The
informality of the title of this essay is meant to convey that I here make no
pretense to scholarship; indeed, my notions have little ambition even to be
called philosophical. My reading of
Plato can only be justified by a reader who finds it poetic. Yet I have always found that the subjectivity
of poets offers an access to truth unavailable to logicians.
Plato’s Parmenides
is to many a puzzler. One modern
reader has called it the philosopher’s “most enigmatic” work, [1] while another,
equally Hellenic but preferring more contemporary jargon, finds it
"aporetic." [2] In most of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’
interlocutors follow their guru like sheep, chorusing “of course, Socrates” and
“how could it be otherwise, Socrates?” while at the same time the reader may be
shouting, “but no!” In the Parmenides
the roles are reversed, and a youthful Socrates accepts the lead of the
elder philosopher. Parmenides even scolds
like an indulgent parent, telling Socrates, “you are still young; the time will
come, if I am not mistaken, when philosophy will have a firmer grasp of you.” [3] Plato’s point of view can always be elusive,
given the dramatic dialogue format and the Socratic pose of knowing nothing,
but where is the authority here? The reader of this dialogue scarcely knows
what to think as Socrates allows himself to be passively led first through a
rejection of his own opinions and then to what looks like a strange sort of
apologetic reconstruction of them, making the second portion if not a
refutation a weaker reflected mirror image of the first. Finally, through the entire dialogue the
argumentation is so abstract, abstruse, and repetitive that even receptive
readers may find themselves dizzy with fatigue after only a page or two, on the
edge of concluding that the whole thing is gibberish.
If one persists,
the effect soon becomes incantatory, hypnotic, at times an astonishing juggling
act, at others more a magic charm or mantra, never a usable map of
ratiocination. Perhaps some savant might
be able to lock in on the concepts here and follow the funabulistic thought,
but could the effort of leaping and dancing and graceful turns lift a
contemplative to the sublime? A good
many Hindu, Buddhist, and Scholastic logicians have constructed similarly grand
and taxing mental gymnastics based on the conviction that it can. Perhaps following a moment of surprising grace
a certain sort of mind can only heap up argument after argument despite their
never quite measuring up to the original flash.
(Does such a dynamo underlie Aquinas’ voluminous productivity?)
For me the Parmenides
induces not active cognition, but rather its opposite, a surrender of logic in
the face of mystery, a submission to circumstance, and a recognition that a
human mind cannot encompass the cosmos.
The Milky Way simply will not be swallowed. Yet that does not doom the philosopher’s
equanimity. In singing the song of
powerlessness, in asserting obeisance to the unknown, in insisting on seeing
reality naked, and then proceeding to make an exceedingly abstract yet shapely
song of what cannot be understood, Parmenides and Socrates and Plato and the
reader following along as well dare to affirm, to celebrate even, these borders
and limits of humanity.
I imagine Plato
winking over the centuries, acknowledging that the cumbrous superstructure of
Forms (later overlaid with Neo-Platonic Emanations and by the time of
Iamblichus crowded with deities and spiritual beings) is only a pastime, a high
intellectual amusement. In Plato’s wink,
though it may exist only in fancy, the reader returns to the One, very much the
same One that recurs so obsessively in the Parmenides.
(Another Platonic
actor may provide a parallel. Gorgias
had enthralled Athenians with his rhetoric while maintaining a rigorously
Skeptical position. Having concluded
that nothing can be shown to exist; that if anything did exist, it could not be
known by people; and that if anything were known, it could not be communicated
to anyone else, he then spent his time weaving fabulous tapestries of
words. Sitting on a Mediterranean
terrace in mid-life, he found he could entertain himself and his tasteful fellow-citizens
with such playful projects as a defense of Helen or of Palamedes. Behind such pleasant theatricals, though,
there shone always the One, the Atman, the Ultimate Reality from which each
person arises, though only temporarily.)
This notion is
not entirely a vagary of my own. There
is some evidence and a great deal of speculation about the Indian influence on
Parmenides himself. As early as 1894 the
author of an article “On the Connexion between Indian and Greek Philosophy”
found “the most striking resemblance – I might almost say sameness – is between
the doctrine of the All-in-One in the Upanishads and the philosophy of the
Eleatics.” He believed in actual
influence from India “without intending to pass an apodictic decision.” [4] Since then a variety of scholars have
examined specific correspondences between Parmenides and Shankara and
Nagarjuna. [5] At least one professor of
Buddhist studies argues that Parmenides must have traveled to study in India.
[6]
While Plato’s
precise position must remain ever obscure, considering the Parmenides I
cannot avoid thoughts of his “unwritten teachings.” Though no Rosicrucian or Theosophist, I
thought of the old notion of Plato’s esoteric doctrines [7] One reader, at least, of the Parmenides
imagines a spark of the glory of absolute Enlightenment passing from one
wounded human psyche to another, diluted and diverted by every possible imp of
ignorance, yet casting still a clear light over thinkers of ancient Greece,
already struggling, like their South Asian cousins, for a way to live in a cold
world.
1.
1. Mitchell H. Miller, Jr., Plato's Parmenides:
The Conversion of the Soul. Princeton 1986.
2. 2. R.E. Allen, Plato's Parmenides: Translation
and Analysis (Minnesota 1983).
3.
3. I use Jowett’s old translation. The Greek is “νέος γὰρ εἶ ἔτι . . . καὶ οὔπω
σου ἀντείληπται φιλοσοφία” (130ε).
4.
4. Richard Garbe, “On the Connexion between Indian
and Greek Philosophy,” The Monist Vol. 4, No. 2 (January, 1894).
5.
5. See, for example, Chiara Robbiano, “Self or
being without boundaries: on Śaṅkara and Parmenides” in Universe and Inner
Self in Early Indian and Early Greek Thought ed. Richard Seaford; Nathan
Tamblyn, “Parmenides and Nāgārjuna: A Buddhist Interpretation of Ancient Greek
Philosophy” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, vol. 4;
and Kelly P. Dugan, Understanding Parmenides as a Numerical Monist: A
Comparative Study, a University of Kansas dissertation that discusses
Shankara in particular.
6.
6. Ferenc Ruzsa, “Parmenides’ road to India,”
Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 42 (2002).
7. 7. Though for a period little discussed, the issue has been revived in recent decades by Irmgard Männlein-Robert and others. Plato's disputed Seventh Letter declares that the truth of the highest matters cannot be expressed in writing. "And this is the reason why every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing, lest thereby he may possibly cast them as a prey to the envy and stupidity of the public. In one word, then, our conclusion must be that whenever one sees a man's written compositions—whether they be the laws of a legislator or anything else in any other form,—these are not his most serious works, if so be that the writer himself is serious: rather those works abide in the fairest region he possesses.” Also “Whosoever, then, has accompanied me in this story and this wandering of mine will know full well that, whether it be Dionysius or any lesser or greater man who has written something about the highest and first truths of Nature, nothing of what he has written, as my argument shows, is based on sound teaching or study. Otherwise he would have reverenced these truths as I do, and would not have dared to expose them to unseemly and degrading treatment.”
8.
8. Aristotle in his Physics explicitly
refers to such unwritten doctrines (“ἄγραφα δόγματα”) of Plato.
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