MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFFthat by showing the impossibility of plurality Zeno allies himself with his
teacher Parmenides, but he fails to ask in what sense Zeno means the
terms “things,” “many,” “like,” and “unlike.” Socrates does, however, im-
mediately distinguish between the plurality of things and the oneness
of forms: “What he is proving is that something is many and one, not that
unity is many or that plurality is one” (129d).^18 But it is this very distinc-
tion that gets him into trouble, because he cannot adequately revise it.
An absence of careful revisions leads to a polarization of the positions.
When questioned by Parmenides, Socrates asserts he is certain that
there is a form of beauty and goodness; “puzzled” about whether there is
a form of man, fi re, or water, and then about “hair or mud or dirt or any
other trivial and undignifi ed objects” (130c), he says at fi rst a form for
them would be absurd, but then wonders whether “what is true in one
case may not be true in all” (130d). Socrates continues: “Then, when
I have reached that point, I am driven to retreat, for fear of tumbling
into a bottomless pit of nonsense” (130d). Parmenides replies that this
is “because you are still young... and philosophy has not yet taken hold
of you so fi rmly as I believe it will someday” (130e). Socrates obviously
cannot reconcile “just the things we see” with the forms we know, the
many with the one, the particular with the universal. His uncertainty
shows in his language itself: he does not know what to say and fears the
possibility of saying nothing at all.
Socrates does not challenge Parmenides on the “part theory” of
how the many things share in the one form (131a– b), on the appropri-
ateness of the analogy between the day and the sail (131b– c), or on the
“third man” argument. If one looks at largeness itself and the many
large things “in the same way in your mind’s eye, will not yet another
unity make its appearance—a largeness by virtue of which they all ap-
pear large?” (132a). Both the problem of divisibility and that of the in-
fi nite regress result from thinking of the forms as like sensible objects;
yet thinking of them in the opposite way, as completely abstract and
removed, proves even worse. Socrates accepts, again without question,
that “no such real being exists in our world,” since “how could it then be
just by itself?” (133c). As illustrated by the example about “mastership
itself” and “slavery itself,” in contrast to any particular master or slave
(133e), the forms of that “other world” of the gods have no signifi cance
for ours, and we cannot know the gods’ world nor they ours.
As a result of these diffi culties, “the hearer is perplexed,” left in a
state of utter ajporiva (135a). Socrates notes the strangeness of an argu-
ment denying the gods knowledge, yet makes no move to criticize it
(134e). Parmenides does not insist on the truth of this argument, but