PLATO AT PLAY
I have been belatedly trying to improve my mind by reading all the Dialogues of Plato and feeling self-sacrificing and virtuous about it. By the time I had got through the first half of Parmenides and found myself laughing at every other sentence, I suddenly realized that part of the popularity that had kept Plato in the forefront of philosophy for so many years was due to his wicked sense of humor.
In this dialogue he pokes fun at Zeno and Parmenides for their reliance on logical proof and for their total lack of grip on reality. Zeno is famous for his insistence than an arrow shot at a target can never get there because it must first pass through an infinite number of fractional points on a straight line. His friend Parmenides also insisted that impossibilities are as good as realities, through logic. Here he bamboozles Aristotle, still a teen-ager and too polite to contradict his elders.
"If One is [my caps]," he begins, "The One cannot be many?" (Agreed) "Then the One cannot have parts .... One would be made up of parts .... One would be many and not One." (Agreed) " and ... formless, as not being able to partake either of round or straight. [forms round or straight have middles which are parts and thus are not One but many] Or to quit quoting and get on with it, this poor formless yet deformed One, in order to arrive on center stage, equipped with a beginning middle and end, is also a conglomeration of different ages, the beginning having arrived on the scene first, then the middle and the tall last. Also it could not exist anywhere without touching its environment at various points, thus being not One again but many. He finishes up thus:
"That if One is not, then nothing is?" (Agreed) "...As seems to be the truth ... whether One is or is not, One and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear and appear not." (That is most true)
It took me a while to figure out how Plato arrived logically at this nonsense. Like Zeno he calmly mingled geometry, numbers, common sense and time, then glued them up with logic. These are all unconnected modes of thought which cannot occupy the same spot all at once, though they can occasionally pair up for practical purposes.
I remember stumbling on a similarly disconnected truth table in a book on finite math. It went something like this:
If and only if it snows, the ski train leaves the station. Therefore when the ski train leaves, it snows. This is a ridiculous mixture of engineering and the "acts of God". These two actions are not in the same mode or realm or time and so can not be reversed and stay plausible. The snow precedes the train in the first instance but the train does not precede the snow in the second so reversible simultaneity is lost, as the engineer needs at least a few moments to start his train. If you like really silly syllogisms try Lewis Carroll, they are funnier even than Plato's in Parmenides.
There is a prominent American gentleman, now living, and much in the news, who believes that he cannot be alone unless he is in some particular place. He clues us in to his style of argument when he adds "It all depends on what 'is' is." 'Is' can mean either to exist or else to be temporarily acting on one's environment. (I am human or I am standing on one foot in my shower). The Spanish have it right with their 'ser' and 'estar' but we live in semantic confusion which makes it easy to bamboozle us. Our dear president is of course perfectly right after the manner of Parmenides for he mixes definition with action as though they were in the same mode. If he says he is alone he can either be on the other side of a shut door or else he can be all alone in a crowd, for that is man's unhappy condition. He might as well say that if he is alone he must exist, and to exist he must be in some place, and if he is not in some place he does not exist and therefor could not possibly have done anything wrong. Very charming, and Plato might have laughed, but the ability to mislead by punning is not the most valuable attribute in a leader.
Ann Kucera