Parmenides

Summary

The Parmenides is told at three removes. Cephalus of Clazomenae comes to Athens to find Antiphon, half-brother of Plato's brothers Adeimantus and Glaucon, who has memorised a conversation reported to him long ago by Pythodorus. Antiphon, now devoted to horses, reluctantly recites it. At the great Panathenaea, Parmenides of Elea, about sixty-five and white-haired, and his follower Zeno, nearly forty, lodged with Pythodorus outside the city wall. Zeno read aloud the book in which he defended his master's claim that being is one by showing that the hypothesis of many things leads to absurdities. A very young Socrates responds with a confident answer. There are Forms, such as likeness and unlikeness, one and many, in which visible things participate; it would be astonishing only if Unity itself were shown to be many. Parmenides, pleased with the young man's zeal, then tests the theory. Are there Forms of hair, mud and dirt? If a thing participates in a Form, does it receive the whole Form or a part of it? Socrates' image of the day, present in many places at once, is turned by Parmenides into a sail spread over many people, each covered by only a part. Considering many large things together seems to produce a further Largeness over them and then another, without end. Treating Forms as thoughts or as patterns fares no better. The gravest difficulty is that Forms existing by themselves would be related only to one another, so that we could not know them and the gods, who possess knowledge itself, could not know or rule our world. Yet Parmenides does not conclude that the Forms should be abandoned. Without something always one and the same on which the mind can rest, he says, reasoning itself is destroyed. Socrates' trouble is that he has tried to define the beautiful, the just and the good too early, without training. Parmenides prescribes an exercise: take a hypothesis, draw out the consequences both of its being and of its not being, for itself and for the others. Like an aged racehorse trembling before a familiar course, he agrees to demonstrate with his own hypothesis of the One, and the youngest present, Aristoteles, later one of the Thirty Tyrants, serves as respondent. The rest of the dialogue is a sequence of tightly linked deductions, usually counted as eight or nine. If the One is, taken strictly as one, it can have no parts, shape, place, time or being, and cannot even be named or known; taken as a one that is, it turns out to have every pair of opposite properties. The hypotheses on the One's not being end in the conclusion that if one is not, nothing is. Whether this second part is a training exercise, a covert solution to the earlier objections, or, as later Neoplatonists held, a theology of the One beyond being, is still debated. The work rewards students who want to see a philosopher subject his own most famous idea to criticism.

Top Lessons

• A great idea survives honest criticism

  Plato places his best-known doctrine in the mouth of a young Socrates and lets an older master press hard objections against it, without supplying full answers. Students learn that taking an idea seriously means stating the strongest objections to it, not only the arguments in its favour.

• Do not despise the meanest things

  Socrates refuses Forms of hair, mud and dirt as beneath philosophy; Parmenides says that maturity will cure him of caring about what people find dignified. The passage invites reflection on whether truth extends to humble and ugly things, a question with echoes in the doctrine that God made and sustains all things.

• Without something fixed, the mind has nowhere to rest

  After demolishing several accounts of the Forms, Parmenides warns that giving up all stable natures would destroy the power of reasoning. The dialogue holds together two things students often separate: rigorous doubt about our explanations and confidence that there is an unchanging truth to be explained.

• Training before defining

  Parmenides diagnoses Socrates' trouble as premature definition of the beautiful, the just and the good, and prescribes exercise: testing a hypothesis by tracing what follows if it is true and if it is false. The long second part is that exercise, demanding patience and accuracy more than inspiration.

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