PLATO’S DIFFERENT DEVICEmakes them join the ranks of “the most incompetent and at the same
time newcomers in such discussions” for attempting to prove that “the
most unlike thing is of all things most like the most unlike” (13d). Plato
thus recollects for the reader Zeno’s fi rst hypothesis in the Parmenides.
But whereas the Parmenides ends in utter ajporiva, the Philebus seeks a
complex solution to the one/many problem. Socrates now accepts that
“all together, the branches of knowledge will seem to be a plurality, and
some will seem quite unlike others” (13e9– 10). If he excluded this pos-
sibility, he would not be “a worthy partner in a discussion” (14a1). Plural-
ity, both in word and thought, must be fully acknowledged. Signifi cantly,
the speakers here for the fi rst time agree on something: to examine all
the variations of each candidate (14b). The turn toward the plurality
within each unity anticipates the new methods to come.
Now turning full-face to the “amazing” or “wondrous” (qaumasto;n;
14c9), even “monstrous” (tevrata; 14e) statement that the many is one
or the one many, Socrates again stresses, as he did at the start of the
Parmenides, that to say a produced thing is both many and one does not
raise problems, but to say so of a non-perishable thing does: “Zealous
concern with divisions of these unities and the like gives rise to con-
troversy” (15a6– 7). Socrates here gives man, ox, beauty, and the good
as examples of this constant category of the forms, whereas the young
Socrates of the Parmenides had doubts whether to assert forms for the
fi rst two. Perhaps this shift evidences Parmenides’ prediction that when
philosophy takes hold of Socrates, he “will not despise any of these ob-
jects then” (Parmenides 130e). As we will see, Plato in the Philebus shows
Socrates the pathway home, toward the oijkov~, “downwards” from the
ideal One to the world of plurality in which we dwell.
The Philebus runs right into the tangle of problems presented
in the Parmenides: How can each unit remain fi rmly itself while being
found in an indeterminate number of particulars? Does each unit re-
main “always one and the same” but become “dispersed and multiplied,”
or does it somehow stay whole but become “entirely separated from it-
self” (15b– c)? Yet the same problem receives a different treatment here:
“It is these problems of the one and the many... that cause all sorts of
diffi culties [ajporiva, literally “blocked passage”] if they are not prop-
erly settled, but promise progress [eujporiva, “good passage”] if they
are” (15c).^30 The reader again hears Plato’s implicit criticism of, and
improvement upon, the method of Zeno and Parmenides. As Dorothea
Frede says, “The Socrates of the Philebus has clearly profi ted from the
lesson he was taught by old Parmenides.”^31 The approach here differs in
the interlocutors’ explicitness about the problem, their patience in enu-