ICOP 2018 Proceedings

Polis, Cosmopolis and Globalisation

Michalis Tegos

The Battle between Gods and Giants

Plato between Parmenides and Heraclitus
ABSTRACT: In the middle of the Platonic Sophist, the Eleatic Stranger narrates
the story of a long-standing battle between two warring factions, reminiscent of the
Hesiodic Theogony. This passage, disguised in myth, is one of Plato’s most direct
confrontations with Pre-Socratic philosophy after the Parmenides. In this version of
the Gigantomachia, Gods and Giants are presented as philosophical camps battling
through logoi, arguments. The Gods represent the friends of forms, idealists of Eleatic
origin, and the Giants, friends of the earth, materialists, supporters of Heraclitian
ideas. The Eleatic Stranger takes it upon himself to respond to them both, refuting
and reconciliating refined versions of their respective theories, for the purpose of
his argument, in what he calls the ‘children’s plea’. That is, not to have to choose
between the two but keep both, as the child would respond when asked, proceed by
reconciliating the two positions: being is both one and multiple, as much static as
dynamic. The philosophical parricide, the attack on Parmenides, that occurs in the
midst of this passage, is very revealing as to how Plato attempts the synthesis of Eleatic
and Ionian ideas - Parmenides and Heraclitus - in the formation of his own thought.
This passage, we shall argue, just as a very similar one that runs parallel, regarding
the conversation with the fluxists in the Theaetetus, is instrumental to understanding
the argument in the Sophist, the trajectory of Plato’s thought, but most importantly the
magnitude of the synthesis of Pre-Socratic and Socratic philosophy that is attempted.

Keywords: Plato, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Gigantomachia, Dynamis

1. Plato between Parmenides and Heraclitus

What follows is a series of reflections on Plato and Pre-Socratic philosophy, occasioned
by a reading of the myth of the Gigantomachia in the Sophist. After few preliminary
comments on the relation between philosophy and the history of philosophy, we shall
proceed to discuss the problem as described by Plato, with regards to his predecessors, and
the way he proposes out of these aporias. By describing the opposition he constructs out
of the great tendencies in Ancient Greek thought, we shall indicate how his philosophy is
a synthesis, a weaving and a surpassing of this very opposition.
Plato presents positions meant to be reconciled and reasoned with; not an accurate
 THE BATTLE BETWEEN GODS AND GIANTS 237

depiction, no history of philosophy. In the Sophist no other names but Parmenides

and Xenophanes are mentioned. It is the creative use of the philosopher, meant to
schematize, and surpass the problems of his predecessors, about being, which resulted
in aporias, puzzlement, the old ones telling us ‘myths as if we were children’. Logoi
that say non-being as being; poems and stories, sophistry and lies.
We encounter, perhaps for the first time, a vast discrepancy between philosophy and
history of philosophy as it ought to be – or - as it became. To begin, we must believe
that Plato had better knowledge of the Pre-Socratics than we do today – after all, we
have only fragments. This sheds a different light on his, conscious, lack of precision.
His allusions to the ancients are often concealed, obscured, striped down to basics
or plainly misrepresented and schematized, reduced to simple binary oppositions. He
appears to forget and pretends not to know; he mythologizes. Yet he is often much
closer to the essence of the teachings of the teachers he does not name. He respects
schools of thought – like his own; discipline, discipleship; Parmenides and the Eleatics.
Aristotle’s analyses and exegeses, his urge to precision and the literality of the word, is
often, on the other hand, rather hasty. He wants to be objective, the first great historian
of philosophy, and thus show this difference – but, that being said, his writing is often
spiteful, wanting to prove this point and less clear and straightforward about his
misrepresentations.1
Perhaps this misrepresentation is essential. The paternal law must be to some level
necessarily misunderstood, misrepresented. The son’ s existence and flourishing is only
possible at some distance from the paternal shadow. This distance is gained precisely by
this misrepresentation; the father is lured into hostile territory; encountered, encircled
and defeated in the field of battle, in his own game. In between the father and the son,
the master and the student, progress in philosophy occurs by way of parricide.2
To be sure, the history of philosophy referred to in the Sophist, the Theaetetus
and the Phaedo (the famous intellectual biography of Socrates departing from natural
history, Phaedo 96a) – is undertaken with specific purposes: Not to present the positions
of predecessors, the entire ‘panorama of Greek philosophy’ as a recent paper argued;
but to place the argument – describe an opposition which is deployed to be surpassed.
To indicate and highlight the reconciliation, difference and superiority, the rupture that
his own enterprise represents.
Not only in the Gigantomachia, where the names are simply left alluded, or where
the confrontation occurs by proxy, but also in that the reader is informed that the
positions presented are admittedly watered down, refined, so that they can be reasoned
with – as they themselves, the camps represented, would not accept the terms of the

1
See the example of the self-moving soul which he attributes to Alcmaeon against Plato, recently found by
scholarship, e.g. Jaap Mansfield’s ‘Plato and Alcmaeon on soul’, to be false.
2
As opposed perhaps to religion where progress occurs by way of sacrifice of the son. The myth of the
Statesman is another parricide, of Cronos by Zeus, but here God abandons man; and because of this, man
is led by necessity to laws and government, to freedom.
238 MICHALIS TEGOS

discussion - the terms of an opposition deployed to be surpassed as an opposition.

In the Theaetetus Socrates advises that, while this lack of precision and careful
examination is not rude, and too much of precision is unfreedom, it is nevertheless
sometimes necessary (Theaetetus 184c). But in the Sophist the Stranger could not have
said it better: We are not interested in the accurate depiction of these opinions, neither
consistently nor faithfully, but to make them possible to discuss with; reasonable - “we
are not really interested in this, for we are seeking the truth.” (Sophist 246d).3
The history of philosophy may have to do with this accurate depiction; what was
said, how it was said. Whereas philosophy seeks what is useful to the formation and
movement of thought. But every philosophy, worthy of the name, is both. Every
philosophy negates and preserves, preserves as negated, all of its predecessors inside of
it, the whole history of philosophy, ‘lifts its entire mass in every step’. In its appearing,
it conserves and recasts, as negated, surpassed as an opposition - ‘sublated’ - the
struggle of forces that brought it to be.4
Against, on the one, Pre-Socratic natural philosophy and on the other, sophists,
with their ethics, virtue and lies. We cannot explain the appearance or the significance
of Plato’s philosophy without taking into consideration this dual battlefront waging in
its interior - forging the path in between. Plato’s myths conceal and reveal too much
at once; the Sophist is emblematic in tracing this double tension and interweaving a
way out. And this way, the innovations proposed in this very dialogue gain much more
momentum when seen in light of the history of philosophy - the concepts adopted and
expanded by Aristotle, orienting philosophy and science thereafter. The Sophist truly
stands between two eras.5

2. ‘They told us myths’

The accounts of Plato’s life tell us he had two early teachers of philosophy even

3
In the Protagoras the sophists are also mocked of such a tendency for precision, for ‘hair-splitting’, yet
it is another point of discrepancy between the word and the thing, that will reach its climax on the verdict
between the sophist and the philosopher.
4
“The universal constitutes the foundation; the advance is therefore not to be taken as a flowing from one
other to the next other. In the absolute method the notion maintains itself in its otherness. The universal in
its particularisation, in judgment and reality; at each stage of its further determination it raises the entire
mass of its preceding content, and by its dialectical advance it not only does not lose anything or leave
anything behind, but carries along with it all it has gained, and inwardly enriches and consolidates itself.”
Hegel G. F. W., The Science of Logic, The Absolute Idea §1809.
5
See Diog. Laert. (III.8) vs. Aristotle. For the role and value of the Sophist; dialogue on being; peri ontos;
the relation to the Parmenides, the Theaetetus and the Statesman. The plan of the Sophist; its twists, turns
and notorious difficulties; the way the tree of divisions is deployed, the interruption of the method with the
myth, its return to the topic – are not to be discussed in this context; that is, with relation to Pre-Socratic
philosophy. We shall try to extricate from Plato’s accounts some of his views regarding his predecessors
and how he attempts to synthesize them. The radical solutions and conception of logos that Plato proposes
in this dialogue are the topic of an adjacent paper, ‘Why the One is not among the megista gene’.
 THE BATTLE BETWEEN GODS AND GIANTS 239

before meeting Socrates; the Heraclitian Cratylus and the Eleatic Hermogenes. How he
grew out of Socrates, Being Parmenidian and from there, Becoming Heraclitian more
and more. Retaining and reformulating however to the end, a theory of forms; eternal
yet communicable and knowable ideas, which relies heavily on the Eleatic methods and
conceptions about ideas – delving all the more to Pythagorean metaphysics. Diogenes
Laertius recounts that Plato philosophizes the sensible according to Heraclitus, the
noumenal according to Pythagoras and politics according to Socrates. Hegel says
that Plato successfully reconciles the four great sources of Ancient Greece – Eleatic
dialectics, Ionian natural philosophy, Socratic ethics and Pythagorean metaphysics.6
Socrates represents a rupture, in the life of Plato, but also of philosophy; rupture
with natural philosophy (and tragic poetry, for Plato, as the myth goes); not interested
in the study of nature and the sensible, turning philosophy inwards, towards ethics and
politics. But this rupture is encompassed, highlighted and surpassed within the work
of Plato; which is the true rupture (see peri fyseos istoria). One may say Platonism
is a series of parricides. One must recount the story of the dream of Socrates the day
before meeting Plato, as mentioned in the anecdotes, a swan placed in Socrates hands,
opening its wings, flying away, farther and higher than the master could ever imagine.7
Our purpose here: not to retrace a story that is - more or less - known to all, narrate
one more ‘story for children’; but to place it in context so that it sheds light to the
surpassing and the formation, the movement that occurs in Plato’s own thought. The
relation of Plato to the Pre-Socratics, and this parricide, the attack on the Parmenidian
position, is of great significance for the development of the Platonic theory of forms,
the idea of dialectics, as well as for the rupture; the total reconfiguration for philosophy
thereafter.8
‘They told us myths’, – the Stranger exclaims; stories ‘as if we were children’
(Sophist 242c): Each portrays Being as One, Two, Multiple; one or many, dualities,
oppositions of hot and cold, wet or dry, stories of friendship, love, war and strife. They
told us stories without caring if the lot of us understand or make sense. They cared only
for finishing their thought, to seem consistent to themselves. They obscure being, but
most importantly, their accounts are not verifiable, accountable to check and reason;
they are one-sided logoi, opinions, not Logos – which is universal (communicable and

6
Hegel G. W. F., Lectures on Platonic Philosophy 1825-6.
7
For the significnce of dreams, the swan as a symbol of Apollo and divinity, see Westerink L. G. Anonymous
Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy 1.20-46.
8
Plato’s dialogues display several visions of dialectics; both division and recollection; from the many,
ascending to the one, descending back to the multiple (back into the cave to free the other prisoners).
Diairesis and synagoge, symploke; where the myth usually plays an instrumental role between them –
this view of dialectics is prevalent in dialogues from the Phaedrus to the Republic and the Sophist. In
searching for the sophist hiding in the darkness of non-being and for the statesman, the royal art of arts in
the following dialogue, the stranger interrupts the diairesis tree – the division, with the myth. Both myths,
the Gigantomachia and the myth of the reign of Cronos are related, familiar and discussed by bith Homer
and Hesiod. As we shall see further down, Plato attempts a reconcilliation.
240 MICHALIS TEGOS

verifiable, the science of which will be established).

We cannot say with certainty who these philosophers are; Pherecydes with the three
archai – Zeus, Chronos and Gaia, Archelaos, with the hot and cold – (being born in the
between) are mentioned by the commentators.
There are also some Ionian and Sicilian muses (Sophist 242c-243a); those who say
being is both one and many. The muses, the strictest of which, Heraclitus, for whom
strife is harmony, comes from the opposites, and is always like this (B51). The softer
of which, Empedocles, for whom it is sometimes this way and sometimes otherwise
– four elements, circulating in between strife and friendship, νεῖκος καί φιλία (frag.
17, 7-8).
Those who say that being is one and non-being is not – are of course the Eleatics.
The ‘great Parmenides’ – Παρμενίδης ὁ μέγαs (Sophist 237a); when we were children,
used to testify against the existence of non-being. Resolutely dealt with in the following
section of the argument; the parricide, which begins by suggesting that non being
somehow is and being somehow is not (241d). What ensues is the refutation of the
Parmenidian position; that being is one, being and logos is one; to think and to be is
the same, being is and non-being is not.

Digression on the Parricide, the One and the Whole;

For Plato, the One is already Two; (Every city is at least two cities, as Socrates
says in the Republic (422e)), for to say one at all we are already in the two; we have
abdicated from monism and have admitted plurality; one (being) and one said. One
being with two names and hence two beings? Two names for one being? And is this
two also not composed of ones? Besides, if it is truly one, either being and word are
identical (and the lie does not exist), or nothing can be said of it (all is lie). In the
Parmenides the one is ineffable. In the Theaetetus the one cannot stand holy, immobile
and knowing nothing. Two is already Three – as the two must always be united by a
third, and so on.
Both Parmenides and Heraclitus posit that Λόγος testifies the unity of the One
and the Whole, ‘ἕν τό πᾶν’, ‘ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστίν ἕν πάντα’ (Heraclitus B50) –
everything/the whole is one. But Plato explores the untenability of the One and the
whole. In the Parmenides (142d) -What is whole; whatever is one and has parts, a
contradiction. In the Theaetetus Socrates questions the difference between whole
and set –πᾶν καί σύνολον; which is a unity of multiples, or a multiple composed of
ones, parts; of which none is absent (Theaetetus 201-205a). The truly one, ἀληθῶς
ἕν, the whole is indivisible, whereas the synolon is divisible– a collection of parts, a
multiplicity counted as one.
In the Sophist, the One (ἕν τό πᾶν, whole- τό πᾶν) is indivisible, whereas the whole
(set-σύνολον- τά πάντα) is divisible (from now on τό πᾶν -τό ὅλον, the whole/ τά πάντα
- everything, all); – the one is different from the whole, everything, the all is more
than one, πλέονα δή τά πάντα ἑνός ἔσται (Sophist 245b); the multiplicity of its parts is
 THE BATTLE BETWEEN GODS AND GIANTS 241

more than one; the one differs from, is outside of itself; the one would be only the one
of the name (244d). Thus, if being is One, it is not whole; which is contradictory, as
whatever was made was made whole (245d). Whole, we saw above, is that of which
no part is absent. Thus lacking itself; - ἑαυτοῦ στερούμενον, ἐνδεές - withdrawn from
itself, being would no longer be (245c). The one would be simply the one of the name;
the presence of the name and the number in logos. A unity, whose operation is to gloss
over a fundamental inconsistency.
Whereas the second argument uses a fragment from the Parmenidian poem (where
the perfection of being is compared to a spherical whole (DK 28B8.43-45)) literally to
(mis-re)present a contradiction between number and concept on behalf of Parmenides,
the first argument reveals a contradiction in the relation between being and the word.
Number serves as indication of being, presence, in logos –when we say non-being: τό
μή ὄν – is already one, singular and hence is already. Non-beings are already multiple.
Language, logos, begins to appear as the being of non-being – caught between the
name of being and the being of the name; the word, the number and the thing, we
appear to be in puzzlement about being.9
Plato seems intent to show how the one and the multiple is a false dilemma of Pre-
Socratic thought. It is not an issue of one over many or many over one, but perhaps
neither as Heidegger suggests, ‘to show that unity is an operation necessary and co-
present with the multiple.’10 Diareseis (one into two) and synagoge (two into one),
operations of unity and multiplicity are indeed fundamental to the dialectical method.
Rather we should go further, in the words of Badiou, there is no One, only the count-
as-one; as one, as Plato says, solely of the name. There is only ‘oneness’ (Lacan), the
one of an operation; the way something is counted as existent, as something, present
and represented in the structure; included, in the state of the situation.
That is not to say that, for Plato, the One does not exist (in the Parmenides the
One is and is not); but simply that it is not accessible, representable, as the object
of discourse, of logos about essence - the truly One, the agathon, God, is ἐπέκεινα
τῆς οὐσίας (Republic 509b). Badiou’s Being and Event opens as follows: ‘Since its
Parmenidian organization, ontology has built the portico of its ruined temple on the
following experience: what presents itself is essentially multiple, what presents itself
is essentially one’… ‘The arcana of the one and the multiple in which philosophy
is born and buried, phoenix of its own sophistic consumption’ to which the Platonic
Parmenides represents the revolving doors.11 It is worth noticing, the north frieze over
the portico of this ruined temple, of the Siphnian treasury in Delphi, built around 525

9
The ruin of the relation between the One and the Whole will prove itself fundamental later on, when non-
being, and generally negation, will have to be thought of as difference instead of mere opposition. Non-
being is ‘infinitely more’ than being, in that difference to being is an open set. Hegel would say, true infinity
instead of the spurious infinity of opposition.
10
Heidegger M. Plato’s Sophist, p. 320.
11
Badiou A., Being and Event, p.23.
242 MICHALIS TEGOS

BC, which is said to have been visible from the sacred way, gloriously depicted an
image of the Gigantomachia.
Having, through the diairetic tree, reached the art of creating idols, phantasms
and imitations, the being of false word and lies, that is to say, the being of (false)
opinions, non-being appears as present, as being. Upon encountering the being of lies,
the division is interrupted by the myth.

3. The Gigantomachia.
The battle between Gods and Giants (Sophist 246a -249d)
In the Theogony, Hesiod describes the Ἑκατόγχειρες, children of Ouranos and Gaia,
battling on the side of Zeus and the Olympians, throwing rocks at the Titans, which
fight on the side of Cronos; this is the famous incident of the Titanomachia.12
In the Sophist Plato describes the Giants, friends of the earth, materialists, of
Ionian resemblance, crude – ἄμουσοι - and bread from the earth (self-taught), carry
in their arms trees and rocks hurling them to the Gods, believing what exists is
only what one can grasp with one’s hands. They identify οὐσία with σῶμα, body,
something is if it offers resistance. Being is Becoming, flux, forever changing and
multiple. No stable knowledge can exist as it can stand nowhere, in a world of
constant movement and change. Being (here being-present), essence is for the Giants
corporeal, hence knowledge, if any, is identified with sensation; the sensory data
perceived by the body.
On the other side, the Gods, friends of forms, idealists of Eleatic origin and school,
defending the existence of the incorporeal from an unseen tower high above; Being is,
for the Gods, One, static and eternally same. Knowledge is knowledge of the eternal
forms and their eternal laws. Addressing the Giants, they respond that they do not talk
about being, whose true nature is unchangeable, but about an endless genesis. (In the
Statesman, which follows this dialogue, the political men of the time are portrayed as
centaurs and satyrs (291a))
In the Theaetetus this opposition is conveyed through an allusion to the war of
Troy. On the one Heraclitus, Protagoras, Empedocles, Epicharmus, and their General,
Homer; fluxists – proponents of movement and multiplicity – of a secret doctrine
about roe, flow, (whereby everything flows like in a stream) the stream, - οἷον ῥεύματα
κινεῖσθαι τά πάντα (Theaetetus 152d, 155e-160e), whereby ‘all things are offspring of
flow and motion’. Whereby anything is true and not-true at the same time (with regards
to the Protagorean position that man is measure of all things). Γηγενεῖς, σπαρτοί τε καί
αὐτόχθονες - bread from the earth, self-taught natural philosophers, not belonging to

12
The most celebrated passages where the Titanomachy is mentioned are in Hesiod Theogony (675-715).
However, there are suggestions that Homer’s Iliad (14.201) contains several allusions to this myth. We also
have few comments by Pindar, Xenophanes, later Apollodorus, and a lost epic by the same name.
 THE BATTLE BETWEEN GODS AND GIANTS 243

any school, nor having pupils, spring here and there, not knowing anything about each
other (180c).13
Crude materialists, ἄμουσοι, (Theaetetus 155e-156) the uninitiated, for whom there
exists only what one can grasp with one’s hands, what can be perceived by sensation,
and this sensation is the source of knowledge, there is only this sensation as knowledge,
in a never resting world. Knowledge is here identified with perception. But these men
are, ‘like maniacs’ - impossible to discuss with, and would not do so, on matters of
knowledge; as even language and propositions slip constantly away with everything.
Always when asked, they reply with their taste for the most obscure fragments which
render everything relative. ‘The water of the sea is the cleanest and the dirtiest; healthy
and life-saving for the fish, while undrinkable and disastrous to humans.’ Heraclitians
(B61) best represent this tendency.14
The refined materialists; Antisthenes’ ‘anti-logic’? Protagoras? Indeed, one Sophist
that Plato held in high esteem – his confrontation with Socrates is one where many
points are conceded - for whom sensation is knowledge, and knowledge is force –
ἰσχύς and hence δύναμις (Protagoras 350e). In the Theaetetus it is with reference to,
or rather, in occasion of the Protagorean theory of perception that the rival camps are
drawn. Democritus, on the other hand, is never mentioned.15
The reference to music and initiation is obviously Pythagorean, for whom
incorporeal entities such as ideas and numbers are the true realm of existence. The
numerical harmonies of the forms are reflected in the heavenly music of the spheres.
For whom initiation and mystical societies were fundamental.
The friends of forms? Socratics? Proclus says Pythagoreans (Comm. Parm. p.
149) – Platonists before Platonism is properly understood? Aristotle, for whom
Platonists are to be lumped with the Pythagoreans, as proponents, through number, of
immobile essences, believes so too. Eleatics? The Megarians, with whom Plato was
in extensive contact at the time? - Euclides, founder of the Megarian School, another
student of Socrates, with Eleatic influences (to whom Plato and others found refuge
after the prosecution of their teacher) may fit the frame; for whom essence is One, but
identified with the Socratic good, and can be said in many ways (Diog.Laert. ii.106,
Schleiermeier, Heidegger). Melissus, whose systematization (and misrepresentation)
probably served Plato and his contemporaries as a gateway to Eleatic philosophy.
Melissus and principally Parmenides, defenders of the stationary whole, defending the

13
In the Theatetetus the battle between idealists and materialists is the background, interrupted by the two
digressions. In the Sophist the battle is posed as interruption in the middle of the search for the Sophist.
14
See also Protagoras and Cratylus. See Gill M. L. Philosophos, p. 85 for the Socrates of the Theaetetus
adopting a position more radical than Heraclitians regarding names and propositions. Even the Heraclitian
doctrine itself keeps changing in the course of the discussion; “Just like their books, they keep moving.”
Theaetetus 179e7-8.
15
See Dies A. Some commentators believe the crude materialists to be the atomists. There seems to be a
concealed rivalry, though anecdotes of Plato requesting for the texts of Democritus to be burned are most
likely false.
244 MICHALIS TEGOS

unity and eternal rest of being, as a lonely Priam on the wall (Theaetetus 183e, Homer,
Iliad Γ171).16
Plato obliges us to think of the bloody fields of the Trojan War under the wall. The
παλaίστρα, an arena for grappling and boxing competition; πάλη through logoi. The tug
of war; and we have been caught in between; the proponents of flow, roe, those who
flow, and those who bring the whole to a stop - between ῥέοντες καί τοῦ ὅλου στασιῶτες
(Theaetetus 181a-b).
Socrates then goes on to refute the identification of sensation and knowledge,
(Theaetetus 186e) After two unsuccessful attempts we arrive at a new definition of
knowledge: True judgement tied with Reason, Logos; – Logos, which is referred to,
as explanation of difference (διαφορότητος ἑρμηνεία – 209a), and identity, alongside
movement and rest - will be taken up in the Sophist.17

4. Being as Dynamis
There is movement in the thought of Plato, towards the dynamism of the final
period – this occurs within the Sophist, or with the Sophist as vehicle. We have been
moving within the Pre-Socratic couples of One/Multiple and Movement/Rest. As in the
Theaetetus, being slowly slides into becoming; in the Sophist, being becomes essence
– οὐσία, οὐσία becomes δύναμις. Late Plato and young Aristotle influencing each other
in the Academy is one possibility (Heidegger). Or, the vocabulary of Aristotelianism
picking up from this late Platonic phase – though castrated (by the son, as Cronos
did to Ouranos for Gaia) – defused; the tendency to understand non-being on the
level of locution, of the word. For Aristotle, non-being is simply the lie - to say being
as non-being and non-being as being, thus displacing what the object of dialectics
is, from being itself to logos (hence his relegation of the dialectic to another form
of argumentation next to rhetoric). Non-being can be said, but we cannot accept its
existence (Aristotle, Metaphysics N 1089).
Indeed towards the end, approaching the locating of the sophist in the darkness
of non-being, the Stranger says the lie is to present non-being as being (263b). The
ontological status of non-being and logos, as great kinds, is to be discussed further
down.
The thought of being is thus accessible through the great kinds and the laws of
their internal composition and communication. Being as participation, something is
what it is, by virtue of its participation in something higher than itself; as the citizen

16
For the role of Melissus in Plato and Aristotle’s reception of Eleatic philosophy, McKirahan, Philosophy
before Socrates, pp. 293-302.
17
Two recent papers highlight this relation between the passages of the Theaetetus and the Sophist:
Nathalie Nercam, ‘La « Guerre d’ Elée » a-t-elle eu « lieu »?’ and Berman Brad, ‘The Secret Doctrine of
the Gigantomachia’, not to mention M. L. Gill’s extraordinary effort to capture the Philosopher in her 2012
book, Philosophos, Plato’s missing dialogue, pp. 76-95, 202-240.
 THE BATTLE BETWEEN GODS AND GIANTS 245

participates in the polis, things in ideas, ideas in higher ideas; it is a profoundly political
vision. Being is not simply presence but presence with the others, communion and
communication, koinonein.
Movement and rest are posited as opposites, as ἐνατιώτατα – that is to say, both
movement and rest participate in being, both are; but they do not participate in each
other (movement is and rest is, but movement is not rest). Being must hence be posited
as a third kind which encompasses them (in a relation), in which they both participate.18
The Stranger breaches the question of the existence of the soul (247b), its corporeal
or incorporeal nature and the existence of such things that the soul is affiliated with
and able to know, such as Justice, Virtue or Phronesis (the point the crude materialist
would not concede). He incorporates the paradigm of the opposition of movement and
rest to begin to question it through the movement between the soul and knowledge. He
plays out the arguments of the Gods to the Giants, and the argument of the Giants to
the Gods. To the Gods; that being must move enough to be known, since knowing is
a form of acting and suffering – of δύναμις. Otherwise the one cannot be known, and
(there is a two) moreover, there is no contact between the two worlds; we are back into
the greatest difficulty of the Parmenides; the total destruction of the possibility of τοῦ
διαλέγεσθαι δύναμις, and philosophy altogether. To the Giants, that it must stand still,
enough, to be minimally known, since knowledge is knowledge of something enduring
- stable, ἀεί - a proposition about something, that, while fleeting, must have a solid,
communicable meaning; if we are to say and know anything about anything at all.
Being as δύναμις (247e); capacity to act and suffer – ἡ τοῦ πάσχειν ἤ τοῦ δρᾶν
δύναμις – is what ideas and bodies have in common as being (Sophist 247d-248d).
Knowledge is brought under the paradigm of change, capacity, δύναμις – ideas affected
by our knowing, even for once, while our world is affected by ideas. They move so long
as they are being cognized. Knowledge is a form of movement; the whole argumentation
is set up so as to expose the insufficiency of any one-sided explanation, of separation. It
is in this sense that dialectics originates as a very critique of metaphysics.19
Knowing and being known are thus configured as forms of acting and being acted
upon, suffering. In both movement and rest; essence – οὐσία, must move enough to be
known, and stand still enough if to be known. We must notice here the role of the soul
in the movement of knowledge, and its existence, whether corporeal or incorporeal –
in between. Knowledge is a form of dynamis; the soul knows, cognizes and essence is
known, cognized (Sophist 248d). Both move and stand still, in the process of thought,
knowing, that occurs in the soul. A soul which is, itself, composed of circles of same
and other; always same to itself, incorporeal, eternal, infinite – and always other to

18
Aristotle will later show in the Physics that movement and rest are the limit case each other – something
which Plato hints at in the Parmenides through the discussion of the instant.
19
Heidegger sees behind this definition of being as δύναμις a confrontation with the young Aristotle,
influencing Plato. He admits this to be a personal conviction, seeing in the position of the refined giants the
sperm of Aristotelian research: σώμα, the body as the ground and beginning for investigating Being, οὐσία.
See Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, pp. 334-336.
246 MICHALIS TEGOS

itself, changing, corporeal, finite. This mixture is also discussed in the Philebus; the
meikton, the third kind, between infinite and finite, is essential to the metron; what
constitutes the life of phronesis; nous, the philosophical life.
The relation between soul, knowing and essence – the presence of Logos in the
soul – is explored in the Timaeus and the Philebus: Logos and Reason were never born
without, outside of soul (Timaeus 30b, Philebus 30c.) In the Sophist Logos was born
in the soul from the interconnection and weaving of ideas, κοινωνία καί συμπλοκή τῶν
εἰδῶν. Plato says to posit the whole as lacking nous, life and movement – that it stands
σεμνόν καί ἅγιον, solemn and sacred, knowing nothing, would be a great mistake,
and fundamental, as it would destroy completely the possibility of philosophy and
Logos in general. If there is no movement, there is no noein at all. And if everything
moves it is impossible to know anything at all, as knowledge is knowledge of the ἀεί
ὄν, of that which always is. Most commentators agree that the definition of being as
dynamis serves to conduit the discussion from the couple corporeal/incorporeal to the
dialectical couple movement/rest. It also serves to expose, therefrom, the true kernel
of dialectics, which is the couple identity/difference. But the definition of being as
dynamis is thus neither entirely provisional nor naive; it reveals both movement and
rest to be necessary conditions for the being of knowledge, of logos and legein, which
is the way the soul cognizes ousia. Neither movement nor rest can, on their own,
explain what being is. Being is capacity/possibility of participation and being-together.

‘The Children’s Plea’

Thus, as children that were told stories, like children we shall respond: The
children’s plea: κατά τήν τῶν παίδων εὐχήν, ὅσα ἀκίνητα καί κεκινεμένα, τό ὄν τε καί τό
πᾶν συναμφότερα λέγειν (Sophist 249d); Being and the all are all things unchanged and
changed, both together. Or, better, when we say Being and the whole (πᾶν/σύνολον) of
beings we mean it is as much at rest as in movement at the same time.
‘It seems we have effectively captured being with logoi,’ in a definition, ‘ἐπιεικῶς
ἤδη περιειληφέναι τῷ λόγῳ τό ὄν’ (Sophist 249d); in truth, the Stranger will go on to
explain the greatest of difficulties and aporias about being, now that we think to have
said something about it. We are no different from the ones that posit the two, a pair
of opposites like hot and cold. The discussion will go into the territory of non-being -
where the true parricide will take place.
To arrive at this, what is necessary is a certain reconciliation of the opposites;
a viewpoint from which they are no longer opposites. Synthesis, surpassing of the
opposition onto a higher level; to accept both movement and rest as great kinds - of
being, and propose to introduce identity and difference as notions, on a different level,
to clarify their relation (to being). Plato wants to be fair and just, like Solon, of which
he was descendant, when reconciling Athens.
The Hesiodic Ἑκατόγχειρες on the side of Zeus, Plato, a true child of Ouranos and
Gaia. Heracles, defeating Giants with bow and arrows, as in Euripides’ Heracles.
 THE BATTLE BETWEEN GODS AND GIANTS 247

Arrows, logoi from the bow from Apollo, as in Pindar’ s Pythian (8.12-18) - or –
Aeschylus’s Prometheus (Theuth, Pythagoras); Titan, for the age of government,
against Cronos; bringer of fire, art – techne - in the battle between Cronos and Zeus,
in between the two eras. Elsewhere, with Cronos, κόρος νοῦς, pure thought as in the
Statesman and the Laws. Cronos and Rhea give birth to Zeus; Time and Flow, give
birth by necessity to justice - to the time of government. And Zeus, equally bringer of
his own downfall (necessity, in Prometheus bound…already in Heraclitus (DKB94));
not even the sun can escape its dues, for the furies will find out.

5. Who is the Eleatic Stranger?

One may argue that the parricide is foreshadowed from the Parmenides and the
Theaetetus – the discussion on difference, preparing the way of non-being, where
thought, is advised by the father Parmenides, not to stray. Plato’s relation to Socrates,
to the Eleatics could constitute a life’s research on its own. The Eleatic Stranger, as we
are told in the beginning of the Sophist, is a distant student of the Eleatics, proficient
in their methods, that is to say, in dialectics. Divine, a true philosopher (see also in the
Phaedrus where dialectic, to see the whole and the parts is considered divine); that he
forgets nothing, οὐκ ἀμνημονεῖν, he remembers everything, the whole; he will survey
the whole question - the question of the whole, the fundamental question of Being;
clarify what is most obscure (the latent contradiction of the Parmenides, an impossible
matrix between Being and what can be said about it, that otherwise, leads to a total
‘ruin of thought’). He will lead us between darkness and light, the relation between
being and non-being, sophistry and philosophy. But most of all, he is willing to go
against himself, to hold in check his own positions, to cross the paternal law and attack
the foundations of his school.
In the Parmenides, Parmenides appears old and wise, handsome and commanding
respect. His exercise teaches young Socrates his own limits, in thinking about forms,
and in dialectical thinking. Socrates is on the right track, yet the exercise proposed
around the being of the One and methodology is undertaken by Parmenides himself.
Parmenides still represents this higher, noumenal realm, (for Proclus; the divine - the
One itself) which the student must train arduously before laying his/her eye on; if not
to end up abandoning dialectics, forms and philosophy altogether. And yet, it is by his
own device that the Eleatic doctrine is brought to ruin.
In the Theaetetus Parmenides appears as an honorable, venerated for his depth of
mind, respectable and lonely Priam on the Trojan Wall. The main character is still
Socrates, and one could argue that his ‘limited’ viewpoint, guiding the discussion
about knowledge, is responsible for the dialogue’s rather aporetic resolve. During
the Theaetetus, through a complex dramatic design, we are forshadowed the death of
Socrates, of Parmenides, the two masters (the real and the symbolic father), as well as
248 MICHALIS TEGOS

the student – Theaetetus, who we are told from the beginning, is off to be mourned for
his heroic conduct. In other words, the whole of the Theaetetus, is marked by death.20
It is the Stranger, the visitor from Elea who arrives the next day, setting the field
ablaze by breaching the question that indicates a way out of the aporias on knowledge.
The vehicle for the surpassing of the aporias and the oppositions; the subject of this
surpassing is precisely what Socrates cannot say: Plato’s corrected, dynamic, theory
of forms and a novel, radical conception of Logos (the community of ideas, difference
and non-being). It is of course no coincidence that in the Statesman, that follows the
Sophist, the Stranger re-appears and this time picks out a young Socrates, student of
Theodorus, a mathematician, as his interlocutor.
We must indeed notice the essential role of strangers in Plato’s dialogues. From
Socrates’ Apology, in which Socrates asks to be treated as a stranger, to Diotima, a
woman from elsewhere, the stranger is always bound in some manner to the truth.21
In the Sophist the Stranger goes even further, to posit the relation between the most
supreme of genera, Being and Difference and their priority over the rest. As then, there
is a Being of Difference, and this would be a difference of being, that is to say, there
is a being of non-being. Not negation of Being, but its Difference, Non-Being as the
ever-present capacity/possibility of its being other.
Non-Being, in the form of difference, is present in all relations between the great
genera, it permeates the relations of communication between them and is present as
much as being (as cause of separation?), even, perhaps infinitely more. Non-Being exists
as Difference of Being. The being of the Other in all the others, they are other than the
rest, yet nothing is other than itself; at the core of Being, otherness, difference. Every
identification passes through its opposite, every thing is what it is not; a movement,
an interconnection between Being and Non-Being. Like the position of the Stranger
(ξένος), in each society, philosophy, part of no-part, is inside and outside of society at
the same time. Pious, holy and yet subversive, transgressive; faithful, yet parricidal,
Plato shows the movement of the non-identical, difference within each identity, the
ξένος subverting the polis; non-being at the core of being.
Who is the Eleatic Stranger? Perhaps Plato’s most interesting and provocative
character, the most complex, unpredictable and intricate persona: He incorporates
strangeness, Difference itself; the Other-of-Parmenides. That is to say, if the Parmenides
is the dialogue of the master, of the father, the Sophist is the dialogue of the son. Indeed
the Eleatic Stranger is such a paradoxical personality, a reflection of this synthesis, of
Plato’s own path. Stranger to his interlocutors, stranger to the Eleatic school, parricide,
stranger to himself - from the Socrates of the Apology to the Athenian Stranger of the
Laws, Plato finding his voice.

20
See Badiou A., L’Un, 1983-4 seminar on the Sophist, pp. 137-157. Also Badiou A., Parmenide, L’etre
I – figure ontologique, Le seminaire 1985-1986, Fayard, Paris, pp. 127-149.
21
See Joly H., Études Platoniciennes: La Question des Étrangers, Vrin. Paris,1992, pp. 10-38.
 THE BATTLE BETWEEN GODS AND GIANTS 249

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250 MICHALIS TEGOS

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Dr Michalis Tegos
Aristotle University Thessaloniki
Greece
[email protected]