Plato 22.7. The Supreme Forms
Being and Not-Being in the Forms
We now have established that change and constancy are real features of the world. To say this is to say that both of them are: they exist, they have being. This suggests that being is real and distinct from change and constancy. This gets complicated, because if we are describing, for instance, an individual, we can identify many features of the person: color, shape, size, virtues, vices, and so on. Socrates is short, bow-legged, snub-nosed, honest, garrulous, and so on. One person, then, has many attributes at the same time. But what about opposite or contrary features? Can change be at rest or rest change? That does not seem feasible. So we seem to have to say that some features mix with each other, and some do not.[27]
In language, some letters go together and some do not. We will need to have a similar art of distinguishing what sorts of features go together and what sorts do not; this art is called dialectic. This art will deal with Forms: which Forms go together and which do not? Let’s focus on the highest or supreme Forms, and ask which ones go together and which do not. Now, in fact, we have already been talking about two of the supreme Forms, namely Being, Constancy, and Change. Constancy and Change do not mix with each other; they are incompatible. But Being mixes with both of them, for they do exist.
Now consider two other high-level Forms, Sameness and Difference. Sameness must be distinct from Constancy and Change, because if both were the same, they would be identical, which is impossible. Similarly, Difference must be distinct from Constancy and Change. We can truthfully say the Constancy is different from Change inasmuch as the two entities are not the same. There is a sense in which Change is the same and not the same; similarly, it is different and not different. And Change is different from Being. So change is and is-not. Being itself is different from other Forms. Thus Being, in a sense, is-not.[28]
What this means is that “Whenever we say something ‘is not,’ it turns out, we are referring not to something contrary to being, but something different from it.”[29]
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All of this seems straightforward as Plato takes us through the supreme Forms and shows how they are distinct but interconnect in important ways. Here Plato takes on a central tenet of Parmenides’ criticism of cosmology: what-is-not cannot be thought or said, for it is nothing, and nothing is incomprehensible and inexpressible. But if ‘is-not’ means ‘is different from,’ we are not talking about nothing. We are distinguishing one kind of thing from another, one Form from another, or saying a subject participates in one Form rather than another. There is nothing irrational about saying that A is not B, or that subject S participates in A rather than B. Of course, there are times when we want to deny the existence of something. If I say, ‘Pegasus does not exist,’ I can make sense of it in Plato’s theory by saying that there is no horse that participates in flying, or no subject that simultaneously participates in Horseness and Flying.
When we say something is not-beautiful, we are referring to a part of the different set over against the beautiful, as in a Venn diagram. What-is-not, then, is just as much a being as what-is, referring not to what is contrary to being but to what is different from it.
The Visitor from Elea recognizes that he has refuted the august Parmenides, who forbad his followers from entering into the path of Is-Not. Plato has taken on Parmenides himself, and proved that what-is-not does not necessarily refer to nothing, but only to what is different from what-is (in some sense of what-is).[30]
[27] Plato Sophist 250a-252e.
[28] Plato Sophist 253a-257a.
[29] Plato Sophist 257b.
[30] Plato Sophist 257b-259b.
