MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFFwhile technically brilliant, actually puts itself at risk by considering only
the extremes and missing the revisions of being and of speaking that
would defi ne the space in between.
Socrates is daunted by this enterprise, and Parmenides says he is
“frightened of setting out, at my age, to traverse so vast and hazardous
a sea” (137b). Indeed, it is such a sea: in considering the consequences
of whether there is or is not “the one itself,” Parmenides ends by frag-
menting any unity of meaning or speaking—a deeply ironic position
for one who wants to assert precisely that unity. The discourse ceases
to be a dialogue and becomes an extremely dense, esoteric series of
paradoxes in which repetition only confuses the issue and distinctions
collapse as soon as they are made.^21 This sea of lovgoi culminates in utter
equivocation:
It seems that, whether there is or is not a one, both that one and the
others alike are and are not, and appear and do not appear to be, all
manner of things in all manner of ways, with respect to themselves
and to one another. (166b)Yet at the same time we learn, “If there is no one, there is nothing
at all” (166b). We are left blocked in a state of ajporiva when the dialogue
concludes simply, “Most true.” One is tempted to say that since there is
no coherence to the discourse, there is no coherence to the meaning
either. Of course, that may be exactly the point, intended to provoke the
reader to take the problem further. At any rate, this enigmatic language
never questions the stark binary oppositions between “is” and “is not,”
between the one and the many, and never investigates a middle way
between them. The Parmenides as a whole discusses and demonstrates
both the one and the many but without any revisions that might promise
to reconcile them.
With the Philebus, the reader feels in surer hands from the start.
Socrates is reassuringly back in control, here in his familiar role of
older, wiser mentor of younger participants.^22 Strikingly, this is the only
dialogue typically regarded as late in which Plato casts Socrates in the
leading role; the dialogue thus yokes together the Socratic search for
a specifi cally human good with the Platonic interest in dialectics, on-
tology, and methodology. Yet the dialogue that ends in agreement be-
gins with competition: starting from a preestablished rivalry between
intelligence and pleasure as the good, Socrates repeatedly cautions and
chastises Protarchus. Socrates himself sets up the opposition by saying
that “knowledge [frovnhsi~] wins over pleasure, and pleasure loses” if
he can prove his point (12a), and that he will need “different armament”