PLATO’S DIFFERENT DEVICEsuch a balance, it indicates Plato’s vision of a complex unity, a oneness
that embraces a measured plurality.
The Philebus not only introduces new dialectical methods but en-
acts them. The dialogue incorporates both of the new methods that
demand repetition and promise reconciliation: the “heavenly gift” of
division and classifi cation and the “different device” of the fourfold on-
tology. When I speak of method, I do not mean it in the sense of a
modern, scientifi c method, but in the original Greek sense of “being
on or along a road or pathway.”^1 By retracing the pathway along which
this dialogue travels, we can fi nd the hidden unity among its diverse
topics. This dialogue both analyzes and practices the two new methods
through a special brand of language. As Gadamer puts it:
The special importance of the Philebus lies precisely in the fact that
the dialectic discussed in it becomes aware of itself in the actual
conduct of the Socratic dialogue. The theory of dialectic must be
grasped on the basis of the concrete situation of coming to a shared
understanding.^2The Philebus contains a signifi cant refl exivity; it does what it says.^3
Platonic refl exivity is by no means exclusive to the Philebus, of
course. Another example occurs in the Parmenides, which I will use, in
this essay, as a critical foil to the Philebus. In the Parmenides, the self-
refl ective dialectic is problematic in that it leads only to a dichotomy
between the one and the many, an unworkable “either/or” between mo-
nism and pluralism. Without excluding other readings, I shall, for the
purposes of this essay, view the Parmenides as a via negative, a demonstra-
tion of the paradoxes resulting from the absence of the right kind of
repetition which would lead to reconciliation. But while I think Plato
wants his audience to take such problems seriously, the negative self-
refl ections of the Parmenides do not necessarily represent a conclusion,
but rather a provocative exploration.^4 The Philebus, I will argue, reopens
the exploration, “repeats” the Parmenides—with a difference.
In both dialogues, self-refl ection makes philosophical language
itself the object of analysis. But the role of language differs in the two
dialogues and even changes within each one. In the Parmenides, in
which the elder master challenges a young and naive Socrates, discur-
sive classifi cation leads to apparently insurmountable contradictions
and polarities. On the one hand, we fi nd the eternal, the constant and
the knowable, all in the realm of being; on the other hand lie the tem-
poral, the particular, the changeable, all in the realm of becoming. In