of thinking, might be regarded by some as combining undecidability with inconsequentiality, and therefore academic in the worst sense of the word. How we answer these questions would then rest on nothing more stable than the aesthetic taste of each individual.

If, however, the forms are for Plato noumenally constitutive, and for Kant only phenomenally constitutive, and for others merely historical constructions, these divergences are not self-contained hypotheses that are therefore inconsequential. They fundamentally affect our attitude toward the world. Plato’s thesis is a powerful advocacy for the priority—the higher value —of the intelligible over the sensible, and for a commitment to increased spirituality and selflessness. A nominalist position, on the other hand, which takes only individuals to be real, leads more naturally although not inevitably toward egoism. Alternatives such as spirituality and materialism, altruism and egoism, are reflections and consequences of our beliefs about the nature of goodness, and its presence or absence in the nature of reality. As such, they have important implications for the nature and basis of morality. They are anything but inconsequential or academic. They are aesthetic only in the sense that the beautiful is the symbol of the good.

Those who are inclined to dismiss the Platonic forms as—at best— regulative principles of the mind rather than structurally constitutive principles of reality may well make the same charge against the purported reality of the good, especially when it itself is called an Idea. But ― 232 ―
in the case of the good it is especially clear that more is at stake than choices based on nothing further than personal taste. The entire fabric of morality is at stake.

Pragmatists, and others who deny any objective truth to the concept of goodness, argue that it is meaningless to speak of the real (noumenal) nature of things. We can know reality only insofar as it enters into our consciousness, and whether the reality that we experience cognitively corresponds to some mind-independent reality is irrelevant. If, as Peirce argued, the meaning of a theory is the practical difference that it makes, then the correspondence theory of truth is meaningless: there is no way to see whether objective reality corresponds to our representations of it, so it is irrelevant to our behavior, and consequently without meaning. As long as we confine our attention to epistemology, this is a plausible argument. When we turn to the question of value, however, the matter is different. Many things may be decided by fiat or convention, but not value itself, as Socrates points out in reply to Protagoras’s pragmatic argument in the Theaetetus . No one would say that whatever a state thinks is good or “advantageous to itself, really is so” (177d). Even for Nietzsche, the sustained attempt to regard value as a product of human creativity exists in perpetual tension with an “objective” preference for natural value (will to power) over reactive value (asceticism). The tension is not a weakness in Nietzsche but the mark of an intellectual penetration and honesty that refuses to dismiss the experiential evidence of a nonarbitrary factor in values, however awkward that factor may be for other features of his perspectivism. He could easily have achieved greater consistency by embracing a thoroughgoing personal relativism, but in order to do so he would have had to be a more shallow or less honest thinker.

The message of the digression that grows out of the above passage of the Theaetetus is that the standard of goodness, in the light of which alone such judgments can validly be made, is the ultimate goal of philosophy; and that it is something we need to discover rather than invent. Not until the doctrine of the mean is developed in the Statesman is the theme of the digression further elaborated.

The value of the doctrine of categorial forms can ultimately be established only in relation to our understanding of goodness. This is true not only in the tautological sense that value implies a conception of goodness, but also in the significant sense that the moral implications of a way of interpreting the world are the most important criterion for choosing among objectively undecidable alternative interpretations—a point that even Kant recognized in the second critique. Hence the hy-

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pothesis that the Same has objective reality, as well as epistemological force, is not treated as self-justifying; its justification points beyond itself. The assumption of the reality of the Same justifies our tendency to classify entities, but the very notion of better or worse classifications already implies the need for a standard of measure, and merely relative measure does not suffice. The doctrine of the Same can find ultimate justification only if its ultimate (and not merely regulative) value can be established.

The doctrine of the Same lies behind every kind of episteme and techne, built as they are on universal principles. Moreover, as the Eleatic stranger pointed out, these involve not only universalization but aspirations toward goodness; without the mean they would be inconceivable.

There would be no possibility of distinguishing skill (techne) from incompetence, for example, unless our judgment were governed by some sense of what is right and good. Even in the form of modem science episteme makes use of the value-laden heuristic principle that reality should be explained in the most rational possible way. However much Ockham’s razor militates against teleology in one sense, in another it presupposes it by encouraging rationally unified models over random and chaotic ones. In this sense even the Timaeus can be considered very much in keeping with the spirit of Ockham’s razor.

An underlying message of the Timaeus is that, if the universe is to be conceivable as rational and good, it can be so only at the level of inherent structure, that is, universal pattern, not at the level of individuality. The kinds of things that exist can be justified, but individual events cannot, since the realm of individuality is at the mercy of the errant cause, chance.[4] Accordingly, the necessity of the reality of kinds follows for Plato from the postulation of a teleological justification of Being. This means that the justification of the Sophist’s postulation (against the Theaetetus ) of the reality of kinds is ultimately predicated on the conception of goodness inherent in the Statesman’s doctrine of the mean. The Sophist points beyond itself for its completion, toward the States man and beyond it to the idea of the good that is only implicit in the latter.

An argument analogous to this cosmological reasoning appears at the microcosmic level. Moral goodness implies the overcoming of ego-

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centric desires in favor of intentions that are equally concerned with what is good for others. To achieve this attitude means to aim at something like the standpoint of the whole, and for Plato our capacity for such a standpoint is “reason.” Justice, and virtue generally, is the subordination of the egocentric desires for corporeal pleasure (appetite) and power (spiritedness) to reason. Whereas appetite and spiritedness operate with primary reference to the individuating body, reason operates with primary reference to the intelligible realm of universal and holistic form. The Sophist’s project, of teaching us to think in terms of the sameness of universal kinds instead of the differentiation of corporeal individuality characteristic of the Theaetetus , can thus be justified on moral grounds as well as epistemological ones: learning to see the world in terms of the primacy of kinds over individuality is a way of overcoming the standpoint of personal bias and self-interest. The mean, by which the statesman evaluates proposed action, is a standard that abstracts from every merely relative measure, and can be discerned only by one who has achieved the disinterestedness of a universal point of view (although the application of the mean is always to particulars). The dialectical methods of the Eleatic stranger enable us to approach progressively the state of mind that makes such thinking possible.

Here again, if we ask whether it matters which hypothesis we adopt— the Platonic doctrine of forms or the Protagorean doctrine of individuality—we can point not only to the former’s superiority in accounting for the nature of knowledge, but, more importantly, to its moral superiority. Its alleged superiority in accounting for knowledge, taken by itself, might easily be dismissed by Protagoras as nothing more than a self-aggrandizing presumption, since for him “knowledge” is simply an ignorant or pretentious term for “opinion.” If Protagoras can establish that we can function in the world by means of opinion alone, Plato’s epistemological argument will carry less weight, for worldviews might be conceived merely as convenient conceptual schemes, any number of which may have the same pragmatic serviceability. They may be regarded as distinctions without difference, free-floating metaphysical speculation. But many of these worldviews do nothing to promote an attitude toward the world that transforms us morally, and several of them promote attitudes that actively discourage morality. In such cases the distinctions imply real and important differences.

It is usual today to deny any connection between Being and goodness, fact and value, is and ought. Heidegger, for example, dismisses any such connection in the strongest terms in his Letter on Humanism , ― 235 ―
and on this issue all major contemporary philosophical traditions stand together. It is largely for this reason that contemporary moral thought is often accused of displaying an impoverished groundlessness. Only from pragmatists would Plato receive any conceivable support for his attempt to ground the theory of forms in the nature of the good—an ironic turn, since it was precisely to counter the pragmatism of Protagoras that the move toward formal kinds and ultimate teleology came about in the trilogy. In fact only the second, microcosmic, argument would be acceptable on pragmatic grounds: if belief in the primacy of the intelligible and universal, over the particular, fosters greater morality, then there are pragmatic reasons for accepting it. But Protagoras and contemporary pragmatists can never in fact accept it, for it would lead to the elimination of their first principle, the priority of the practical over the theoretical. For Plato, on the contrary, the theoretical is primary, and for practical as well as theoretical reasons, since it is the stronger ground of morality. Just as the Epicureans began with the life of the body but end up with the life of the mind, a Platonic pragmatism begins with praxis but is led to theoria.

2. Beyond the Statesman

The Statesman is not the end, but only the end of the beginning. It is possible to ascend still farther, we were reminded: young Socrates has been shown only a limited version of the stranger’s method (262c). Would the fuller explanation reveal to us not only a more complete portrait of the statesman, but also the nature of the philosopher? The statesman’s mean was only a principle of praxis; it could no more exist without the arts than they could without it (284d). The philosopher, by contrast, would be concerned with a more ultimate principle still, the unhypothetical, independent source of value, which is prior to any practical application.

At the beginning of the Sophist it is implied that, after investigating the nature of the sophist and statesman, the Eleatic stranger will continue by investigating that of the philosopher (216d-217b). This expectation is reasserted by Theodorus at the beginning of the Statesman (257a-c), but half a page later the elder Socrates suggests a symmetrical pattern instead: he himself has already conducted an investigation with Theaetetus as his partner; the stranger had then done so as well; now the stranger is to conduct one with young Socrates as his partner, so, Socrates suggests, young Socrates “will reply to me afterwards” (258a).

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Now it seems that not the stranger but Socrates will lead the investigation into the nature of the philosopher. Perhaps this is another indication of the way that the stranger’s approach begins to converge with the Socratic approach to philosophy during the course of the Statesman .

Perhaps, on the other hand, the ambiguity about who will conduct the investigation is meant to suggest that the status of the projected dialogue is at least uncertain. After all, the second (314a-c) and seventh (341c-342a) letters tell us that such a project cannot be accomplished, and should not even be attempted except perhaps with the utmost caution.

No philosopher was more aware than Plato of the self-overcoming dialectic of philosophic speech. The Parmenides shows how this is true of structuralism, and the Theaetetus shows how it is true of nonstructuralism. Accordingly, Plato’s dialogues always have the character of withholding just what they seem to offer. Plato’s own reticence, Socrates’ irony, the interlocutors’ reservations, and various literary devices continually combine to deny definitiveness to whatever is put forward. And yet things are put forward, for any attempt to evade the dialectical tension of philosophy by refraining from assertion only results in the no less problematic tensions of skepticism. There is an ultimate dialectic for Plato between aporia and natural value—ultimate in the sense that it must be preserved rather than overcome. To overcome the tension in favor of aporia results in misology. To overcome it in the direction of fully determinate values results in dogmatism. The difference between Plato and Protagoras is not that Protagoras alone recognizes the limits of objectivity, but that Plato alone recognizes both poles of the ineluctable tension of philosophy.

The investigation of the Philosopher was perhaps never intended to be written down in a dialogue, but only presented as the implicit goal of the Sophist and Statesman investigations. It is a goal that is necessarily left to readers to pursue further on their own. Nevertheless, there are hints that help us to find a path on which to begin. Consider the stranger’s remark that the demonstration of the method of division in the Sophist and Statesman is not fully adequate. What would it be like in its fully realized form? “In the present circumstances,” he said, “it is not possible to make it clearly evident” (262c). What does he mean by this? It seems likely that the limiting “circumstances” (

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) refers to the limits of young Socrates’ present abilities. As we saw, the application of the method seems tailored to one who has mastered the first five dianoetic disciplines but not dialectic. The method, as utilized in the Statesman , was not impressive for its rigor— ― 237 ―
particular divisions were often arbitrary (sometimes avowedly so: 289b) and even contradictory—and was hardly displayed in way that would justify Socrates’ claim in the Phaedrus that only a godlike man could perform it.

It was to overcome conceptual limitations like those of young Socrates that the stranger introduced the method of paradigms. His language was reminiscent of the Republic’s “soul writ large,” and more generally reminiscent of the theory of recollection:[5]

It is difficult, you divine man [

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], to mark out any of the greater things without making use of paradigms. For it is as if each of us knows all that he knows as in a dream and then, like someone waking up, knows nothing of it at all.

(277d)

We can see a paradigm of this technique in the way children can be taught to read:

Take them first to those cases in which their opinions were correct, and then take them and set them in front of the ones they do not recognize, and by comparing the two show that they are the same and have the same nature in both cases.

(278a-b)

The same kind of problem occurs in philosophy, and a similar technique may be used to overcome it:

To some things there are by nature visible likenesses that are easy to understand, and that are not hard to show to people when, in response to a request for an explanation of one of them, someone wishes to indicate it easily, without trouble, and without a verbal explanation. To the greatest and most valuable [

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] things, however, there corresponds no image made clear for human perception, which someone who wishes to satisfy the mind of an inquirer can display to one of his senses and succeed in satisfying them.

Accordingly we must train ourselves to be able to give and to understand a rational account of each thing. For incorporeal things, which are the most beautiful and greatest, can be exhibited deafly through reason only and through nothing else, and it is for their sake that all this has been said. But practicing is in every case easier on lesser things rather than on the greater ones.

(285e-286b)

On the basis of this, the stranger undertook an elaborate division of the art of weaving, as a paradigm to help with the search for the states-

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man. It turned out that just as the weaver combines the warp and woof of the two kinds of woolen strands, the statesman weaves together the warp and woof of the two kinds of subjects. The weaver is a paradigm for the statesman because what the weaver does is visible in a sense that what the statesman does is not. In the case of the weaver we can easily see whether he understands the mean that leads to excellence in his craft, and we can see whether he is successfully weaving the warp and woof; we cannot see these things in the case of the statesman. More to the point, we can clearly see what the weaver’s intentions and goals are, but not those of the statesman. The paradigm was well chosen, for despite the difference in their visibility we can appreciate the parallel between the two endeavors, and thus understand the statesman by analogy with the weaver.

Was this the whole point of the exercise, however? Why was the paradigm developed by means of an elaborate bisective division—at fifteen steps by far the longest in either of the two diaeretic dialogues— when the technique of bisective division was never to be used again, either in the remainder of the Statesman or in any other dialogue? Why did the stranger not simply say that weaving, insofar as it is a combination of warp and woof, will give us an image by which to picture the statesman’s activity?

Weaving is not only the subject of the diaeresis, and a paradigm for the art of the statesman, but is also a paradigm of the method of diaeresis itself: it is an intimate concatenation of combining and separating, as the diaeretic method is an intimate concatenation of collecting and dividing. Perhaps not only the extrinsic subject of this division but the very technique of division itself is intended as a paradigm of something that cannot easily be made evident to us. If the stranger has not been able to show us the nature of division in its highest sense, perhaps what he has shown us here is a paradigm of a higher kind of division.

The mean toward which the statesman looks is not the same as the Idea of the good, for the mean can exist only if there are arts, while the good is prior to all such specification. The statesman, in discerning the mean, must do so in the light of the good, but he need not perceive the good directly. We must assume that this is to be what ultimately distinguishes him from the philosopher. According. to the Republic , once the dialectic of noesis has led the philosopher to an apprehension of the Idea of the good, then, “hanging onto the things that hang on this beginning, it thus descends again to a conclusion, making

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use of nothing perceived by the senses, but moving from forms themselves, through forms, to them, it concludes in forms” (511b-c). It is plausible that this downward movement of noesis, which proceeds from the good to the subsequent forms, is the consummation of the method of division. Or rather, that the method as portrayed in the Statesman (and Sophist ) functions as a concrete analogue or paradigm of this true method. It performs, at the prenoetic level of Theaetetus and young Socrates, the kind of derivation of kinds that can be carried out adequately only at the level of one who has attained the wisdom necessary to the true philosopher.

If that is the intention, then the stranger’s method of division operates on several levels. (1) It functions as a useful tool for classification and definition. (2) It introduces the bridging concept of quality (in abstraction from value) into the erstwhile exclusively quantitative dianoia practiced by young Socrates and Theaetetus. (3) It illustrates the upward path of the method of hypothesis or dialectic by the abandonment of the shepherd modal in favor of the weaver model of the statesman (in which the concept of value makes its appearance in terms of the mean). (4) In accordance with the method of analogical paradigms, it uses this avowedly inadequate version of the method of division to intimate to us the consummate but as yet unattainable employment of this method, the downward path of dialectic from the good.

Because the exhibition of the method was, by admission, greatly simplified, it would be a mistake to try to assimilate the Republic passage very closely to the models we have been given in these two dialogues. On such a model we might, for example, have bisected the good into intelligible and corporeal species, and the latter into active (acting) and passive (perceiving), and thus derive by division the three major forms after the good, namely, wisdom, virtue, and beauty. But these would be merely formal divisions that tell us nothing of the content of the terms. The results would be nearly as extrinsic to the essential nature of the subjects as was the definition of “human being” in terms of the absence of feathers or legs. The actual derivation of the other forms from the Idea of the good must presuppose a detailed insight into the nature of the good, such as not even the Socrates of the Republic claims to be capable of. And the movement in the Statesman from bisective division (relative measure) to immediate division into numerous species suggests that a mechanical bilateral division of the good, as illustrated above, would never be satisfactory. The true relationship of the good to the

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subordinate species of reality would need to be much more subtle and nuanced.

Of the dialogues believed to be later than the Statesman , the Philebus is the only one in which the method of division is employed even in a minor role. In one place, for example, “lack of self-knowledge” is divided into three species: with respect to wealth, with respect to beauty, and with respect to virtue; and the latter is divided into the twin species of weakness and strength (48d-49c). In another place a division is begun that might almost have come from the Sophist , but it does not last long.

Knowledge is divided into knowledge of production on the one hand, and knowledge of education and nurture on the other. Productive arts are then divided into the inexact, like music, and the exact, like building. The most exact of the arts, arithmetic, is next divided into reckoning with unequal, concrete units (e.g., two armies, two oxen), and with equal, abstract units (two, four). Socrates observes that the division can be carried at least one step further, but breaks it off because it has already served its purpose, which is to show that there are pure and impure species of knowledge, just as there were pure and impure species of pleasure (55d-56e).

Neither of these exercises in the method of division is very ambitious, nor is there any other example that would justify the high expectations that the Phaedrus, Sophist , and Statesman led us to have. In another way, however, the concept of division does play a serious role in the Philebus . Socrates says:

And the ancients, who were superior to us and lived closer to the gods, handed down this saying, that all things that are ever said to be come from one and many, innately possessing limit and unlimitedhess in themselves. Since this is how things are ordered, we must always posit one Idea for each thing, and seek it—for we shall find it in the thing.

Then, if we grasp it, after one we must look for two, if that is how many there are; but if not, then three or some other number. And again the same with each of those ones until we see not only that the original one is one and many and unlimited, but also how many it is. We should not apply the Idea of the unlimited to the multiplicity before we discern the whole number of it between the unlimited and the one.

(16c-d)

This is evidently a reference to collection and division: by collection we discover the class in which the object is to be sought, and then we divide that class until we locate the object in the infimae species. Since we are instructed to repeat the process with each of the ones we discern, the method will eventually lead to the parent of all Ideas, the Idea of the ― 241 ―
good (cf. Republic 6.509b). Ultimately, then, the goal is to be able to see in retrospect the lines of division that lead from the good to all other forms, as had been adumbrated in the Republic . Accordingly, later in the dialogue we are told to posit—as a further division beyond limit (form), the unlimited (“materiality”), and their combination—the cause of their union (23c-d), and that can only be the good (64c f.). As Socrates introduces this unifying conception, Protarchus asks, “What do you mean, my good man?” (

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, 23d).

The method is not employed in the Philebus in anything like a conclusive way: the dialogue ends with Protarchus’s enjoinder to Socrates not to leave yet because they have not yet finished (we are not told what remains to be done). It nevertheless has a crucial function in the search for the nature of the good. By means of the method of hypothesis, Philebus’s hypothesis that the good life is the life of pleasure, and Socrates’

hypothesis that the good life is the life of wisdom, have given way to the higher hypothesis that the good life is what combines wisdom with pleasure. Since this means that the nature of the good life may now be conceived as a product of wisdom (limit) and pleasure (unlimited), the method of collection and division, as described above, can be brought into play in order to seek the unifying cause of this mixture. Socrates concludes: “Then if we cannot catch the good with one Idea, let us capture it with three: beauty, proportion, and truth. Let us say that we may ascribe the causality to these, taken as one, more correctly than to the components of the mixture. And through this the mixture itself has come to be good” (64e-65a). Thus we have found the Idea of the good, by virtue of which the mixture of wisdom and pleasure constitutes the good life.

We have not, however, grasped it as it is in itself, but only in terms of three aspects. It is tempting to think of this as the first division of the Idea of the good, a division into the species of beauty, proportion, and truth. The first we might further divide into natural and artistic beauty, and thus be led to the realms of eros and art; by means of the second, to the realm of mathematics, and by means of the third to the realm of philosophy. But what of morality and politics? Just prior to this, Socrates had said, “Now, then, the power of the good has hidden itself from us in the nature of the beautiful. For certainly moderation and proportion completely correspond to beauty and virtue” (64e). Virtue, however, is left out of the subsequent triune description of the good. It turns out, then, that the division of the good into three parts is hardly definitive. Not only have we not grasped the good as it is in itself, but even

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the three species in terms of which we have conceived it are to some extent arbitrary and incomplete. Nevertheless we begin to have a clearer idea of how the methods of division and of hypothesis may, both individually and in combination, give us guidance and direction in our asymptotic attempts to grasp the oneness of reality, and in particular to grasp the necessitating ground that alone can complete our understanding and endow the whole with value. When Plato does attempt to give more than a hint of content to the Idea of the good, he eschews any formal methodology whatever, and resorts to the ambiguous world of myth (although even in the myth of the Timaeus there is an emphasis on the forms of Same and Different, which lie at the basis of the method of collection and division).[6]

It was Hegel who ultimately attempted a rigorous systematization of the whole and of its necessitating principle. Indeed, the dialectical method by which he did so bears a strong resemblance to the methods of both hypothesis and division. It resembles the former in its progressive resolution, through higher theses, of the conflicts that result from the incompleteness of lower ones. And it resembles the latter in its preservation of the lower theses, so that lower and higher are related to one another through lines of derivation and subsumption—although the way in which the lower are present in the higher is not the same as the way species (even the quasi species of the Sophist and Statesman ) are present in the genus. The rigor that Hegel claimed for his unification, however, is often belied by arbitrary steps within the dialectic, and by questionable assumptions at the base of it. Plato’s avowed mythopoietic presentation reflects a more realistic assessment of the possibility—or rather, impossibility—of consummating our aspiration toward wisdom with an episteme of wisdom.

Dramatically, the Timaeus is presented as a sequel to the Republic . This is obviously fitting because of the centrality of the creative power of the good in the latter dialogue. But the Timaeus is also the natural sequel to the investigations of the Philebus , especially if we regard the Timaeus ‘s mythic presentation as an indication that the Philebus has taken us as far as is possible through conceptual methodology alone.

Whether chronologically it was in fact a sequel to the Philebus is impossible to ascertain, but ultimately the historical date of the Timaeus makes little difference. Regardless of when the Timaeus was written, it remains the case that only under the cover of mythology did Plato ever ― 243 ―
feel comfortable enough to attempt to give content to his conception of the good. His famous lost lecture on the good was said to have been full of mathematics; but whether the mathematics were any less qualified by whimsy and aporia than those of the Timaeus must remain a matter of speculation. We cannot dismiss the fact that he never published it, and in this respect the warnings of the second and seventh letters ring true.

Chapter Five An Overview

Table of Contents

- Chapter Five An Overview

- Chapter Five An Overview