Plato's Theory of Knowledge by Plato

Author:Plato
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2003-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The alleged’ eclipse of Socrates ‘by the Eleatic Stranger (of which critics have made too much) would then be only temporary ; he would reappear as leader in the Philosopher. It is hard to see why these expressions should be there at all, if the intention had never been in Plato’s mind.

Why the Philosopher was never written, we can only conjecture. The Statesman is concerned with the Philosopher in active life as the royal shepherd of mankind, the guardian who has come down from the vision of the Good to serve his fellow-men in the Cave as lawgiver. We might expect the picture to be completed by an account of the region of contemplation, his proper home, and of the nature of the reality he contemplates. This would be the place for that final account of the relation of reality to appearance which is called for in the Parmenides and again in the Sophist, but is not given in any of these dialogues. The Philosopher, if it could have been written, might have gathered up these loose ends in that doctrine which Plato adumbrated in the Lecture on the Good, but never published in writing. But, as we know from his Seventh Letter, Plato’s final decision was that the ultimate truth could never be set down on paper, and ought not to be, even if it could.

In what appears on the surface to be a graceful exchange of compliments Plato has contrived to define precisely the philosophic standpoint of the Stranger from Elea. On hearing that he is ‘of the school of Parmenides and Zeno ’, Socrates at once fears he may be an exponent of that verbal disputation (’ Eristic ’) which disregards truth and aims solely at refuting an opponent. This type of Sophistry, analysed below (224E ff.), was associated with the Megarian school, which, though founded by the Socratic Euclides, took its main doctrine from the Eleatics. Zeno had supplied Eristic sophistry with one of its methods—the reductio ad absurdum, which refutes an opponent’s thesis by asserting that it involves a dilemma, either horn of which leads to a contradiction. The description of the Stranger makes clear that he does not stand for this negative and destructive element in the Eleatic tradition. The reader is not to expect an exhibition of Zenonian dialectic, such as we had in the Parmenides. An open reference to the conversation in that dialogue emphasises the contrast between Eleatic methods of argument and the genuine dialectic of Socrates and Plato, already illustrated by the Theaetetus.

The Stranger, then, is not, as Socrates feared, a ‘very spirit of refutation ’, but a genuine philosopher ; and the philosopher is the ‘divine ‘or inspired man who looks down from above on human life and is taken by the world for a madman. These traits recall the Phaedrus (249) and the Theaetetus (173E). All this means that the Stranger stands for the genuinely philosophic element in the Parmenidean tradition. He understands dialectic as the co-operative search

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