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The Disunity of Plato's Thought or: What Platodid not say

Renford Bambrough

Philosophy / Volume 47 / Issue 182 / October 1972, pp 295 - 307DOI: 10.1017/S0031819100055923, Published online: 25 February 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0031819100055923

How to cite this article:Renford Bambrough (1972). The Disunity of Plato's Thought or: What Plato didnot say. Philosophy, 47, pp 295-307 doi:10.1017/S0031819100055923

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r PHILOSOPHYf THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTE

OF PHILOSOPHY

f VOL. XLVU, No. 182. OCTOBBR 1972

9THE DISUNITY OF PLATO'S THOUGHT

[ or: What Plato did not say

RENFORD BAMBROUGH

WHEN MR. APOLLINAX visited the United States, his laughter tinkledamong the teacups. When Professor Ryle published Plato's Progress,1

I his paradoxes clattered through the china shops (<b tfj<; KaivdrnTo?.• 'Hp&KXeu; xf]<; rcapa5o£oA,oyiac;. £ouf|xavog fivGpcojtoi;).i Professor M. I. Finley, reviewing the book in the New Statesman of^ 9 Sept. 1966, treated it as if it were an essay in ancient history too boldly\ served up for the Tripos, and found he could give it no better than a y?-.! Professor A. G. N. Flew, in the Spectator of 7 October, welcomedf it as the most important work about Plato since Sir Karl Popper's The

Open Society and its Enemies. He could surely have gone further. It is| the most stimulating contribution to Greek scholarship since Samuel! Butler's The Authoress of the Odyssey.f The mixed reception of Ryle's book illustrates two familiar features of

Platonic studies. Aristotelian scholars spend most of their time andi space talking about Aristotle, but Platonic scholars tend to be preoc-

cupied less with questions about Plato than with questions about methods|" of interpreting Plato; and while expositors of Aristotle are usually content

to expound, controversies about the interpretation of Plato are charac-f teristically also philosophical controversies, in which rival commentatorsI endorse or criticise Plato's arguments and doctrines. The two pointsf are connected, and they are both involved in what I have to say abouti the disunity of Plato's thought.f Ryle wrote an earlier, shorter and more important work on Plato—

'Plato's Parmenides' in MIND, 1939. This broadside was a contribution^ to an engagement that is part of a wider war. Ryle maintained that the

first part of the Parmenides presented some arguments that were gravelyf damaging to Plato's Theory of Ideas', and were known to Plato to be

damaging to that theory. The puzzles about the third man, abouti mastership and slavery, about participation and imitation, represented

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Plato's recognition of the logical obstacles in the way of his statingintelligibly the relation between his Ideas and the instances that fall underthem. Ryle has been followed by Professor Gregory Vlastos, ProfessorG. E. L. Owen, Professor Peter Geach and others whose work is stronglyrepresented in Studies in Plato's Metaphysics2 edited by R. E. Allen. Theywould all with varying degrees of emphasis endorse Bertrand Russell'sremark that the Parmenides is 'one of the most remarkable cases in historyof self-criticism by a philosopher.' Their interpretation has achieved thestatus of an orthodoxy among those students of Plato whose primaryobjectives are philosophical rather than historical.

But Ryle's Parmenides is not the only Parmenides on the market. Thefirst part of the Parmenides as read by Dr. A. L. Peck presents someworthless arguments, known by Plato to be worthless. His interpretationis in the tradition of Cornford's reading of the Theaetetus as an obliquedefence of the 'Theory of Forms', and of A. E. Taylor's remark in hisintroduction to the Sophist that the later 'dialectical' dialogues arecharacterised by a 'new tonality' that brings their theory of form muchnearer to the Aristotelian doctrine than to that of the Phaedo and theRepublic. Professor Harold Cherniss holds the same line more firmly inhis rejoinder to Owen's arguments for the re-dating of the Timaeus,arguments tactically deployed in pursuit of the strategic objective ofestablishing that Plato is not committed at any date later than that of theParmenides to any version of the classical Theory of Ideas.

In this controversy history and philosophy are intimately intertwined.Side by side with the question 'Did Plato ever abandon the Theory ofIdeas?' stands the question 'Would it be right to abandon the theory?'Two of the possible composite positions in this double dispute are usuallyleft unoccupied. No prominent scholar has maintained that Platowrongly abandoned the theory, or that he wrongly maintained it to theend of his life. The two main parties are those of Ryle and of Peck,firmly opposed both on the historical and on the philosophical issues;both holding that Plato was right, but differing both about what is rightand about what Plato held. And the general position of Peck andCherniss is the prevailing orthodoxy among those Platonic scholars whosepurposes are primarily historical rather than philosophical.

In Paul Shorey's book The Unity of Plato's Thought (1903) we find alearned and sprightly treatment of the same two interconnected issues.Thirty years later, in What Plato Said, Shorey defended the same inter-pretation at greater and indeed at tedious length. In 1903 he could stillspeak of stylometry, and of the systematic study of the relative chronologyof Plato's works, as a comparatively new departure. The idea that therewas growth and development in Plato's thought during the period coveredby the surviving writings was a new-fangled notion that was still receivinglittle attention and less sympathy from established scholars. And yetwhat is most striking is that there has been little or no change in the battle

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i THE DISUNITY OF PLATO'S THOUGHTf

lines in the sixty-five years that have passed since Shorey declared war onf 'the enumerators of KaGdwtsp and xi jxf|v'. Some of the tools and

weapons are different, but the issues are substantially the same,f That there should have been so little change in so long a period—a

period during which Platonic scholarship has become a heavy industry—f. gives rise to a reasonable suspicion of cross-purposes between the parties: to the two disputes, and especially of a characteristically philosophicalL species of cross-purposes of which I shall have more to say later. Shorey

is most unquestionably right when he endorses, at the very end of TheL Unity of Plato's Thought, John Stuart Mill's statement that 'there are few,I if any, ancient authors concerning whose mind and purpose so manyL demonstrably false opinions are current, as concerning Plato.'I Shorey gives a useful clue to the character of the conflict, and helps tot account for its persistence, when he reminds us on p. 5 that in order to prove

that Plato always held the same doctrine it is not necessary to establish thathe always expressed his doctrine in the same form of words. Shorey does

i not seem to have noticed that this consideration is double-edged: it mayL happen that a philosopher's doctrine continues to be expressed in identicali or closely similar forms of words, and yet becomes in course of time a' different doctrine, different in content and implications. For his own[ part Shorey is satisfied that we can find nothing more extreme than certain' 'variations of mood' and changes in 'minor beliefs' between any dialogue[ of Plato's and any other dialogue, however much earlier or later (p.88).1 I believe that we need to keep both edges of this weapon bright andi sharp; to remember both that Plato may use the characteristic language of1, the theory of Ideas when he is not propagating the theory, and also thatf he may use language quite different from the customary language of thei theory in works and passages in which he is propagating the theory. It! must not be assumed, for example, that whenever Socrates, in an early,! Socratic, aporetic dialogue, seeks for a general definition, and speaks ofi collecting a variety of instances under a single 156a, he is then giving! expression to the metaphysical doctrine of the Republic and the Phaedo.f Equally, it must not be assumed without evidence or argument that inI the Sophist or the Philebus the words y£vr| and jiSpa? do or do not form, part of an expression of classical Platonism.1 I cannot here and now set out in full or defend in depth a comprehensivef view of the development of Plato's thought. It will be sufficient for my

present purpose to give an outline of what I believe to have been thecourse of that development, and in outline I accept the picture painted byRyle in 'Plato's Parmenides' and repainted on a larger canvas in Plato'sProgress. According to this picture, the historical Socrates was interestedin seeking definitions, but offered no metaphysical doctrine about thestatus of the objects or subjects of definition. Plato presents in the earlyaporetic dialogues a biographically faithful account of a Socrates engagedin informal conversation about moral concepts. This same Socrates is

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sketched by Aristotle's brief and more prosaic testimony, as given mainlyin the Metaphysics: 8uo ydp ECTTIV d xiq dv djtoSotn EooKpatei Siicaicx;,TOIX; -c'e7taKTiKoi)<; X6yovq m l to 6pi^ea8at Ka06X,ou (1078b27-29).

After the early group of dialogues there was a gradual development ofa Platonic metaphysic, morality and religion. In the Gorgias the doctrineof the immortality of the soul is introduced. In the Meno it is combinedwith the conception of learning as recollection or Anamnesis. In thePhaedo both doctrines are accompanied by an almost fully fledged theoryof Ideas, as known to us from the other dialogues of the classical middleperiod of Platonism: Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus. At this stage inPlato's development there occurs an important crisis. The Parmenidesgives expression to an drcopia that Plato found himself in when he recog-nised the force and importance of the logical objections that may bebrought against the theory of universals which is still, in his honour,called Platonism. At Parmenides 135b5-c3 he represents himself as tornbetween a loyalty to his theory that would involve him in what nowappeared to be intolerable paradoxes and contradictions, and the equallyintolerable alternative of denying the possibility of all thought andlanguage and knowledge, which seemed to him to be an inescapableconsequence of abandoning the theory.

It is not surprising that the Theaetetus should represent a return to theaporetic structure of the early Socratic dialogues and a new start at thetheory of knowledge. Like the Laches, the Lysis and the Charmides theTheaetetus propounds definitions, rejects them, and ends in uncertaintyand gloom. The Sophist and the Philebus belong to a new phase in whichcriticism of Plato's own earner theory, such as is implicit in the Theaetetusand explicit in the Parmenides, is combined with the reconstruction of atheory of knowledge and of universals which is designed to take accountof the logical difficulties found by the Parmenides to lie in the path of theearlier theory. The EI8COV (piXot of the Sophist are criticised for justsuch a separation of the world of universals from a supposed world ofmere particulars as was alleged by Parmenides {Parmenides, 133 c ff.) tobe involved in classical Platonism, and the reconstructed theory is carefullyarmed against a similar accusation. Mr. I. M. Crombie has usefullyremarked that in these later dialogues, and especially in the Philebus, thereis a more sophisticated awareness than in the earlier dialogues of thenature and importance of the relations between universals and universalsas opposed to relations between two artificially divided worlds of universalsand particulars (An Examination of Plato's Doctrines, Vol. II, pp. 356 ff).

This account is highly controversial, but its most uncompromisingcritic could not deny that it has one rare merit: it makes every Platonicdialogue mean what it says. It makes the aporetic dialogues sincerelyaporetic—including the Theaetetus, a work that Unitarian scholars muston pain of inconsistency represent as a facade behind which a doctrine isdefended that is different from and incompatible with any that could be

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THE DISUNITY OF PLATO'S THOUGHTt

expressed by a plain understanding of the words of which the dialogue^ consists. My account makes the Parmenides mean to be critical when it

is critical, and to express uncertainty when that is what it appears on a^ plain reading to express. It has the subsidiary but not negligible advan-

tage of making Socrates in the Apology mean what he says, especially onthe question of human immortality. Above all, it has the importantmerit demanded by Aristotle at N.E. 1154a23: it can offer an explanationof why other and false accounts have appeared plausible. It can giveT6 ditiov TOD \|/6o8ouq.

The major part of the explanation is provided by a single factor, by aphenomenon of which in recent years the most dramatic and extremeinstances have been provided by theology, but which is and always hasbeen widespread in all the humane disciplines and even in mathematicsand the natural sciences. In every sphere of enquiry it repeatedlyhappens that a radical transformation in the content of a thesis, theory ordoctrine is disguised by conservatism in the forms of its expression. Inthe natural sciences it is often more natural to preserve an old term with aslightly different use rather than to coin a new terminology. The history

T of the word 'atom' or the word 'gravity', quite as much as that of 'form'or 'substance', is a story of gradual modification in the use of a term lead-

r ing in the end to the expression by its use of theories not only differentfrom but actually incompatible with those that it was at first adopted to

f express. From the fields of political and legal theory and practiceexamples could be indefinitely multiplied. We still speak with goodreason of Crown and Parliament, without always being aware of howdifferent these institutions are from those to which the terms were first

* applied. A small scale example that has occurred within this century isthe case of the ranks of Royal Air Force Officers. It must in the terms

7 of the short history of the service be a long time since a Squadron-Leaderled a squadron or a Wing-Commander commanded a wing.

r In Plato's philosophy there are many key terms which remain in the1 forefront of the exposition while their meanings change with the gradualT but in the end extensive and even revolutionary changes in the content of

Platonic doctrine. Shorey knows which terms they are, and he gives a* substantial list of them on p.4. The word 'dialectic', which is used at

first to refer to the informal conversation of Socrates with his friends,* comes in the end to be the name of a species of metaphysical logic which is

as technical and formal as that of any idealist of recent centuries, and* which is or includes an ontological doctrine as well as a logical and

methodological technique. In the Meno 'doxcf has not yet acquired, andt in the Theaetetus it has already lost, the use given to it in the central booksI of the Republic, whereby belief and opinion are distinguished fromt knowledge as having different objects. In the Meno and in the TheaetetusI it is recognised, as it has been recognised by the common sense of all men,t ancient and modern, that I may at one time know or believe what at

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another time I believe or know. The Republic derives an ontologicaldivision from the logical distinction between knowledge and belief thatconsists in the fact that a belief may be either true or false whereas know-ledge can only be of what is true.

Nobody who was not blinded by a general thesis about the unity ofPlato's thought would deny that 'anamnesis' means different things indifferent dialogues of different dates, or that Socratic irony is ironical in themiddle dialogues, in which it gives rise to Macaulay's revulsion against thecharacter of Socrates ('The more I read of him, the less I wonder that theypoisoned him') whereas in the aporetic dialogues (including the Theaetetus)it is an honest admission of ignorance and perplexity.

In some cases the change of doctrine is almost open and explicit. Noteven the most generous use of Shorey's principle that language may varywhile doctrine stands still can reconcile the hedonism of the Protagoraswith the psychological and ethical dualism of the Gorgias, or with thePhaedo's contemptuous reference (69a) to bartering pleasure for pleasurelike gold for wares. Crombie has pointed out that here again Platonicscholars have been actuated by philosophical as well as by historicalmotives. They have been anti-hedonists themselves, and have wishedPlato to be a faithful anti-hedonist (Volume I, pp. 227-28).

Important as these examples are, they are mere satellites to the centralarticle of Plato's metaphysics: his doctrine, or doctrines, of universals.When we debate the unity and disunity of Plato's thought it is the Theoryof Ideas that we principally have in mind.

It will not do to assume in advance even that the question 'What is xT(courage, knowledge, justice) has the same meaning or meanings and thesame purpose or purposes in different dialogues at different times. Onemay agree with Hackforth's suggestion that the historical Socrates held'no metaphysical doctrine whatsoever' (Plato's Phaedo, p. 50) and there-fore that the quests for definitions of the Laches, Lysis and Charmidespresuppose no view about the logical or ontological status of the subjectsor objects of definition, and still accept that in later and Platonic dialoguesthe question 'What is x?' takes as a generalised answer the Theory ofIdeas of the Phaedo and the Republic.

Faithful Unitarians who come in the end to see that there is no singleunvarying theory of ideas that can be reconciled with a plain reading of allthe texts from the Laches to the Laws sometimes resort to a more moderateview, and one that calls more clearly than ever for a recognition of theinvolvement in this controversy of philosophical as well as historicalissues. While it may be true, it is said, that Socrates sought for definitionswithout being explicitly aware of the need for Platonic universals as partof the machinery for providing such definitions, we must recognise thatPlato's Theory of Ideas is the logical consequence of the Socratic processof questioning. Did not Aristotle testify that it was by combining the

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THE DISUNITY OF PLATO'S THOUGHT

Heraclitean-Cratylean flux with the Socratic search for universal defini-^ tions of moral terms that Plato was led to his metaphysical ontology ?r There is nowhere in the history of philosophy where it is more important

than it is here to keep a clear head about the distinction between a logicalconsequence and a psychological consequence. Nobody denies that thedevelopment of the Platonic ontology was a natural development from theSocratic search for definitions of general terms. But it is possible toallow that it is a natural development while denying that it is a necessarydevelopment; and whereas the suggestion that it is a natural developmentis a psychological or historical diagnosis, the thesis that it is a necessary

* development is a philosophical thesis, and needs to be argued for inopenly philosophical terms, and to be defended against powerful philoso-phical criticisms. Too often the philosophical questions are beggedbehind the scenes while the stage is occupied with a 'purely historical'

r production. The fact that the development is natural easily leadshistorians to think that it is necessary, and the belief that it is necessary

y easily leads in turn to a representation of the growth of Plato's thoughtthat confers upon it at least a plausible likeness of the unity that Shorey

r and Burnet and Taylor see with the eyes of a more uncompromising faith.The prominence of Burnet and Taylor in the Unitarian camp suggests a

Y secondary but not wholly negligible dinov TOU \|/6i>8oi><;. Plato's Republichas for many generations been the Platonic set text taken by most candi-

* dates for the Final Honour School of Literae Humaniores at Oxford.Many of those who have written on Plato made their first acquaintance

f with his philosophy as close students of that single dialogue. Whenthey later turned to earlier or later works and found in them a similar

f vocabulary used in the discussion of similar questions, it was under-standable that they should think themselves entitled to attribute to those

t earlier and later works the doctrines familiar to them from the Republic.(Taylor, op.cit., p. 7).

* Burnet-Taylorism in its extreme form is dead or dying. But there is| still life in the upside-down Burnet-Taylorism that consists in finding inf every dialogue after the Republic where there is any use of the words

E18O<;, i86a, yfcvo? or others akin to them, the full blooded Platonism of* the middle period. There is more excuse for this misunderstanding than

for the converse anachronism of reading the Theory of Ideas into works*• written before it was conceived, but some of its sources and effects are the1 same. It involves a serious confusion between two senses in which at philosopher may be said to offer a theory of universals. Sometimes the

expression 'theory of universals' or 'philosophy of universals' is used tof refer to a particular answer or range of answers to 'the problem of uni-j versals'. In this use of these expressions, a holder of the theory orf philosophy of universals is to be contrasted with a nominalist or a defender| of the resemblance theory. But proponents and critics of all these•> theories may be described as theorists of universals, as propounding

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theories or philosophies of universal, in the sense that they all attend to aspecifiable problem or topic or set of problems or topics that can beraised by the question 'What are universals?' or 'Are there such things asuniversals?' or 'What is the relation between a universal and its instances?'

Any philosopher who discusses this problem in English will need someor all of the words 'kind', 'class', 'property', 'resemblance' and relatedwords and expressions such as 'having something in common'. That aphilosopher uses such words and expressions may correspondingly indi-cate that he is concerned with this problem. But it is clear that theseexpressions will occur in the writings of philosophers whose philosophicaltheses may radically differ, and may even be mutually opposed. Aphilosopher who discusses the problem of universals in Greek willnecessarily use some or all of the Greek expressions for 'kind', 'class','property', etc., and to suppose that any philosopher who uses them iscommitting himself to a Platonist theory of universals will make itlogically impossible for Plato's theory to be criticised or denied. Noteven Plato himself must be debarred from recognising, as I believe hecame to recognise, that the question 'what is it for a number of differentthings to be of the same kind ?' and the question 'what is it for manythings to be of one kind ?' can be answered without holding either thatthere are no such things as universals or that universals are things, sub-stances, more lasting than bronze, harder than adamant.

It is now widely if not universally recognised that the historical Socratesdiscussed particular classes, kinds, concepts, properties, relations andresemblances, without committing himself to or even considering thepossibility of a metaphysical theory of his logical practice. This showsalready that what are sometimes taken to be the committal expressions canoccur in the absence of the supposed commitment. It needs to be morewidely recognised that the expressions can be used without the commit-ment, even by a philosopher who is explicitly aware, as Socrates and theearly Plato were not, of the existence of a problem of universals, and ofalternative and conflicting theories that may be offered as solutions ofthe problem.

This is not the only context in which philosophers and scholars havefailed adequately to distinguish the treatment of a topic from the holdingof a particular theory or type of theory about that topic. There is a moregeneral tendency, of which the application to the problem of universals isonly a special case, to think of the distinction between metaphysical andnon-metaphysical theories as an opposition between theories which doand theories which do not state or imply the existence of abstract orimmaterial entities. According to this use of the terms, Plato andLeibniz are metaphysicians and Hume and Ayer are not. There needbe no harm in the use of the word 'metaphysical' to make this distinction,but in the actual practice of philosophy it has caused confusion. Ithas been allowed to obscure the fact that there is a set of questions and

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THE DISUNITY OF PLATO'S THOUGHT•y

problems that can be recognised as metaphysical, and to which anyr proposed answer or solution, whether offered by Leibniz or by Hume,

may conveniently and correctly be called a metaphysical proposition orv doctrine. In this sense the negation of a metaphysical thesis is a meta-

physical thesis, and Ayer and Hume cannot reject the metaphysical theories^ of Aristotle and Aquinas without themselves engaging in metaphysical

enquiry and making metaphysical assertions.. What I have said so far, however controversial it may be, is all familiar

at least in outline. My reason for rehearsing it here, at least in outline,is that it can all be strongly reinforced by the use of a principle of inter-pretation that I now wish to introduce, one that needs, I believe, to be

. applied explicitly and extensively both in historical studies of philosophersand in substantive philosophical enquiry. It is a principle that takesaccount of the peculiar character of philosophical conflict, as contrastedwith logical, scientific and most other forms of disagreement. It might becalled the Principle of Multiple Capability.

Philosophers from the author of the Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter to theauthor of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus have repeatedly stressed thediflSculty or alleged the impossibility in principle of adequate written oreven oral communication of philosophical truth and understanding.Philosophy is (no doubt) the pursuit of truth, and the elimination offalsehood, and yet it is hard to find any philosophical proposition ofwhich any philosopher, and still less any two or more philosophers, willsay that it is unquestionably true, or any philosophical question to whichany philosopher or pair of philosophers will give the unqualified answerYes or the unqualified answer No. This state of affairs puzzles nearly all

f non-philosophers and many philosophers themselves. A philosopher isliable to be ashamed of it in direct proportion to the degree of his philoso-

* phical confusion about how it comes to be so. I suggest that the explana-tion of this state of affairs is largely given by the principle of multiple

* capability—the principle (to put it in plainer words—for it applies toitself) that no indicative form of words is a natural expression of aphilosophical point unless it is an equally natural expression for a differentand incompatible philosophical point; and that no interrogative philo-

* sophical form of words has a natural use in which it expresses a question' to which the right answer is an unqualified Yes without also having anothert and equally natural use in which it expresses a question to which the right! answer is an unqualified No. A partial recognition of this feature off philosophical enquiry sometimes expresses itself in the remark thati philosophical questions are or involve questions about meaning; that we* must define our terms, or that it all depends what you mean by the wordsi that you use.f I have recently discussed elsewhere, though without christening it as: here, both the principle of multiple capability and some of the examplesf of its application that are most relevant to a discussion of Plato's thought.3

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The chief among these is the conception of universals or forms as inde-structible objects, beyond change and decay. To argue that redness is notsomething indestructible is to be in danger and under the suspicion ofbelieving that redness is something destructible. To suggest that rednessis not something destructible is at least to appear to suggest that it issomething indestructible. What needs to be recognised, and is increasinglyrecognised by Plato, is that a confusion of categories is involved inconceiving of a universal as a candidate for admission either to the classof destructible things or to the class of indestructible things. Each of theseinadequate ascriptions has the merit of resisting the inadequacy of theother; and they are jointly valuable because there are no easy or straight-forward alternative ways of performing that meritorious service. (It isnot that they are oblique ways of expressing what can be expressed morestraightforwardly.) But we do need to resist a danger that they jointly fallinto of suggesting that if we cannot say what kind of thing a universal iswe shall have to say that a universal is nothing at all, that there are nouniversals.

But I need not repeat myself any further. The principle and its applica-tion to Plato can be pursued with numerous further examples from thesame stable, and they illustrate the principle and each other so clearly thatit will not be necessary to give more than a brief description of each ofthem. In fact they are so strongly mutually relevant that some artificiality,even if also great convenience, is involved in treating them as separateinstances.

(1) xapia\i6q. Aristotle's testimony that Plato ixatpiaev the forms isusually translated by the idea of separation. But nothing more need beinvolved than distinction or distinctness. To say that a universal is some-thing distinct from the particulars that fall under it may be to say simplythat they are to be distinguished, i.e. that there is some distinction to bedrawn between them, or it may be to say that they are distinct or separatethings, different types of furniture of the universe.

(2) Sivdi TI. Protagoras rightly says that there is such a thing(npayua) as justice, or that he is willing to call something justice (330c). Tothe eye of a Burnet or a Taylor these expressions suggest more than theydo to any of the rest of us, but still more to some of us than to others.But once again we must all recognise that the use of these expressionsby itself settles nothing about the meaning of a passage in which theyoccur.

(3) Sivcu as expressing truth. Gulliver finds in A Voyage to the Houyhn-hnms that the inhabitants are such strangers to doubt that they have noproper name for falsehood. Gulliver has to use the circumlocution'THE THING WHICH IS NOT'. In modern English this phrase, thoughfully intelligible, is less than natural. One reason why we understand it sowell is that it is akin to what is in Greek a standard use of the verb to be:it may be used to express what is so, what is true. Part at least of what is

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THE DISUNITY OF PLATO'S THOUGHT

meant by £cm td uf] 5VT<X in the Sophist is that what is negative maynevertheless be true (258d5).

But it is in the Republic, and in the central books of the Republic, thatwe must most attentively keep in mind this use of givcti. When Platospeaks at 476-479 of what is intermediate between being and not being,and of the differing objects of Srcicrrfiuri and 56^a, his doctrine can be givena largely gratuitous air of quaintness by translating it as ontology ratherthan as epistemology. I am not suggesting that Plato is not here committinghimself to an ontological doctrine, and I do not therefore go so far as tosuggest that a translation into ontological terms is a mistranslation. Mypoint is rather that neither an ontological version nor an epistemologicalversion by itself can convey the use that his words have in their contextof argument and assumption. An English version that has any claim toaccuracy will be capable of bearing either of the two interpretations ofwhich the Greek is capable. Nowhere is it clearer than it is here that totranslate is to interpret, and that we cannot aspire to make an antecedentlycorrect translation the basis on which to build an interpretation of anydifficult or even any interesting philosophical text.

All this is brought into focus if we look at the passage in Book V ofthe Republic where Socrates asks n&q uf) 6v yt xi yvooaGein (476e6)A non-committal version might read: 'How can what is not be known?'The question may be seen as one more assertion of the necessity that ifp is known then/> is true, but it may alternatively be seen as the expressionof the conviction, certainly held by Plato in some moods and by manyof his commentators, that for there to be any knowledge or truth theremust be 'realities' (Svxa) in some sense that passes beyond the necessitythat my knowledge must have a propositional object. Of the many parallelpassages in the dialogues it may be sufficient here to refer to Republic477a2, where what is navxzk&c, ov is equated with what is navxzk&ic,yvoatov, and to Theaetetus 152c5, where again knowledge is said to betoo 6vxo<;, and where again the text has been variously understood tomean that knowledge requires the existence or reality of some sort ofthing or entity or substance, or, less excitingly, that only what is true canbe known.

(4) Belief, knowledge and their objects. The search in the Republic forsome realm of objects intermediate between ov and ur) ov combineselements from (2) and (3): 'If I believe I must believe something; not tobelieve anything is not to believe at all. But what is believed may either be ornot be, whereas what is known cannot not be. So what is believed must besomething different from what is known.' This version is of independentinterest both historically and philosophically: historically because thecontrast between this passage and the Meno is one of the clearest instancesof conflict between what Plato holds at one time and what he holds atanother; philosophically, because there are still many live issues inplaces where the evident need for an intentional or grammatical object

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raises dispute about whether there is also a need for some kind or categoryof 'entity' or 'thing' or 'substance'—i.e. for an object in another use ofthe word. Professor G. E. M. Anscombe's 'The Intentionality of Sen-sation' is only one recent and important example of the type of work Ihave in mind.4

(5) 'Participation'. Both those who believe in the truth of the 'Theoryof Ideas' and those who do not have sometimes made a mistake thatPlato also sometimes made. They have taken u^Ge^ii; too seriouslybecause too solemnly. If we think of something being distributed amonga range of particulars, and especially if we speak of them all as participatingor sharing in a Form, we shall see classical Platonism where there is nosuch thing. We need to remember that usGe^i? is an ordinary Greek word,meaning the same as the ordinary English expression 'having somethingin common': that is to say a starting point for discussing the problem ofuniversals and not an unambiguous theoretical conclusion.

(6) Parmenides 135b. When Socrates says that speech will be impossibleunless there are E(8T| T&V SVTCQV it makes a great difference whether theforce of 5vta is the same as in the passages of the Phaedo and the Republicwhere classical Platonism is affirmed, or whether it is to be taken as itmust be taken even in one passage of the Republic itself, 477c 1, where theremark that the SOV&UEU; of knowledge and belief are yevoq TI tcov 5VTCOV

would not tempt the most dogged Unitarian, and would barely temptMeinong himself, to think of knowing and believing as imperishablesubstances.

(7) T<5 KaX$ t& Koka KaXd {Phaedo lOOd). What is probably intended byPlato as the expression of a belief in something distinct from beautifulthings that exists independently of them and is the cause and explanationof their being beautiful could equally, as far as the Greek of that sentencealone is concerned, be an assertion of the platitude that what beautifulthings have in common is that they are beautiful. And while I could notconsistently deny that this platitude is important for the consideration ofthe problem of universals its importance and interest are of quite adifferent kind from those of Plato's classical theory.5

In The Problems of Philosophy, at the end of the chapter on 'The Worldof Universals', Russell writes a passage that might have been designed fortranslation into Platonic prose:

We shall find it convenient only to speak of things existing when theyare in time, that is to say, when we can point to some time at whichthey exist (not excluding the possibility of their existing at all times).Thus thoughts and feelings, minds and physical objects exist. Butuniversals do not exist in this sense; we shall say that they subsist orhave being, where 'being' is opposed to 'existence' as being timeless.The world of universals, therefore, may also be described as the worldof being. The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightfulto the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems,

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and all who love perfection more than life. The world of existence isf fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear plan or

arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data ofy sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or

harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of life and they world. According to our temperaments, we shall prefer the contem-

plation of the one or of the other. The one we do not prefer will probably^ seem to us a pale shadow of the one we prefer, and hardly worthy

to be regarded as in any sense real. But the truth is that both have thea same claim on our impartial attention, both are real, and both are

important to the metaphysician. Indeed no sooner have we distinguished+ the two worlds than it becomes necessary to consider their relations.

In interpreting what Russell says about these worlds and their relationsr we meet with problems like those that face us when we try to interpret

what Plato says about the same questions, and like those that face us whenr we try to deal with those questions for ourselves. And in all these enquiries

we shall not only be faced with, but shall ourselves be constrained to^ employ expressions that are subject to the principle of multiple capability.

The attribution of a philosophical thesis to an author or speaker, ancientv or modern, involves all the kinds of inexactness, variety and ambiguity

that are involved in the direct expression of a philosophical thesis. WeL shall make progress in philosophy and in the history of philosophy to the

extent that we can see the inappropriateness of some of the customary and' traditional ideals of exactness, clarity and precision without concluding

that their abandonment commits us to abandoning exactness, clarity andprecision.

St. John's College, Cambridge.

1 Plato's Progress, by Gilbert Ryle, Cambridge University Press, 1966.^Studies in Plato's Metaphysics, edited by R. E. Allen, Routledge and Kegan Paul,

1965.^"Objectivity and Objects," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1971-72.*In Butler (ed.) Analytical Philosophy, First Series.5See "Universals and Family Resemblances", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,

1960-61.

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