I transcribe a few sentences from the argument of Ficinus, to show what different meanings may be discovered in the same words by different critics. (Ficini Argum. in Plat. Parmen. p. 756.) “Cum Plato per omnes ejus dialogos totius sapientiæ semina sparserit, in libris De Republicâ cuncta moralis philosophiæ instituta collegit, omnem naturalium rerum scientiam in Timæo, universam in Parmenide complexus est Theologiam. Cumque in aliis longo intervallo cæteros philosophos antecesserit, in hoc tandem seipsum superasse videtur. Hic enim divus Plato de ipso Uno subtilissimé disputat: quemadmodum Ipsum Unum rerum omnium principium est, super omnia, omniaque ab illo: quo pacto ipsum extra omnia sit et in omnibus: omniaque ex illo, per illud, atque ad illud. Ad hujus, quod super essentiam est, Unius intelligentiam gradatim ascendit. In iis quæ fluunt et sensibus subjiciuntur et sensibilia nominantur: In iis etiam quas semper eadem sunt et sensibilia nuncupantur, non sensibus amplius sed solâ mente percipienda: Nec in iis tantum, verum etiam supra sensum et sensibilia, intellectumque et intelligibilia:— ipsum Unum existit. — Illud insuper advertendum est, quod in hoc dialogo cum dicitur Unum, Pythagoreorum more quæque substantia a materiâ penitus absoluta significari potest: ut Deus, Mens, Anima. Cum vero dicitur Aliud et Alia, tam materia, quam illa quæ in materiâ fiunt, intelligere licet.”
The Prolegomena, prefixed by Thomson to his edition of the Parmenides, interpret the dialogue in the same general way as Proklus and Ficinus: they suppose that by Unum is understood Summus Deus, and they discover in the concluding Antinomies theological demonstrations of the unity, simplicity, and other attributes of God. Thomson observes, very justly, that the Parmenides is one of the most difficult dialogues in Plato (Prolegom. iv.-x.) But in my judgment, his mode of exposition, far from smoothing the difficulties, adds new ones greater than those in the text.
The various explanations of it given by more recent commentators may be seen enumerated in the learned Prolegomena of Stallbaum,[53] who has also set forth his own views at considerable length. And the prodigious opposition between the views of Proklus (followed by Ficinus in the fifteenth century), who extols the Parmenides as including in mystic phraseology sublime religious truths — and those of the modern Tiedemann, who despises them as foolish subtleties and cannot read them with patience — is quite sufficient to inspire a reasonable Platonic critic with genuine diffidence.
[53] Stallbaum, Prolegg. in Parmen. ii. 1, pp. 244-265. Compare K. F. Hermann, Gesch. und Syst. der Platon. Phil. pp. 507-668-670.
To the works which he has there enumerated, may be added the Dissertation by Dr. Kuno Fischer, Stuttgart, 1851, De Parmenide Platonico, and that of Zeller, Platonische Studien, p. 169 seqq.
Kuno Fischer (pp. 102-103) after Hegel (Gesch. der Griech. Phil. I. p. 202), and some of the followers of Hegel, extol the Parmenides as a masterpiece of dialectics, though they complain that “der philosophirende Pöbel” misunderstand it, and treat it as obscure. Werder, Logik, pp. 92-176, Berlin, 1841. Carl Beck, Platon’s Philosophie im Abriss ihrer genetischen Entwickelung, p. 75, Reutlingen, 1852. Marbach, Gesch. der Griech. Phil. sect. 96, pp. 210-211.
No dogmatical solution or purpose is wrapped up in the dialogue. The purpose is negative, to make a theorist keenly feel all the difficulties of theorising.
In so far as these different expositions profess, each in its own way, to detect a positive dogmatical result or purpose in the Parmenides,[54] none of them carry conviction to my mind, any more than the mystical interpretations which we read in Proklus. If Plato had any such purpose, he makes no intimation of it, directly or indirectly. On the contrary, he announces another purpose not only different, but contrary. The veteran Parmenides, while praising the ardour of speculative research displayed by Sokrates, at the same time reproves gently, but distinctly, the confident forwardness of two such immature youths as Sokrates and Aristotle in laying down positive doctrines without the preliminary exercise indispensable for testing them.[55] Parmenides appears from the beginning to the end of the dialogue as a propounder of doubts and objections, not as a doctrinal teacher. He seeks to restrain the haste of Sokrates — to make him ashamed of premature affirmation and the false persuasion of knowledge — to force upon him a keen sense of real difficulties which have escaped his notice. To this end, a specimen is given of the exercise required. It is certainly well calculated to produce the effect intended — of hampering, perplexing, and putting to shame, the affirmative rashness of a novice in philosophy. It exhibits a tangled skein of ingenious contradiction which the novice must somehow bring into order, before he is in condition to proclaim any positive dogma. If it answers this purpose, it does all that Parmenides promises. Sokrates is warned against attaching himself exclusively to one side of an hypothesis, and neglecting the opposite: against surrendering himself to some pre-conception, traditional, or self-originated, and familiarising his mind with its consequences, while no pains are taken to study the consequences of the negative side, and bring them into comparison. It is this one-sided mental activity, and premature finality of assertion, which Parmenides seeks to correct. Whether the corrective exercises which he prescribes are the best for the purpose, may be contested: but assuredly the malady which he seeks to correct is deeply rooted in our human nature, and is combated by Sokrates himself, though by other means, in several of the Platonic dialogues. It is a rare mental endowment to study both sides of a question, and suspend decision until the consequences of each are fully known.
[54] I agree with Schleiermacher, in considering that the purpose of the Parmenides is nothing beyond γυμνασία, or exercise in the method and perplexities of philosophising (Einl. p. 83): but I do not agree with him, when he says (pp. 90-105) that the objections urged by Parmenides (in the middle of the dialogue) against the separate substantiality of Forms or Ideas, though noway answered in the dialogue itself, are sufficiently answered in other dialogues (which he considers later in time), especially in the Sophistes (though, according to Brandis, Handb. Gr.-Röm. Phil. p. 241, the Sophistes is earlier than the Parmenides). Zeller, on the other hand, denies that these objections are at all answered in the Sophistes; but he maintains that the second part of the Parmenides itself clears up the difficulties propounded in the first part. After an elaborate analysis (in the Platon. Studien, pp. 168-178) of the Antinomies or contradictory Demonstrations in the concluding part of the dialogue, Zeller affirms the purpose of them to be “die richtige Ansicht von den Ideen als der Einheit in dem Mannichfaltigen der Erscheinung dialektisch zu begründen, die Ideenlehre möglichen Einwürfen und Missverständnissen gegenüber dialektisch zu begründen” (pp. 180-182). This solution has found favour with some subsequent commentators. See Susemihl, Die genetische Entwickelung der Platon. Philosophie, pp. 341-353; Heinrich Stein, Vorgeschichte und System des Platonismus, pp. 217-220.
To me it appears (what Zeller himself remarks in p. 188, upon the discovery of Schleiermacher that the objections started in the Parmenides are answered in the Sophistes) that it requires all the acuteness of so able a writer as Zeller to detect any such result as that which he here extracts from the Parmenidean Antinomies — from what Aristeides calls (Or. xlvii. p. 430) “the One and Many, the multiplied twists and doublings, of this divine dialogue”. I confess that I am unable to perceive therein what Zeller has either found or elicited. Objections and misunderstandings (Einwürfe und Missverständnisse), far from being obviated or corrected, are accumulated from the beginning to the end of these Antinomies, and are summed up in a formidable total by the final sentence of the dialogue. Moreover, none of these objections which Parmenides had advanced in the earlier part of the dialogue are at all noticed, much less answered, in the concluding Antinomies.