American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (Volume 84, Issue 3)

PARMENIDES AND THE HISTORY OF DIALECTIC: THREE ESSAYS

By Scott Austin. Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing, 2007. Pp. xiii + 98. Hard Cover $28.00, ISBN: 978-1930972193.

In the three essays comprising this work, Scott Austin discusses a number of logical (or dialectical) and metaphysical issues in Parmenides and his successors. The principle successor discussed is the later Plato of the Sophist and especially the Parmenides. The first essay concerns the dialectical structure of Parrnenides' poem and its relationship to the second part of Plato's Parmenides, while the second essay deals with metaphysical issues of the latter in relation to the poem. The third essay rounds out the discussion in one and two, and also introduces a number of other topics insofar as they relate to them: e.g., Dionysius the Aeropogite, Thomas Aquinas and Hegel on the Trinity, and the closure of the Western rationalist tradition.

The first essay focuses on the dialectical structure of fragment 8 of Parmenides' poem, which expands upon the cryptic treatment of Being in the earlier fragments. Austin maintains that at this point it would be more fruitful, rather than trying to initially determine what the earlier fragments are saying and interpret fragment 8 in the light of them, to first examine the more coherent logical argument in fragment 8. Austin argues that fragment 8, which travels through four dialectical signposts to elucidate the One Being, is not self-referentially inconsistent as many philosophers in the analytic tradition have claimed. Statements such as "true trust does not allow" are said to ignore the strictures on negative predication which were laid down at the beginning of the poem. Austin claims (and this was argued for at greater length in his Parmenides: Being, Bounds, and Logic) that Parmenides is not making negative predications of non-identity, but rather is making affirmative statements with negative predicates. Hence, the proper translation would be "true trust is not-allowing."

Austin says that the four signposts in fragment 8 are a complete set of logical alternatives: "it is not possible that [S is P]," "it is necessary that [S is not-P]," "it is necessary that [S is P]," and "it is not possible that [S is not-P]. These alternatives are represented in fragment 8 thus: Justice does not allow coming into being and perishing (lines 8–21); True Trust actively repels coming to be and perishing (22–5); Necessity requires wholeness and immovability (42–4); and Doom prevents Being from failing to be whole and immovable (36–8). It can be seen that each modal statement ofnecessity is related to a statement of non-possibility.

More controversially, Austin argues that these four logical alternatives map onto the second part of Plato's Parmenides. He says that there are only two major Hypotheses found there: the "One that is" or "the One that blends with Being," and the "One that is not" or "the One that does not blend with Being." Each of these Hypotheses is divided into four parts, the traditional hypotheses 1–4 and 5–8. Hypothesis 1 concerns the One in relation to itself, hypothesis 2 the One in relation to the Others, hypothesis 3 the Others in relation to the One, and hypothesis 4 the others in relation to each other. And similarly for hypotheses 5–8.

The major topic in the second essay is the relationship of Parmenides' One Being to the Platonic Forms. The young Socrates in the first part of the Parmenides argues against Zeno's demonstration that plurality in the sensible world leads to unavoidable contradictions. The price of Socrates' solution is that each nonsensible Form in which sensible things participate must exist by itself in isolation from any other Forms. For if this isolation did not hold, then it seems that the problem of plurality and its contradictions would be reintroduced at the level of the Forms. The elder Parmenides in Plato's work, however, shows that any discourse on the Forms cannot avoid introducing plurality insofar as it must relate the Forms to one another. And thus the Forms themselves must be related to one another. At least this is what Austin claims that Plato's Parmenides is saying, and most would agree. It is thus somewhat puzzling to hear Parmenides say that he will go through the elaborate dialectical display in the second part of the eponymous dialogue in order to save the Forms "just by themselves," that is, free from any relationships and consequent loss of simplicity (e.g., 135b).

This essay turns on the distinction between meaning (sense) and reference. Austin suggests that Parmenides at least implicitly employed this distinction in his poem.

For how could the four signposts not break up the unity of the One Being if each of them did not refer to the same thing? How could he make modal statements? It is because this dialectical structure constitutes a kind of metalanguage, moreover, that it can be detached from its application in the poem and used by Plato in the Parmenides (as discussed in the first essay). Now according to Austin, the middle Plato did not make the distinction between sense and reference when speaking of the Forms. For Plato, the meaning of the terms "Justice" or "Beauty" is their referent, the Form Justice and Beauty. Hence, there can be only one meaning for each referent, and one referent for each meaning. This theory of reference goes hand-in-hand with the young Socrates' argument in the Parmenides that the Forms are purely in-themselves and mutually isolated. But the later Plato, Austin suggests, does have a distinction between meaning and reference. Plato can thus apply Parmenides' fourfold dialectical structure to a single set of Forms, and indeed to more than one set of Forms. For not only the One and Being is to be put through Parmenides' dialectical exercise, but also each set of syncategorematic terms, such as the Same and Being, and Likeness and Unlikeness, and Motion and the One (see Parmenides 136a–d for Plato's statement that all syncategorematic Forms should be examined by the method Parmenides will use for One and Being). Hence, there can be more than one referent for one meaning as well as more than one meaning for each referent.

Austin emphasizes that Parmenides' method, being distinct from its reference, need not be tied down to a monistic ontology. Parmenides could have, like Plato, granted a pluralistic ontology. But it happened to be the case that "he just wanted to restrict that discourse [i.e., his method] to only one subject" (34). Austin seems to say that it is almost accidental that Parmenides insisted on his restriction to One Being—if only Parmenides had accepted statements of non-identity, as Plato does in the Sophist, then he could have moved on to a plurality of subjects. This perspective on Parmenides, it seems, originates with Austin's decision to first consider fragment 8 apart from previous fragments.

Such an easy expansion of Parmenidean ontology, however, evades important questions. It is indeed correct that the middle Plato gives to the Forms the same characteristics that Parmenides gave to his One Being: immovability, eternity, self-subsistence, simplicity. But the problem is how it is possible for a true plurality of such Forms to exist, each having all of these characteristics. For if there is a plurality, then it seems—as the later Plato discusses in the Sophist—that these Forms must be interrelated. So it is for good reason that for the young Socrates in the Parmenides, the meaning of a formal term is indeed the Form "just by itself" to which it refers. If the Forms were interrelated, then they would lose their simplicity and self-subsistence, their being "in themselves." They would be exteriorized in a network of interdependencies. Hence the Parmenidean characteristics that the middle Plato wanted to have for his many Forms that would overcome the contradictions found in the world of interrelated sensible things would be lost just because they constitute a multiplicity. It seems that if Plato is to have a multiplicity of self-subsistent Forms, then they would have to be absolutely isolated from each other, like Leibniz's monads or Kant's things-in-themselves. And like the latter, they could not form a whole. But can there be multiplicity of any sort without some sort of interrelatedness?

It thus seems that it is for good reason that Parmenides in his poem insists that Being cannot be a multiplicity. Like Hegel with his insight that the transcendental subject must be one, not many (contra Kant), Parmenides saw that there could be only one "subject." So Parmenides' insistence on non-multiplicity must be deeper than the fact that he fails to distinguish the "not" of negative predication from existential non-being (as Plato suggests in the Sophist and which Austin goes along with). It is unclear whether the Sophist does in fact solve the problem of multiplicity without destroying the Forms or introducing paradoxes. As an example of the latter, if a Form1, is different from Form2, because of the Form of Difference, then there would have to be another Difference2, between Form1 and the original Difference, and between Form2, and the original. But then another Difference3, would have to be introduced, ad infinitum.

Be that as it may, in the third essay Austin says that the dialectical exercise in the second part of the Parmenides is not successful in the sense that it does not show how it is possible for self-subsistent Forms to interrelate. But Plato did not intend to be successful in this sense, according to Austin. He maintains that "the negative 'hypotheses' (1, 4, 6, 8) will be descriptions of the One or the Others as keeping too closely to themselves, of not blending enough or having sufficient commerce, while the positive 'hypotheses' will depict too much blending" (66). That is why the dialogue ends in the paradoxical way it does. But this exercise, says Austin, is redeemed by the Sophist, which establishes a middle ground by showing the precise ways the Forms are and are/or are not related. One might ask how this is possible, given that the hypotheses in the Parmenides are supposed to constitute a logically complete analysis of Form. More interestingly, Austin also suggests that the dialectic in the Parmenides cannot be conclusive, because the "solution" to the problem set in the first part of the Parmenides cannot be on the same level as the dialectic itself. The exercise of the dialectic ideally leads the inquiring mind to a vision ofthe Good, and perhaps it is in this vision that the problem of the plurality of self-subsistent entities is solved. Similarly, in leading beyond the dialectical, Parmenides' fragment 8 is meant to actualize the unity of thought and Being articulated in fragment 3: "to follow the road [of Parmenides] is to realize one's own identity with the reality that rests at its end" (46). Austin suggests that one of the enduring legacies of Parmenides is the marriage of logic and mysticism found in such figures as Plato, Leibniz, Hegel, and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. As with the latter, the logic and dialectic of Parmenides and Plato is a ladder which can be discarded when it has served its purpose.

Somewhat in conflict with the above idea and the notion that Parmenides' method can be applied to other ontologies without distortion, Austin claims that the history of Western Philosophy involves a long descent from Parmenides' One Being to the plurality of Plato and Aristotle, to the Trinitarian theology of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to Hegel as the philosopher "of the identity of identity and difference" (80), to the philosophy of mere difference, of the unmediated Other. The latter is prefigured by the movement down Plato's divided line to mere imitation, and by his fourth hypothesis in the Parmenides, which depicts the chaos of the Others relating only to Others. Austin thus offers us a grand narrative of a descent from a primal unity to difference. Like many grand narratives, this one can be quite compelling. But the devil is in the details, and Austin does not provide enough detail to evaluate this narrative. Austin, moreover, does not provide a reason for why this historical descent occurs.

It can be seen that Austin takes on a number of important topics and makes many interesting suggestions in this short work. The style is often cryptic and allusive; one wishes that he had written a longer book giving more detailed explanations and argumentation. His claims might at times seem audacious and his suggestions sweeping; nevertheless, they are not ill-considered. One need not go along with all ofthem in order to appreciate the depth of thought in this book.

EDWARD M. ENGELMANN
Merrimack College