Form and Good in Plato's Eleatic Dialogues "d0e8597"

1. Statesman As Shepherd (257a-267c)

After the fanfare and multiple demonstrations with which the stranger introduced the method of symmetrical division in the Sophist , it is surprising to find that that is the only dialogue in which Plato makes use of it in its pure form. The same Eleatic stranger conducts the inquiry of the Statesman , but halfway through the dialogue the divisions cease to be symmetrical and bisective, and the stranger increasingly resorts to myth, analogy, and metaphor—sespecially the metaphor of weaving—in a way that resembles Socratic inquiry much more than it resembles the diaeretic method employed in the Sophist .^[1] In fact that method is employed in a dubious way from the beginning of the dialogue. The first division may be schematized as in Figure 10.

The details of this diaeresis show a remarkable decline from the rigor and precision of the divisions in the Sophist . Three points in particular are worth commenting on.

1. In the shorter way the distinction between leathered and non-leathered is made twice: the differentia of step 7, "leathered" (or

[1] The shift is preceded by a discussion of the importance of paradigms (277d-279a). We may think of that discussion as a deliberate tempering of the Parmenides ' critique of analogical and metaphorical reasoning. The discussion acknowledges that paradigms are only an indirect way of presenting what we would prefer to present directly, but that they are sometimes indispensable.

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Figure 10

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"winged":

), is repeated in step 9 (

).^[2] This is an obvious violation of the method. Once "leathered" is excluded by step 7, it can no longer be implicit in the species to be divided in step 9. Since this manifest anomaly involves the species of birds, it calls our attention to a more serious problem about that species, the fact that the stranger's divisions, both here and in the Sophist , destroy the species of birds. In both dialogues there is a distinction between land animals and water animals. The Sophist locates birds within the genus "water animal" (220b) while the Statesman locates them within the genus "land animal" (264e). Thus we can locate water birds within one genus and land birds within another, but there is no genus that divides into the species of birds per se . We can isolate classes that are too general (animals) or too specific (water birds, land birds) but not the precise species of birds itself. The problem could easily have been avoided by making "feathered" into a prior differentia, that is, by dividing animals into feathered and nonfeathered, and nonfeathered into swimmers and walkers (birds could then have been located by appropriate distinctions within "feathered"). In fact this very point is suggested by the summaries, both here and at 276a, which omit step 6 and thereby separate the species "feathered" prior to any distinction between water and land.

All this would be of little consequence if the method of division were presented merely as a convenient method of classification, but it is offered rather as a method of arriving at real essences, by discovering which species belong by nature within which genera. The stranger speaks of distinguishing one kind of thing from everything else in terms of its "single form" (

, 258c5), and later says,

When someone at first perceives the common character of many things, he should not turn away until he sees in it all the distinctions, as many as lie in the forms [
]. When on the other hand he at first perceives all sorts of differences in a great many things, he must not become discouraged and stop until he has put those that are akin into a single similarity, enclosed in the genus to which they really belong [
].
(285a-b)

The problems we have seen, however, (and will continue to see) should make us wonder whether the method of bisective division is being recommended as wholeheartedly as at first it seemed.

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2. The diaeresis begins with the same flagrant violation of methodology with which it ended. Just as step 9 of the shorter way used a differentia already excluded by step 7, step 2 uses one already excluded by step 1. Step I distinguishes practical from intellectual arts on the grounds that the former eventuate in products (

, 258e). But when the latter (which by definition now exclude the producing of products) are divided into critical and directive, the distinction is that the directive art is for the sake of producing (

, 261a-b) and necessarily has products (

, 261b). Here too a characteristic supposedly excluded by the previous division reappears and needs to be excluded again in the subsequent one (even though the stranger could have made his point without inconsistency, as we shall see). This is reinforced by an oddly enfeebled conclusion that the stranger draws: not that the art of the king is within the class of theoretical rather than practical arts, as the stranger has just claimed to show, but only that his art is "more akin to" the theoretical than the practical (259c-d)—a weak identification that is hardly adequate to the requirements of definition by division (although it will be echoed in the "weaver" division), but that faithfully reflects the lack of rigor in the first two steps. All this seems too confusing even for the stranger. Here he locates kingship within the directive sciences, which are distinguished from the critical; but later he will say that kingship was differentiated from other sciences as being both directive and critical (292b).^[3] More than methodological carelessness is involved here. After the stranger distinguished between practical and intellectual arts on the basis of whether or not they involve products, he remarked that "any king can, with his hands or his whole body, do little to hold his rule, compared with what he can do with his entire soul and its force" (259c). This distinction between what can be accomplished by the body and what by the soul, which was mentioned only in passing, could have been used to avoid the problem that we just noticed. Suppose that step 1 distinguished the intellectual sciences from the practical not by claiming that the latter have products and the former do not, but that the latter have corporeal products (resulting from the activities of the body) while the former have intelligible products (resulting from the activities of the soul). In that case, the intellectual sciences would not have been defined in such a way as to preclude them from making products, and there would be no contradiction when step 2 uses this as the differentia to

[3] Cf. Benardete 3.126.

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distinguish the directive intellectual sciences from the critical. Step 1 would have rejected only corporeal products while step 2 affirmed intellectual products. Thus the incoherence is egregious and the stranger himself has shown us how he could easily have made these divisions without tangling his distinctions. Why does he refer to the corporeal/ intellectual distinction but not use it—especially when it would have saved him from incoherence? This issue will reappear in an intensified way within the next passage discussed.

3. After step 5, where herds are distinguished from individuals, Socrates' namesake, young Socrates, proposes that the next division be between human herds and animal herds, and is rebuked by the stranger for impatiently cutting off a small part (herds of humans) from the whole (herds) rather than gradually narrowing the field by progressive symmetrical divisions (262a-b). However, the stranger has evidently not dosed the door on shortcuts altogether, for he soon offers young Socrates the choice of a longer or shorter route by which to track down the statesman. The longer is methodologically more correct, he repeats, but "it is possible to go by whichever of these ways we wish" (265a). Young Socrates understandably would like to see both, so they take first the longer, then the shorter way, and arrive at two apparently quite different conceptions of what the statesman is. Both conceptions start from the assumption that he is a herdsman of human beings, but the way a human being is conceived is very different. According to the more famous shorter way, the lowest genus to which humanity belongs is the genus of two-footed animals, which includes only the two species "humans" and "birds." The difference between the two is that humans have no feathers, so our essence is "featherless biped." According to the longer way, the lowest genus to which humans belong is the genus of tame, hornless, noninterbreeding herd animals, which includes only the two species "humans" and "pigs."^[4] The difference between the two is

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that humans have two legs and pigs have four, so our essence is "two-footed, tame, hornless, noninterbreeding herd animal."

There are at least two problems here. First, the concept "human" is radically different in each case, with "two-footed" acting as the genus in one and the differentia in the other. Second, neither definition is very impressive: according to one, humans are like birds with the feathers missing; according to the other we are like pigs with two legs missing. And yet this method is supposed to lead us to a thing's very essence (285a-b). How does young Socrates react to all this? "The argument was beautifully done," he replies (267a). Perhaps, then, the problems are meant to reflect on young Socrates' lack of conceptual discipline and rigor, rather than on the method itself, for he has also ignored the stranger's recommendation to take the long way rather than the short (262a-c, 265a).^[5]

On the other hand, perhaps he ignored that recommendation because of its conditional character: "It is finest to distinguish what is sought from everything rise immediately, if that correctly reflects how the things really are . . . [But] it is safer to make one's cuts by going down the middle, and one would more likely hit upon the boundaries between the forms" (262b). Conceptual rigor and safety are serious concerns in Plato, as he previously had shown in the Phaedo (101d-e, 105b-c). But if a different approach is called the finest or most beautiful one (

), this is certainly a still more impressive recommendation. Even the safer way is not entirely secure: it is only "more likely" to hit upon the boundaries. Accordingly, while the longer way would be safer, it would not be unreasonable for young Socrates to hope that the stranger has found a valid shortcut, which would, after all, be the "finest" solution. In fact the shorter way does, in effect, "distinguish what is sought from everything else immediately." Since leathered creatures were already ruled out by step 7, all the stranger needs to do is distinguish the resultant species of (featherless) walking animals into two-legged and four-legged (there was no need to exclude feathers again in

[5] Cf. Mitchell Miller, The Philosopher in Plato's Statesman (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980) 21-29.

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step 9, as we saw). Strictly speaking, then, the definition that the shorter way leads to is not "featherless biped" but "two-footed walker." The subsequent reintroduction of the already discarded category of "feathers" can only be regarded as a kind of joke since both divisions begin from the same point, if the shorter way still needed to exclude feathers so would the longer way. The stranger's intention, in this calculated attempt to make the shorter way look less respectable than it really is, is perhaps to reinforce his effort to discourage Theaetetus from looking for shortcuts before he knows how to do so properly. Had Theaetetus been able to demonstrate at this point the ability to see through the stranger's subterfuge, it would have been a different story.

The shorter way turns out to be more convincing than the longer one not only in its one-step definition ("two-footed walker"), but also in its procedure. Since the genus from which the longer and shorter ways began was "walking," it is more natural to use "number of feet" as the differentia, rather than "presence of horns." Nor do the differentiae "horned/hornless" and "interbreeding/noninterbreeding" tell us anything significant about human nature. Even though they are technically more correct because they proceed by more symmetrical cuts, they are artificially devised and are more in the nature of distractions from, rather than concentrations upon, the subject to be defined. (As Socrates points out in the Philebus [17a], it is possible to go from the one to the many too slowly as well as too quickly.) It is perhaps an implied criticism of their artificiality that, when this division is later recalled, the order of these two unilluminating differentiae is reversed (276a)." It is far more natural to define human beings simply as two-footed animals than as two-footed noninterbreeding hornless ones.^[6] Consequently it is the definition of the shorter way that serves as the model for Aristotle, who commonly defines "human being" as the "two-footed animal" (and describes us as "by nature a political [cf. "herd"] animal": Politics 1.2.1253^a 2-3).

If we think of the shorter way in terms of the definition to which it really leads, rather than the redundancy that the stranger tacks onto the end in order to belittle it, then there is a very pointed difference between the results of the two methods. Both take "two-footed" to be the final

[6] Moreover, as Harvey Scodel points out, the longer way "is somewhat perverse in its implication, for it construes human nature . . . as a surd, while that of its four-footed counterparts is rational" (Diaeresis and Myth in Plato's Statesman [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1987] 65). The reference is to the stranger's description of human nature in terms of the square root of 2 at 266b.

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differentia of human beings, but the shorter way uses this to distinguish human beings from all walking animals, whereas the longer way uses it to distinguish us only from pigs. Which of these reflects more accurately the distinctive nature of humanity? It cannot be denied that by dividing walking animals immediately into two-footed and four-looted we produce a seemingly unbalanced division—humans on one side, all four-footed animals on the other—whereas by the longer way the divisions are more evenly balanced at each step. But on the other hand the longer way ignores the distinctive nature of human beings. A rigid insistence on balanced divisions may conform to the principle of relative measure, but violate that of the mean (to anticipate a distinction that the stranger will make later on). It may be that human beings are so distinctive that it makes more sense to speak of humans as one side and all "other animals" as the other, as young Socrates was inclined to do.^[7] The stranger did, it is true, rebuke young Socrates for doing something of the sort when he simply divided "animals" into "humans" and "beasts" (262a if.); however, the problem with young Socrates' immediate division of animals into human and nonhuman is not that it is asymmetrical, but that it gives no indication of what he takes to be the essential nature of humanity. Rather than identifying the determinative differentiation of the species "humanity," young Socrates simply makes the species its own differentia, and so the definition, in its impatience to arrive at the infima species , bypasses the all-important step of discovering what the real differentia of humanity is. Because it dispenses with an identification of the essence, the distinguishing feature of "human being," it fails to give us the very thing that the process of division is supposed to accomplish.

In a later remark the stranger shows that it does in fact make sense to set human beings apart from all other animals as long as we can discern the true differentia: "human beings, who are different and more divine [

] animals, govern the lower species of them" (271e). Later still we are told that the human soul comprises a divine part as well as an animal one (309c), which once again distinguishes us immediately from all other animals.^[8] Although these distinctions make no reference to the number of our legs, it is not unusual to regard our two-

[7] J. B. Skemp points out that "Aristotle argues very thoroughly against any attempt to reach any of the infimae species of the animal world by a process of division by dichotomy [De Partibus animalium , I, 2-4; 642b,5 644b,20]" (Plato's Statesman [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952] 70).

[8] Scodel 57, too, notes that "Plato himself continues to invoke the distinction between man and beast despite the Stranger's stricture (cf. Phil . 16a and Laws 653e)."

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legged posture, which sets our head heavenward, as the outward sign of our distinctive nature:

The name anthrôpos ["human being"] signifies this: that, on one hand, the other animals do not examine, reason about, or look up at what they see; but a human being, as soon as it has seen—and this means viewed—then it looks up and reasons about what it has viewed. Therefore alone of the animals the human being is rightly named anthrôpos , since it looks up [anathrôn ] at what it has viewed [opôpe ].
(Cratylus 399c)

For of all animals man alone stands erect, in accordance with his god-like nature and substance. For it is the function of the god-like to think and to be wise; and no easy task were this under the burden of a heavy body, pressing down from above and obstructing by its weight the motions of the intellect and of the general sense.
(Aristotle, Parts of Animals 4.10.686^a 27-32, rev. Oxford translation)

In challenging young Socrates' division of animals into human and not human, the stranger said that any other intelligent animal, as for example the crane is thought to be, might make an analogous division: for example, cranes and noncranes (263d). The stranger's primary reason for speaking of other intelligent animals here is that only an intelligent animal could make such a distinction; but there is a secondary consequence as well. If there are other intelligent animals, we are prevented from using intelligence or rationality as the obvious differentia by which to distinguish humans from other animals. The crane may be rational too. However, as we soon learn, only humanity is godlike. So there really is a natural differentia by which we might have been distinguished from all other animals immediately. The implication is that what distinguishes us from other animals is not a technical distinction but a difference of value, "divinity." The crucial difference between ourselves and other animals lies not merely in the number of legs, or even the presence of intelligence, but in the divinity of our nature, that is, in the nature of our soul . The longer way, in insisting on equal divisions, may often have to bypass the "fitting" division, as in this case. When it does so, it succeeds according to relative measure but fails according to the mean.

The key to the two preceding problems lies in the difficulty, for the method of division, of taking account of nonvisible marks such as the distinction between body and soul, or between one kind of soul and another. This difficulty stems from the method's inability to recognize

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differences among levels of being that imply differences of value. Such differences are alluded to even though they are never addressed. The stranger said that "the science of the king is never one that supervises soulless things, like architecture, but it is nobler [

] in that it always exercises its power among living beings and in relation to just these" (261c-d). Later, when he draws the distinction between "more divine" and "lower" souls (271e), it is clearer still that any adequate account would have to make distinctions of value. Since the first part of the dialogue defined statesmanship as the nourishing of human beings the way shepherds take care of their flock, we might have expected the concept of value to enter into the notion of "nourishing." However, the stranger never inquires into the meaning of "nourishing," but only into the meaning of "human being." Later he calls attention to this as a failure, saying that their investigation did not specify in sufficient detail how the statesman rules (275a). The myth will redress this reticence about nourishment—as will the final part of the dialogue (310a ff.)— explicitly discussing the nourishment of the human herd, both corporeal and otherwise (271e-272c).

In the Sophist the stranger had emphasized that the method abstracts from considerations of value (227a-b), and this turned out to be why the dialogue's eventual distinction between the sophist and the philosopher is ultimately unsatisfactory. Here, too, at the end of the longer way, the stranger defends the juxtaposition of pigs and people in the ultimate genus by repeating the prohibition against paying attention to differences of value (266d). But the present dialogue, unlike the Sophist , will violate that principle with increasing frequency throughout its course,^[9] as it replaces the longer way with the shorter. It even begins with an explicit recognition of the importance of value:

SOCRATES : I owe you a great debt of gratitude, Theodorus, for my acquaintance with Theaetetus and also for that with the stranger.

THEODORUS : Soon, Socrates, you will be three times as indebted, when they have worked out the statesman and philosopher for you.

SOCRATES : Indeed? Shall we say that this, my dear Theodorus, is what we heard from our great calculator and geometrician? . . . You are placing equal value on each of these three, who are farther apart in honor than your art of proportions can express.

[9] Cf. Michel Fattal: In the Statesman , "le dialecticien semble par là contrevenir à la règle qu'il s'est pourtant fixée dans le Sophiste en 227a-b et dans le Politique lui-même en 266d, celle qui proscrit l'usage des 'valeurs' comme critère de division" ("La diairesis dans le Politique de Platon" [paper presented at the Third Symposium Platonicum, "Plato's Politicus, " Bristol, August 25-30, 1992] 13).

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THEODORUS : By our god Ammon, Socrates, you have rebuked me well and justly and with presence of mind. (257a-b)

The second and third of the problems we noted regarding the opening division of this dialogue may be indirect confirmations of Socrates' warning: that an attempt to account for distinctively human activities without reference to value is doomed to confronting externals rather than essentials. And in view of Plato's association of the good with the image of the sun, there may be an oblique reference to value as well in Theodorus's oath by Ammon, who, in his characteristic of Ammon-Ra, was the Egyptian sun god.

As I have suggested above, the three dialogues of the trilogy may in this way be regarded as an extended application of the method of hypothesis. The Theaetetus , by hypothesizing that knowledge is a species of perception or doxa, foundered in a sea of unacceptable consequences. The Sophist proposed a "higher" hypothesis, that besides the individuals that comprise the world of perception and doxa, there are also universal kinds. This higher hypothesis resolved some of the aporiae of the Theaetetus (regarding the nature of knowledge and of epistemic logos), but led to unacceptable consequences of its own—an inability to find the true differentia between the sophist and the philosopher. Finally the Statesman will present us with a higher hypothesis still, that of the mean, which implies value and the good. On the basis of this hypothesis the residual problems of the Sophist (e.g., the essential difference between philosophy and sophistry) will be more convincingly resolved. The doctrine of the mean will not be introduced explicitly until 283d if., but it has been present (in different ways) by indirection in Socrates' opening remarks about correct proportion and in the stranger's problematic opening diaeresis.^[10]