Plato’s Critique of “Platonism” in the Sophist and Statesman: A Post-Voegelinian Reading

The Origins of Platonism

The dramatic appearance of the Eleatic Stranger in the Theaetetus / Sophist / Statesman trilogy is generally taken as the moment a robust Platonism announces itself in the history of philosophy. The Eleatic Stranger is thought to be speaking for Plato when, in the Sophist, he criticizes Socratic dialectic as a type of sophistry and, in the Statesman, he denies that Socrates is the only true statesman in Athens (Gorgias 521d) and claims the authority for himself.

The Eleatic Stranger’s development of the diairetic method in the Sophist culminates in his claim to have superseded not only Socrates but even “father Parmenides” (241d) in being the only philosopher to attain “dialectical science (διαλεκτικῆς . . .  ἐπιστήμης, 253d)” and his diairesis¹ of the sciences in the Statesman, in which a practical science is said to be a cognitive science applied in a technical way, culminates in his equally hubristic claim to an absolute political authority in so far as he is the only philosopher to have acquired the true statesman’s science of politics.

From these claims, the specter of a metaphysically and politically totalizing Platonism takes its shape. Now, totalization is simple; so it should be simple to present. And yet most commentators find the composition of the Eleatic dialogues – especially the Statesman – as anything but simple. They are inexplicably turgid, baffling, and even impenetrable. In my view, it is right to find elements of what has come to be known as Platonism in the Eleatic dialogues, but it is wrong to attribute them to Plato. On the contrary: in the Sophist and Statesman, Plato is presenting an explicit critique of Platonism, or more precisely a critique of those aspects of Eleatic or Megarian philosophy that have become identified with Platonism – in the modern period certainly since Hegel did so, but among the ancients as well.

Following up work I have presented in Plato through Homer and elsewhere that analyzes Plato’s use of source-texts in the composition of his major dialogues, I would argue that Plato bases his presentation of the Eleatic Stranger’s dramatic indictment of Socrates on two key episodes in the Odyssey. To state the exegetical analysis in its most basic form: the Sophist is a rather straightforward reworking of the encounter of Odysseus and his crewmen with Polyphemos the Cyclops; and the Statesman is a slightly more complex reworking of the narrative in which Odysseus, his son Telemachos, and the loyal Eumaios oppose Antinoos, the leader of the Ithakan suitors.

The complexity of the dialogues is in part the consequence of Plato’s recognition of the Odyssey’s own critique of Cyclopean tendencies in human nature and society: the Cyclops is anti-noetic, for instance, just as Antinoos is leader of the polyphemic suitors; and Odysseus must not only defeat them but also overcome the Cyclopean tendencies within himself before reclaiming his authority on Ithaka.

Portrayals of Cyclopean tendencies in politics and thought were not uncommon in Greek culture before Plato took up writing dialogues. They had long been used to criticize the excesses of tyranny and, more frequently in Plato’s earlier years, also the excesses of sophistry, particularly in its eristic form. There is a wealth of such depictions in Old Comedy, particularly in Aristophanes. Plato’s literary presentation of the Eleatic Stranger is unique, however.

The Eleatic is a Cyclopean character because his new sort of abstraction and high-mindedness necessarily leads to sophistry and tyranny, despite his ostensible disdain for, and opposition to them. In other words, he is an intellectual. He is an intellectual who considers himself a philosopher. And he thinks that gives him a certain authority. What’s more, he’s thought to be a philosopher by men such as Theodorus the geometer, in part because he has a method that seems to be the embodiment of precision, which men such as Theodorus think is the measure of all things.

Taken together, the Sophist and Statesman are history’s first campus novel, Plato’s Aristophanic lampooning, not of the sophist, but of the Eleatic as a bombastic professor of political science, the sort who tells stories about phone calls from the White House and such. We see none of this because we are, of course, high-minded professors of political science who disdain sophistry and tyranny and prefer to think that Plato is on our side. It is the blindness of our professional deformation. But there is no doubt that Plato sides with the silent Socrates. In other words, the Stranger is not a stranger to us at all; he is one of us, all too familiar. It is Socrates and Plato who are strangers.

The mistaking of the Eleatic for Plato himself has a distinguished pedigree that predates Hegel’s History of Philosophy. It is at least as old as Aristotle, who opens the Politics (1.1) with a statement that “[t]hose who suppose that the same person is expert in political rule, kingly rule, managing the household and being a master of slaves do not argue rightly” (1252a).

The Eleatic does indeed make this argument in the Statesman. But Aristotle oddly does not discuss the Statesman in his critique of Plato in Book 2 of the Politics. Instead, he claims to find Plato defending the suspicious doctrine in the Republic (2.1-5) – and the far-reaching consequences for the history of political philosophy are well-known.

Before Aristotle’s Lyceum lectures, however, there were also comedies performed in which Plato was identified as an Eleatic. In the extant fragments of Middle Comedy, approximately from the time of Plato’s death, Ephippos of Athens (in Shipwrecked [Nauagos]) describes the students of Plato’s Academy as being smitten by a “BrysonoThrasymachian” itch, a term he coined relating the sophistry of Thrasymachus with the philosophy of Bryson of Achaea (Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, 509b-d). According to the Suda, Bryson followed Euclides the Megarian philosopher and advocated “eristic dialectic.”

As well, Epicrates of Ambracia wrote a comedy in which Plato is depicted leading the students of the Academy in pointless diairetic exercises. The scene we have (fr 11K) is something like a somber game of Twenty Questions played with the worst tutorial group you can imagine.

It is doubtful that Ephippos or Epicrates read the Sophist and Statesman. If they had, they were likely clever enough to have recognized that the humorlessness of the Eleatic was being depicted humorously and not have been tempted to attribute it to Plato himself. Or perhaps not. The comedy of the Eleatic dialogues is rather subtle and might be lost on those who are not academic insiders.

For instance, consider the light touch evident in these two examples, both of which are seemingly insignificant exchanges, and both of which are entirely current. First, in the Sophist, when the Stranger is lecturing at Theaetetus while keeping up the pretense of engaging in a dialogue, Theaetetus disrupts things by asking a damning question. After the Stranger has come up with his sixth definition of the sophist, using diairesis rhetorically as his method of presentation while claiming it to be a method of analysis and derivation, Theaetetus undercuts everything by admitting he is “perplexed (ἀπορῶ, 231b)” and still unable to say “truly (ἀληθῆ) … what the sophist really is (ὄντως εἶναι τὸν σοφιστήν, 231c).” In reply, the Stranger simply repeats the six definitions in summary fashion, numbering them this time, and with a note of condescension asks, “perhaps you youngsters see more keenly” (232e)?

Diairesis. Or, the Gimmick of Cutting Things into Two

In the Statesman, the Stranger is even more obviously the dismissive professor. After he has insisted on the fundamental importance of the distinction between “genus (γένος)” and “part (μέρος),” his less than adequately passive interlocutor, the young Socrates, also asks a very important question; and the Stranger dodges it in the classic manner of every intellectual caught out publicly.

Young Socrates asks: “How does one recognize genus and part clearly (πῶς ἄν τις γένος καὶ μέρος ἐναργέστερον γνοίη), given that they’re different?” The implications of the question expose the counterfeit nature of the Stanger’s whole enterprise. He claims his diairetic technique of dividing in two, or in the middle, reveals the actually existing genus or form and not the arbitrarily delimited part – that is, it produces the cut in thought and speech alike that corresponds to the nature of things – but he never offers, and he cannot offer a reason, explanation, or proof of why this should be the case.

Diairesis is a rhetoric of presentation disguised as analysis. At best, it assumes a prior ability to judge correctly the natural divisions of things. No number of demonstrations of diairesis will teach anyone anything; and as a method, it can nether be learned nor applied. In other words, diairesis presupposes a non-diairetic judgment that it can neither cultivate nor instruct. It is the antithesis of Socratic dialectic; and in its place it substitutes the gimmick of cutting things in two, passing that off as the key to acquiring the right sort of judgment.

The question young Socrates asks the Eleatic calls him on it. The reply Plato has him make is a bit of comic genius. It is a script every professor still follows in similar circumstances. First, the Eleatic praises the question and the questioner’s intelligence; he then acknowledges the importance and the profound implications of the question; he promises that they will “pursue these things . . . at a later time at our leisure” (263b) – as if there were not time and leisure enough at the moment; he repeats the point in question axiomatically, as if it were already proven; and finally, he changes the subject, claiming that their present conversation is in any case a “digression” (263c).

Plato is surely the first philosopher to identify and critique the intellectual as a type in his satirizing of the Eleatic’s affectations, of his attempts to disguise lecturing as conversation, his assertions of authority behind empty pleasantries, and his resentful dismissal of everyone else either as one sort of sophist or another or, at best, a no longer relevant, superseded predecessor.

The critique of the Eleatic is invisible to us because we aspire to his erudition and style and we still use all his tricks. But it is even more personal. The Eleatic is not just any old professor; he is a professor of political philosophy. In other words, he is someone who lives in the no-man’s land between philosophy and politics, doing neither but claiming to have expertise in both and imagining that this makes him the wisest of all men. In the Euthydemus (304b-7c) Socrates says this sort of person can fool almost everyone.

Voegelin’s Early Assessment of Eleatic Philosophy

A convincing defense of my reading of the Eleatic dialogues against the assembled forces of the Platonizing tradition would require far more exegetical proof than the present circumstances allow. Perhaps at a later time, at our leisure?

I will offer one further detailed analysis; but first, allow me to digress briefly in order to consider what Voegelin has to say about these dialogues. Voegelin is a remarkably outspoken critic of intellectual fraud generally and has written a good deal cataloguing its many ancient and modern forms. To paraphrase something he said about Plato: Voegelin has “a keen eye for the social dynamics of deformation” (“Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” CW 12, 355).

And given the importance of Plato for his philosophy, it is somewhat surprising to find that he wrote relatively little about the Eleatic dialogues. There is an early analysis of the Statesman, of course; but almost nothing on the Sophist. There are tantalizing criticisms of Parmenides and hints about an “Eleatic Deformation;” but on the whole, they suggest that Voegelin did not quite catch the force of Plato’s own critique of the Eleatic Stranger.

Voegelin’s only extensive discussion of the Statesman is presented in Plato and Aristotle (1957), the third volume of Order and History. It is a reading somewhat influenced by the work of Leo Strauss in that it identifies Plato with the Eleatic Stranger and therefore attributes all the various puzzling features of the dialogue to a deliberate rhetorical obfuscation. He writes: “the Statesman is one of the most obscure of the Platonic dialogues, not because of its subject matter, but because it is made obscure, with great skill and labor, by various devices of indirection.”

This is evidently something that was not done in the Republic. The Statesman is different, perhaps because “Plato was afraid an exoteric reader would misunderstand the opening of a perspective as a plan for revolutionary action” (PA, 149). He continues:

“If Socrates-Plato were himself the speaker in the Statesman, the situation would acquire an atmosphere of direct, political action; with the Eleatic Stranger as the speaker this danger is averted. The philosopher-statesman is now transformed into an innocuous object of logical inquiry: We know already what a philosopher-king is. . . . The long-drawn exercise, with its amusing incidents, serves as a screen which makes us almost forget that the object of the discussion is silently present.” (PA, 149)

Other than this illuminating observation, made only in passing, that we are to prefer the silent Socrates to the Eleatic, Voegelin’s reading remains well within the Platonizing tradition. Indeed, he even finds reason to prefer the Statesman to the Republic. The later Plato is wiser. “Compared with the Republic,” he writes, “the psychology of Plato has gained a new subtlety;” and there’s a “more differentiated classification” or typology of regimes in the Statesman (PA, 167).

Voegelin even seems to accept a Straussian interpretation of the Eleatic’s understanding of the political implications of having scientific knowledge of politics: “The royal ruler is the mediator between the divine reality of the Idea and the people; he is the Zeus who rejuvenates the order that has grown old. … It is superfluous to point out in detail the parallel of this Platonic evocation with the Pauline conception of the Christian community” (PA, 169).

The Eleatic Dialogues in Voegelin’s Late Works

None of this is followed up in Voegelin’s subsequent work, and perhaps that is for the best. Several decades later, when developing the differentiated vocabulary of his philosophy of consciousness, Voegelin returns to a consideration of the Eleatic dialogues, but the Statesman no longer interests him; instead, he turns to the Sophist and more so the Parmenides. In “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme” (1983), he gives a quick description of something he names the “Eleatic Deformation.” Voegelin writes:

While a considerable part of Plato’s work is concerned with the aporetic reifications of the ‘Eleatic’ type, the main attack remains directed against the ‘Sophist.’ For after all, the truth of reality is not deformed by the philosopher who reacts to the spiritual crisis of the age with the vision of the divine One beyond the gods, but by the sophist who doubts, or denies, the reality of the gods.

Deformation has its dynamic source in the Sophist who fragmentizes the meditative complex: when a social situation is dominated by Sophists who deny divine reality, even a thinker whose existential consciousness is otherwise intact may be tempted to counter the negation with a positive assertion that God exists, and may be further tempted to prove the truth of a proposition in which God has become the subject of predication. The ‘Eleatic’ deformations thus are secondary. (CW 12, 355)

It is a rather benign portrait; hardly a critique at all. If we are to assume Voegelin derives it from the Sophist, he does so in a way that skirts the most important implications of the dialogue’s presentation of the opposition of the Eleatic Stranger and the silent Socrates. On this reading, the Eleatic Stranger is indeed a philosopher – a little too metaphysical, perhaps, but with some justification. Other than being tedious, his only difficulty is accentuating the “divine pole” of the metaxy too much, thereby “reduc[ing] all other reality to the status of nonbeing” (CW 12, 350).

It would seem that Voegelin is less concerned to understand Plato’s Eleatic Stranger in this analysis than he is to formulate a criticism of Parmenides – Parmenides himself and not the character who appears in Plato’s dialogue of that name. In his final work, In Search of Order (1985), Voegelin presents the same analysis, not under the heading of an “Eleatic Deformation,” but rather as the problem of “The Knowing Man;” and the knowing man is not the Eleatic Stranger.

Voegelin bases his analysis on Parmenides’ “famous, succinct Fragment B 3: ‘For the same is thinking [noein] and being [einai].’” In this text, “The thinker has become the speaker of the It-reality with such self-assertive assurance that the balance of consciousness is disturbed.” But disturbed in what way?

There are two aspects of the critique. First, he writes:

“The structure of the movement . . . is the same that we have to observe in the Hegelian movement of thought.” The more dangerous problem, one would think; however, Voegelin does not develop this insight. Instead, he concentrates on the second, and far less significant criticism, a restatement of the harmless Eleatic Deformation: Parmenides is so excited to have discovered the truth that he forgets he is “the human being known as Parmenides” (OH 5, 86-7).

Voegelin’s last work describes a grand battle between Hegel and Plato, surveying the field, assessing the troops, their relative strengths, and their positions. Parmenides and the Eleatics, as unworldly “knowing men,” would seem to be on neither side, a threat to no one, wandering about reflectively in no-man’s land. I tend to agree with Hegel, who counts them all as his own men and is especially fond of Plato’s Eleatics.

There are intriguing indications throughout his writings that Voegelin had strong suspicions the Eleatics were just the sort of intellectual frauds Hegel could recruit. It is all the more unfortunate, then, that Voegelin did not confirm them by returning to the Eleatic dialogues and instead concentrated on criticizing the Eleatics as followers of Hegel the German Professor. Plato’s Eleatic Stranger, for one, has far more in common with Hegel the Magician.

The substance of Plato’s critique of the Eleatic in the Sophist and Statesman is essentially the same as Voegelin’s critique of Hegel. Indeed, there is a passage in Voegelin’s “Reason: The Classical Experience” analyzing the nature of Hegelian magic that describes Plato’s presentation of the Eleatic Stranger’s arguments perfectly:

“the ground [of being] has become incarnate in existence through the construction of the System. The metaxy has been transmuted into immanence. The speculative magic (Zuberworte, Zauberkraft) by which the thinker brings the divine ground into his possession is what Plato has called “eristics”; Hegel, on the contrary, calls it “dialectics.” Thus, the meaning of the terms has been inverted.” (Anamnesis, 1977 [1974], 109)

The Eleatic Stranger is the first to call this sort of System-building “dialectical science (διαλεκτικῆς … ἐπιστήμης, 253d)” and Plato’s dialogues show that the Eleatic’s attempts to categorize Socrates’ philosophy as a type of sophistry are a sort of “speculative magic.”

Philosophy, Geometry, and Sophistry

Unraveling the intricacies of Plato’s satire of the Eleatic’s attempts at speculative magic would take too long, as I have said. But I will follow Voegelin’s lead in offering a brief exegesis of a few passages of the Sophist. In a discussion of the Republic, Voegelin “stress[ed] that, linguistically, quite a number of the Platonic dialogues are most carefully constructed, beginning from the first word” (1978). This is certainly true of the opening scene of the Sophist; everything important in what is to follow is suggested immediately. The morning after the Theaetetus, Theodorus the geometer brings the Eleatic Stranger into the discussion, introducing him to Socrates and the others not by name, but rather as a “real [or manly] philosopher (ἄνδρα φιλόσοφον, 216a).”

Why would Theodorus be so disrespectful toward his friend Socrates? Commentators take this as an indication that Plato is announcing a definitive break with Socrates and an intention to speak through the Eleatic. Far from it. He is pointing out Theodorus’s limitations and intending to affirm his understanding of the Socratic dialectic against all other schools of philosophy, and particularly the Eleatic or Megarian school.

He shows this dramatically by having an annoyed and perhaps even jealous Theodorus introduce the Eleatic Stranger as payback for the events of the previous day. As a geometer, Theodorus is a fine teacher; and his students – Theaetetus, the young Socrates, and others – do learn the latest in mathematics and geometry from him. But he also tells them things outside his expertise. He leads them to believe that everything other than geometry is well explained by Protagoras the sophist. There are demonstrable things and everything else is a matter of perception or opinion: an ancient version of the tedious fact / value distinction.

When Socrates spends a day talking with Theaetetus in the company of the other students, Theodorus cannot prevent him from refuting the Protagorean argument that man is the measure of all things; he cannot prevent Socrates from demonstrating that his way of conversing is effectively what philosophy is; and what is more, he cannot prevent Theaetetus and the young Socrates from being led away, both dialectically and erotically, by Socrates.

So the next morning, he brings in the Eleatic, a “real, manly philosopher,” to silence Socrates and win back his students. The argument illustrated by this dramatic action is an elaboration of the distinction drawn by Socrates in the Republic between dialectic and the “habit of geometers (τὴν τῶν γεωμετρικῶν . . . ἕξιν, 511d)” or geometric thinking.

Geometric thinking and dialectic do not concern different things; they are two possible orientations of the soul (ψυχὴ, 510b, 511a; cf. 511d) to the same thing, usually hypotheses, and Socrates opposes them using directional terms: geometric thinking moves from hypotheses “to an end (ἐπὶ τελευτήν)” whereas dialectic moves from them “to a beginning that is free from hypotheses (τὸ ἐπ᾽ ἀρχὴν ἀνυπόθετον, 510b).” It would be misleading to oppose them too strictly and claim that geometric thinking descends and dialectic ascends or that geometric thinking is practical and dialectic is theoretical.

Socratic dialectic ascends, but it also descends; and geometric thinking descends, often mistakenly or inappropriately, but it also has its own form of illusory ascent. Insofar as geometry, as a discipline, is both axiomatic and a method of deriving proofs from axioms, accepting hypotheses uncritically and “descending” from them is unproblematic. But insofar as this form of thinking can be habitual, it can also be manifest in domains of theory and practice in which it is entirely out of place and destructive. Geometry and all comparable sciences have affinities to the technical arts, if not to the acquisition of the moral virtues, but no similarities at all to the intellectual virtues.

However, it is the habit of geometric thinkers – the habit of men like Theodorus – to project the form of such knowledge into all realms, and consequently to imagine that the dialectical ascent foundational to the pursuit of wisdom and prudence is an aspiration to the mastery of the highest axioms and demonstrative proofs, and furthermore to imagine that life itself can be lived as theory applied on the model on technique. So for Theodorus, the Eleatic Stranger’s diairetic technique is “real” philosophy.

Now, Theodorus’s preference for an expansive sort of geometric thinking over Socratic dialectic might seem to be benign intellectual laziness, but it is a failing that is far from harmless. A man with a habit for geometric thinking is not a sophist; he is instead a man who cannot tell the difference between a sophist and a philosopher, and who, if he were compelled to choose, would almost certainly consider the sophist to be the better intellectual.

So Theodorus prefers his friend Protagoras to his friend Socrates in Socrates’ absence; however, he remains reasonable enough to admit that there are problems with Protagoras’s arguments in Socrates’ presence. But what about the arguments of the Eleatic, or more precisely the Megarian school of philosophy? Theodorus finds them irresistible. In the character of the Eleatic Stranger, Plato portrays someone who defends a comprehensive sort of geometrical thinking as a superior kind of dialectic – exhaustive diairesis as “dialectical science” (253d) – in opposition to Socratic dialectic, which he dismisses as failed philosophy, inferior reasoning, mere conversation, and even a kind of sophistry.

And to show the real danger of this kind of “speculative magic,” Plato has him indict Socrates for sophistry the morning after Socrates receives the Athenian indictment that will lead to his execution. The Eleatic’s intellectual high-mindedness is not neutral; and Theodorus’s ostensible intellectual neutrality is not without disastrous practical consequences.

“Not a Stranger but Some God”: The Eleatic as Cyclops and Suitor

To return to the text: When Socrates is introduced to the Eleatic, Plato has Socrates describe him to Theodorus as “not a stranger but some god (οὐ ξένον ἀλλά τινα θεὸν, 216a);” and to indicate what kind of god he is, Plato has Socrates refer explicitly to Homer and cite two passages from the Odyssey.

The first passage (9.269-71) is from Odysseus’s encounter with Polyphemos. Odysseus speaks in fear and supplication to the “monstrous (πέλωρον, 9.257)” Cyclops, invoking Zeus as a superior divinity. The second passage (17.485-7) is from a later point in the Odyssey, following Odysseus’s return to Ithaka. It is addressed to Antinoos by another of the suitors, after Antinoos had struck Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, with a footstool; he is warned that gods sometimes take human form, appearing as strangers in cities and “observing human hubris and law-abidingness (ὕβριν τε καὶ εὐνομίην ἐφορῶντες, 17.487).”

If one were to read the references separately as clues to the drama of the dialogues, there might seem to be some ambiguity: is Socrates or the Eleatic being cast in the heroic role of Odysseus? But taking them together, as Socrates does, leaves no doubt. Plato has Socrates demonstrate an awareness of the relation of the Cyclops and Antinoos in Homer’s poetic symbolism in his recognition of the uniquely Cyclopean character of the Eleatic Stranger. And the drama of the Sophist and Statesman is the playing out of the threat Socrates spots immediately: in the Sophist the Eleatic is the Polyphemos triumphant, and in the Statesman he is the Cyclopean Antinoos triumphant.

Socrates concludes his initial response to the Eleatic’s appearance by describing him as one of “the Mightier (τῶν κρειττόνων)” and as “a god of refutation (θεὸς ὤν τις ἐλεγκτικός, 216b).” The Mightier are divinities also mentioned by Socrates in the Euthydemus (291a); he identifies them as the moving force behind the eristic refutations of Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, the sophistic brothers whose absurd arguments are the only ones in all of the dialogues that reduce him to speechlessness and force him to admit defeat (303a).

By having Socrates describe the Eleatic Stranger as one of these divinities, Plato is obviously associating the Eleatic or Megarian school of philosophy, and particularly its diairetic form of dialectic, with eristic argumentation. The Eleatic’s rhetoric might impress people like Theodorus, but it leads to the worst sort of sophistry eventually; or perhaps it would be sufficient to say that despite the Eleatic Stranger’s professed disdain for sophistry, his sort of philosophy both fosters it and does nothing to prevent its social predominance.

To distinguish himself from the verbose “god of refutation,” Socrates admits he is “poor in speeches (φαύλους … ἐν τοῖς λόγοις, 216b)” and says nothing after the Eleatic begins his lecture. His silence in the Sophist and Statesman is different than his speechlessness in the Euthydemus. He holds his tongue, as Odysseus does while deliberating how to escape from Polyphemos’s cave, and as Odysseus does while deliberating how he will revenge himself on Antinoos and reclaim his rightful authority on Ithaka.

Theodorus catches the implications of Socrates’ comments and immediately denies them. He distinguishes the Eleatic’s philosophy categorically from the “contentiousness (ἔριδας, 216b)” of eristics, insisting that the Stranger’s “way [or method] (τρόπος)” is different: he is “more measured (μετριώτερος, 216b).” The unfolding of the Eleatic’s arguments in the Sophist and Statesman does not bear this out. There is a continuum from the Eleatic’s initially trivial demonstrations of the diairetic method in the Sophist, through his “chopping [things] into bits (κατακεκερματισμένην, 258e)” theoretically with increasing abandon in the manner of eristics, and more importantly through his increasingly frequent disregard of his own method in making flat assertions of opinion, distracting his interlocutors’ attention by burying them in long-winded verbal “paradigms” and wearisome myths, to the preposterous political claims the Eleatic makes in the Statesman. And the implications of such arguments for us are different than they would have been for Theodorus and Socrates.

In ancient Greece, this sort of metaphysical and political totalization was only a novel deformation of character and a corruption of philosophic education without much further political or historical significance. In our time, the unspeakable consequences of the social and political predominance of such “speculative magic” make it difficult to see the humor in Plato’s satire of the bombastic and hubristic intellectual, increasingly confident that the more he talks, the more he has persuaded his audience, and increasingly impatient to assert the authority he imagines this gives him. But it is never the less comedy, and written with a light touch.

“Real” and “Fabricated” Philosophers

In reply to Theodorus’s insistence that the Eleatic’s way is fundamentally opposed to the way of the sophists, Socrates seems to agree in saying that there is indeed a difference between “fabricated [or counterfeit]” philosophers and “real” ones (οἱ μὴ πλαστῶς ἀλλ᾽ ὄντως φιλόσοφοι, 216c) – in other words, between those who are philosophers in their nature and character and those who have manufactured something, a method, that gives them the appearance of being philosophical. Everyone who accepts there is such a difference is certain he can spot a counterfeit: the other fellow. Both Socrates and the Eleatic Stranger accept there is such a difference, and both have their doubts about the other fellow, although on different grounds.

Theodorus claims to respect both his friends, but in the end he cannot remain neutral. No one can remain neutral. In his composition of the Eleatic dialogues, Plato presents his reader with the alternative and leaves no doubt that, even in silence, Socrates is the “real [or manly] philosopher (ἄνδρα φιλόσοφον, 216a);” the other fellow is mad. But there is madness and madness.

At the beginning of the Sophist, Plato has Socrates say that real philosophers seem to be “altogether mad (παντάπασιν . . . μανικῶς, 216d);” and they seem so because they are so, not because they act unconventionally, but rather because philosophy is the erotic mania of the psyche’s orientation toward the divine, as Socrates explains in the Phaedrus (249d). The Eleatic Stranger has no philosophic eros or mania. Indeed, at the conclusion of the Statesman, he explicitly defends the “orderly (κόσμιοι, 310c)” against the excesses of “utter madness (παντάπασι μανίαις, 310d).” Order for him is method.

And he summarizes his diairetic method as a doctrine: the doctrine of “the middle (τὸ μέσον, 284e).” To follow the middle way methodically, he takes “the precise itself (αὐτὸ τἀκριβὲς, 284d)” as the measure of all things; and this enables him, he claims, to be “more dialectical about everything (περὶ πάντα διαλεκτικωτέροις, 285d).” For Plato, taking “the precise itself” as the measure of all things is the defining symptom of a new and somewhat amusing form of madness, the madness of the philosophic fraud, the intellectual, the professor. He could not have expected that intellectuals and professors would one day have their revenge by fabricating the claim that the Eleatic Stranger speaks for Plato himself.

Notes

Also available is “The Real Name of the Stranger: The Meaning of Plato’s Statesman,” “Challenging Plato’s Platonism,” “Plato Reconsidered: Planinc-Rhodes Correspondence,” “The Uses of Plato in Voegelin’s Philosophy,” and “One View of Zdravko Planinc’s Critique of Voegelin.”