The One and the Concept: On Hegel's Reading of Plato's Parmenides

AuthorAllegra de Laurentiis
PositionAssistant Professor, State University of New York at Stony Brook
Pages61-79

Page 61

Introduction

Hegel's interpretation of Plato's Parmenides during the early Jena period focuses largely on its methodological value as a radical exercise in negative skepticism, and, as such, as introduction to proper philosophizing. In his Relation of Skepticism to Philosophy, for example, Hegel characterizes Plato's dialogue as exhibiting "the negative side of the knowledge of the absolute" (die negative Seite der Erkenntnis des Absoluten)1 According to this interpretation, the dialogue's role in the history of philosophy is twofold. On the one hand, the negative dialectic of ideas that constitutes its backbone would exhibit the inadequacy of the understanding to provide true cognition. By showing that concepts (here understood as "determinations of the understanding [Verstandes-bestimmungen]") like similar and dissimilar, older and younger, continuous and discrete, or, more crucially, same and other, are intimately connected with their respective contradictory, Plato would demonstrate that to deny or attribute these opposites simultaneously to "finite" or "badly infinite," that is, non-self-reflexive,2 objects of thinking leads to utter unintelligibility. On the other hand, Hegel believes also that the dialogue works as indirect proof of the validity of a different cognitive mode-namely, reason-that Plato intends to display and account for in a separate trilogy: the Sophistes, the Politicos, and, in definitive form,Page 62 the Philosophos.3 The Parmenides would then tacitly imply that "truly infinite," self-reflexive objects of thinking may actually be made intelligible precisely by the dialectic contradictions of which the dialogue shows only the negative results. On this interpretation, the dialogue would indirectly suggest that self-reflexive objects are knowable if they are being thought as dialectical unities of opposites.

In this early interpretation, then, Hegel views Plato's Parmenides essentially as negative reflection only paving the way to a positive or speculative science of the absolute. But already in 1807, his well-known remarks on this "greatest work of art of ancient dialectic" in the Preface to the Phenomenology extol the dialogue as containing more than potentially constructive but actually negative skepticism.

In the following development of Hegel's thinking, as attested by his commentaries on this and other Platonic dialogues in the Greater and Lesser Logic4 and in the lectures on ancient philosophy, the Parmenides appears to approximate the status of prima philosophia speculativa. Hegel sees now in the dialectic of the ideas exhibited in it an embryonic form of authentic speculative thinking.5 Thus, he no longer reads Plato's text as cathartic training for a future science but as the historically first insight into the intrinsic dialectic of the Absolute itself.

Hegel's mature interpretation may at first appear to be untenable on both textual and historical grounds. What I argue in the following tries to dispel some of these doubts.

As a preliminary consideration, it may be stressed that Hegel's reading is at least consistent with his own theory of the history of philosophy. This finds a brief, explicit formulation in the 1820 Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy: "According to this idea I now maintain that the succession of the systems of philosophy in history is the same as the succession in the logical derivation of the conceptualPage 63 determinations of the Idea."6 Since the logical series of the determinations of the Idea consists of the successive sublation of each in the next, so does also the series of the systematic principles (Grundbegrijfe) of philosophy in history. But the systematic principle of Plato's philosophy is the idea. Its implicitly speculative character consists in its being at once purely intelligible and the most real. The Platonic idea, then, is present in sublated form in the subsequent principles of the philosophies of the Middle Ages and of modernity, including their latest embodiment in Hegel's own theory.

But a sympathetic reading of Hegel's mature interpretation of Plato's Parmenides requires more. The main task is to clarify the nature of the Parmenides' main topic. This requires showing that, contrary to traditional readings, it is legitimate to interpret the underlying subject matter of the fictional Parmenides' speech in the dialogue as being quite different from the subject matter at the center of the historical Parmenides' poem About Nature.7 While the poet's subject matter may be thought of as a non-reflexive, perhaps "badly infinite" object of the understanding, the philosopher in the dialogue appears to be rather concerned with a self-reflexive, "genuinely infinite" object of reason.8 In other words, on this reading the subject matter of Parmenides' speech in the dialogue is not the lonely, impenetrable Being of the historical Parmenides' poem, but rather the unity of mind or Ego.

Most of the interpretive tradition, however, with the notable exception of Hegel,9 has taken for granted precisely this identification of the dialogue's topic with the topic of the pre-Socratic poem.Page 64

In defense of Hegel's interpretation, I argue in the following: (1) that there is no unequivocal textual basis for identifying the Being of Parmenides' poem with the One of Plato's dialogue; (2) that a comparison of semantic and syntactic features of the poem on the one hand, and of the dialogue on the other, speaks against such identification; and (3) that there are serious philosophic reasons not to go along with the traditional reading.

Taken together, these considerations actually show that the dialogue as a whole acquires intelligibility and depth when it is understood as a first attempt at grasping the internally contradictory nature of what Hegel would call the Concept.

Hegel, of course, does not claim that this dialogue (or any other Platonic dialogue, for that matter) contains a theory of the speculative Concept. But he does explicate the discussion of contradictions that forms its cornerstone as the earliest insight into the nature of the Concept-though still in the epistemic or psychological embodiment typical of the "childhood of philosophizing."10

On the Hegelian reading, the dialogue does not exhibit "external dialectic," that is, a sophistic exercise in futility. Plato's Parmenides actually loses its infamous obscurity-often attributed in twentieth century literature to its allegedly parodic character11-if it is recognized that the contradictions being discussed are not intended as determinacies of abstract pure being but as determinations of a more concrete essence. If the contradictions are understood as pertaining to a subject matter (potentially, to a subject) much different from Being (the "to be" [einai] of the pre-Socratic poem) their discussion sheds its appearance of a virtuoso display of pointless dialectic. The dialogue then acquires the dimension of authentic pursuit of truth through dialectic reason, because its author recognizes the subject matter to be potentially an identity of identity and difference a recognition that Plato abandons in the end, leading even this dialogue to the customary aporetical conclusion.

After sketching briefly the trajectory of my argument, I analyze in Section I a passage of the Parmenides that is essential to my thesis. This is the pivotal passage in which Plato introduces, through Parmenides' voice, the subject matter of the dialectical investigation to follow.Page 65

At the beginning of his main speech,12 the old Parmenides singles out the notion of emautos (myself) as the field of inquiry in which to challenge the dialectical skill of his younger audience. From a Hegelian perspective, "myself can be taken here as psychological instantiation of Plato's philosophic concept of idea as that to which belongs the highest degree of reality. To frame this in terms of Hegel's Logic, one could say that Plato's emautos embodies in antiquity, at the logical level of being, the notion of what would later find expression, at the logical level of essence, in Descartes' res cogitans or in Spinoza's causa sui. The immediate certainty of the Cartesian substance-"I exist"-is due precisely to the fact that, in and for this substance, thought and existence coincide. Spinoza's substance is such as to be inconceivable unless existent.13 If, in conformity with Hegel's theory of the history of philosophy, his own concept of the Concept is a sublation of logical and historical predecessors, then the Concept will contain also a version of Plato's original conception of idea. Thus, the fact that the core of a Platonic dialogue consists of the denial and attribution of contradictory pairs of ideas to one and the same subject matter loses, at least for a Hegelian reader, its outrageous character.

I Analysis: With What Must Plato's Dialectic Begin?

In the first part of the Parmenides,14 Plato examines the relations between the ideas (ideai), forms (eide) or kinds (gene), on the one hand, and the sensible things ("the visibles") that participate in the ideas, on the other. In the second part,15 Plato investigates, through the character of the old Parmenides, the relations among the ideas themselves.

In the opening,16 young Socrates boldly declares that the notion of a sensible thing's participation (methexis) in different, even contradictory ideas, for instance similarity and dissimilarity, is logically un-problematic: after all, each sensible thing can be like others in somePage 66 respect and yet unlike them in some other respect. It is equally intelligible, almost a matter of course, that all sensible things (panto) may be one entity from one perspective (one world) but many from another: every thing and all things can rationally be said to "partake of one-ness" as much as "of multitude."17...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT