Main concerns:
I. What is the role of the Mark of Being in the Battle of Gods and Giants? Does it successfully reconcile the Gods with the Giants? Is the discussion of the Mark of Being offered as a new approach to Plato’s theory of Forms?
II. (i) Why does Plato turn to discuss the Great Kinds after considering the Mark of Being? How does the discussion of the Great Kinds relate to that of the Mark of Being? Does the discussion of the Great Kinds deviate from Plato’s theory of Forms?
(ii) What is the function of the Great Kinds? How do they associate with each other? Is the combination among the Great Kinds an asymmetrical one? Are they associated with each other in the same way as a particular partakes of some Form?
I. Mark of Being: Capacity of Affecting and Being Affected
245e-246e The Battle of Gods and Giants
Giants: the Ionian science of the Milesians and their successors, including Leucippus and Democritus:
[T1] “drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen” (246a)
[T2] “they define reality as the same thing as body” (246a-b)
Gods: the Italian tradition of the Pythagoreans and Parmenides:
[T3] “[the Gods] maintain with all their force that true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless Forms” (246b)
246e-248a A mark of Being is offered for the Giants’ acceptance
The visitor induces the “reformed” giants to admit the existence of non-visible or tangible things such as moral qualities.
[T4] “I suggest that anything has real being, that is to constituted as to possess any sort of power either to affect anything else or to be affected, in however small a degree, by the most insignificant agent, though it be only once. I’m proposing a mark to distinguish real things, that they are nothing but power” (247d-e).
248a-249d The Gods must concede that reality includes some changing things
[T5] “And you say that we have intercourse with Becoming by means of the body through sense, whereas we have intercourse with Real being by means of the soul through reflection. And Real being, you say, is always in the same unchanging state, whereas Becoming is variable.—We do.—Admirable. But now what are we to take you as meaning by this expression ‘intercourse’ which you apply to both? Don’t you mean what we described a moment ago?—What was that?—The experiencing an effect or the production of one, arising, as the result of some power, from things that encounter one another … —you mean?—We proposed as a sufficient mark of real things the presence in a thing of the power of being acted upon or of acting in relation to however insignificant a thing.—Yes.” (248a-248c)
My observation: “Combine” or “intercourse” takes place as the result of some capacity. Does Plato intend to argue that the Mark of Being, i.e., the capacity of being affected or affecting, is the capacity of combination or intercourse?
Argument in 248a-249d
(1) If Being consists solely of unchangeable things, intelligence will have no real existence anywhere. (T6, 248c-249b)
(2) But if Being consists solely of things that are perpetually changing, there can be no intelligence or knowledge. (249b-d)
(3) Hence Being must contain both changing and unchanging things. (T7, 249d)
[T6] “Do they acknowledge further that the soul knows and Real being is known?—Certainly.—Well, do you agree that knowing or being known is an action, or is it experiencing an effect, or both? Or is one of them experiencing an effect, the other an action? Or does neither of them come under either of these heads at all?—Evidently neither; otherwise our friends would be contradicting what they said earlier…—Are we really to be so easily convinced that change, life, soul, understanding have no place in that which is perfectly real?...—That, sir, would be a strange doctrine to accept.—But can we say it has intelligence without having life?—Surely not.—But if we say it contains both, can we deny that it has soul in which they reside?—How else could it possess them?—But then, if it has intelligence, life, and soul, can we say that a living thing remains at rest in a complete changelessness?—All that seems to me unreasonable.—In that case we must admit that what changes and change itself are real things.” (248c-249b)
[T7] “He must declare that the Reality or the sum of things is both at once-all that is unchangeable and all that is in change.”(249d)
249d-251a Transition of the meaning of “Reality”?
[T8] “So, then, you conceive of reality as a third thing over and above these two; and when you speak of both as being real, you mean that you are taking both movement and rest together as embraced by reality and fixing your attention on their common association with reality?—It does seem as if we discerned reality as a third thing, when we say that movement and rest are real.—So reality is not motion and rest ‘both at once’, but something distinct from them.—Apparently.” (250b-c)
♠ Transition from [T7] to [T8]
Cornford: the meaning of Reality has shifted from “the real” to “realness.”
Frede: Though it is true that whatever is is in motion or is at rest, being itself is neither in motion nor at rest. Neither to be in motion nor to be at rest is what it is to be; and hence what is, as such, in itself, by itself, is neither in motion nor at rest.
II. Great Kinds
251a-c How is it possible for one individual thing to have many names?
♠ The Late Learner Assumption: The late learners think that a thing can only be called by its own name and not by another. You can call a man “man” and the good “good”, but you cannot call a man “good”. These people believe that there should be a one-to-one correspondence between a thing and its name. Hence now the visitor needs to explain how one individual thing can be called by many names.
Frede: Once we understand that Being takes these two Forms, for instances, Sameness and Difference, we also understand how it is possible that we can tell a thing not only by its specific name (by Late Learner Assumption), but by many names. Moreover, we can explain how Being itself can be in motion or rest, though of itself it is neither.
♠ What are the Great Kinds for?
Cornford: It cannot be right to construe the five Great Kinds as Aristotelian “categories” (as Campbell suggested). Category, for Aristotle, means predicate or predication, a short expression for the “modes” or “fashions of prediction”. Those predicates are entities of different kinds and related to the subject in different ways. They are ultimate and irreducible classes. Also, Aristotle mentions a couple of times that Being and Unity are not categories, precisely because they can be predicated of everything.
Philosophers in the Middle Ages call such kinds transcendentals, since they transcend Aristotle’s ten categories.
Ryle: The Great Kinds function not like bricks but like the arrangement of the bricks in building. They structure other Forms and enable them to relate to one another.
Silverman: It is not said here what makes a kind “great”. There is a sense that the more you go through, i.e., combine with, the greater you are.
251c-252e Some Forms will combine, other will not
[T9] “Are we not to attach Existence to Motion and Rest, nor anything else to anything else, but rather to treat them in our discourse as incapable of any blending or participation in one another? Or are we to lump them all together as capable of associationwith one another?” (251d)
[T10] “Let us suppose them to say that nothing has any capacity for combination with anything else for any purpose” (251e)
[T11] “Will either of them [i.e., motion and rest] exist, if it has no association with Existence? (252a)
Mina: the Mark of Being is not just the capacity of combining a particular with some Form, but also the capacity of blending or combining one Great Kind with another.
Cornford: the words “combination”, “blend”, and “partake”, are used synonymously and they introduce an asymmetrical relation between an object and a property it has.
(252e-254b Digression on Dialectic)
254b-d Being, Motion, Rest
Plato addresses two questions: (a) What is each of the Great Kinds like? (b) What capacity do the five Great Kinds have to associate with each other?
[T12] “We will not take all the Forms, for fear of getting confused in such a multitude, but choose out some of those that are recognized as most important, and consider first their several natures and then how they stand in respect of being capable of combination with one another.” (254c)
[T13] “And observe, we say that two of the three will not blend with one another.—Certainly.—Whereas Existence can be blended with both; for surely they both exist.—Of course.” (254d)
Silverman: That Motion and Rest do not mix with each other augurs that they are not as widely distributed as Being.
Being must be a third thing distinct from Motion and Rest: If Being were the same as either of them—say motion—then when Being applies to Rest, by substitution Rest would partake of its own opposite. But that is not possible, since Rest and Motion do not blend.
254d-255e Sameness and Difference
Being must be distinct form Sameness: If Being were not distinct from Sameness, when we say that Motion and Rest both are, we could substitute them with Sameness, and Motion would be the same as Rest.
Being must be distinct from Difference, because Difference is always in relation to other things and more precisely in relation to something different (255d), whereas Being is both itself by itself and in relation to other things.
[T14] “I suppose you admit that, among things that exist, some are always spoken of as being what they are just in themselves, others as being what they are with reference to other things.—Of course.—And what is different is always so called with reference to another thing, isn’t it?—That is so.—It would not be so, if Existence and Difference were not very different things. If Difference partook of both characters as Existence does, there would sometimes be, within the class of different things, something that was different not with reference to another thing. But in fact we undoubtedly find that whatever is different, as a necessary consequence, is what it is with reference to another.” (255c-d)
♠ Different senses/uses of “Is”
Cornford: In saying that Being is said both itself by itself and in relation to other things, Plato is distinguishing different senses of the verb “to be”: (a) complete or absolute sense, i.e., “Is” of existence, and (b) incomplete sense, i.e., “Is” of predication.
Frede and Owen: Plato does not mark off two senses of the verb “to be”, but only different uses, since he speaks of only one Form of Being. Owen accepts the distinction between two syntactically distinct uses of the verb “to be”, but Plato’s interest in the Sophist is exclusively in the incomplete use. Frede: Plato recognizes just one Form of Being and that he talks throughout the dialogue as if this one Form was involved both in saying that not being is and in saying that something is. It is one and the same being that we are attributing to something in both cases.
Brown: There is no sharp semantic distinction between the two syntactically distinct uses of the verb “to be”. The “is” in “x is” is complete but allows a further completion.
References
Lesley Brown, “Being in the Sophist: A Syntactical Enquiry”, Plato 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology, Gail Fine (ed.), 1999. 455-78.
Francis M. Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, 1959.
Michael Frede, “The Sophist on False Statement”, Cambridge Companion to Plato, Richard Kraut (ed.), 1992. 397-424.
G. E. L. Owen, “Plato on Not-Being”, Plato 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology, Gail Fine (ed.), 1999. 416-454.
