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Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 19, Number 3, July 1981,pp. 377-380 (Review)

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Book Reviews

Jacob Klein. Plato's Trilogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Pp. vii + 2oo. $16.oo.

Jacob Klein's third book provides commentaries on Plato's thre e dialogues: Theaete- tus, Sophist, and Statesman. It treats each of these dialogues in a separate section of the book, but interprets each of them in the light of the others. This accords with statements Klein made in his second book, "Unquestionably, these three dialogues form a unity . . . . The links between these dialogues are not external or superficial." ' In fact, the general directions of Klein's interpretat ions of these dialogues are clear not only from his ear l ier work on the Meno but also even from his first book. ' Inasmuch as these two previous books are of'great----of outs tanding--wor th , this book, by remain ing close to them, has much strength. Yet it must be said that this work has some serious weaknesses and is less impressive than his earlier books.

Klein begins the in t roduct ion with the assertion, "Any meaningful interpretat ion of any Platonic dia logue has to rest on the following premises," after which he presents six premises (pp. 1-2). Even if this strikes us as overstatement, the premises themselves can be extremely useful ones for interpret ing the dialogues, but his dis- cussion of these is to be found in an earl ier book. 3 Following the list of his interpre- tive premises, the in t roduct ion has several sections; among other things Klein gives us br ief indications o f his purpose in the book. We find on page 6: "The ultimate goal of the dialogues is to make us repeat and continue the questioning"; and on p. 5: "We shall watch the text carefully . . . . We shall participate in the discussions: The paraphrase of the text o f the dialogues will be interwoven with what occurs to us as listeners." Such remarks lead us to expect a very careful, perhaps detailed, t reatment of the dialogues. Unfor tunately , the entire book is obviously not large enough to give detailed analysis, and we find that most of it is occupied with paraphrase and hardly any comment . Many seemingly important points in the dialogues are passed over with no discussion. Occasionally there are some useful comments in the paraphrase, but so rarely that Klein's book is more likely to provide help with the general inter-

' A Commentary on Plato's Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), p. 27.

9 "Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra," in Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik, Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, fasc. t (Berlin, 1934), pp. 18-1o 5 (pt. l); fasc. 2 (1936), pp. 122-235 (pt. 2). English trans., Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968), see esp. pp. 237-38, n. lot.

Commentao on Plato's Meno, pp. 3-3 I.

[377]

378 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

pretation o f the whole of a dialogue than with particular difficult passages. Plato's Tri/0gy refers to little of the secondary literature on the three dialogues.

The commentaries start with the treatment o f the Sophist for reasons I will discuss below. His commentary on the Sophist paraphrases the whole dialogue, as they all do, but in addition it stresses that the frequent appearance of the word "both" provides the key for interpretation. He counts thirty-four appearances of "both" (which is the sum of the two perfect numbers six and twenty-eight, and also the number of sec- tions in Plato's Trilogy.t). There are three reasons for the repeated usage of "both," according to Klein; these three reflect his life-long conviction that Aristotle's com- ments upon Plato in Metaphysics I, 6 and 9, but especially XIII , 6-8 , take us to the heart o f Plato's thought (see p. 1). 4 The first reason is that Plato conceives the form Being to be the "eidetic Two." His deepest penetration into Being's structure, into its manner o f association with other forms, is to view it as a sort of two. Opposites such as Rest and Motion "both together" constitute Being (pp. 48, 54, 56, 60); we should not count three things---Rest, Motion, and Being--as our speech and thought lead us to do, but recognize that Being is both opposites combined, in the case of such comprehensive forms. Though the forms are not simply countable in the way per- ceptible units and intelligible units are counted, the forms are assemblages in their very structure and thus provide the principles of these countable units. Being must be viewed as the assemblage of Rest and Motion or the Same and the Other, and, as the "eidetic Two," be the principle of all other duality. With reference to the way in which Being is no third thing besides the two embracing opposite forms, hut both of them together, Klein says, "We can now understand why the conversations of the 'trilogy' (of dialogues) occur in two, not three, days and why the Sophist, the States- man, and the Philosopher are dealt with in two, not three, dialogues" (p. 61; see pp. 4-5)-

The second reason given for the copious use of "both" is that "the Other, '~ which is o f such crucial concern in the dialogue, also has a dyadic structure. But unlike Being, which is the "eidetic Two" of both opposites together, the Other is the "inde- terminate dyad," since the Other names the indeterminate multitude of things other than other (p. 61). For example, what is other than the beautiful, or the not-beauti- ful, includes the infinite number of beings that are other than the beautiful. The dyadic structure is the way in which the other is always other than an other, and the indeterminateness derives from the infinitude o f things other than an other. The Other is the principle of all multiplicity (p. 61) and thus is at the origin of the Sophist's "many-headedness" (pp. 27, 36, 63).

Klein gives as the third reason for the frequency of "both" that the Same, along with the Other, forms the second of the leading pair of principles of all things (p. 63). T he Same, for Klein, is what appears in other dialogues as the One, the Limit, the Good, or the Precise itself. It is what combines with the indeterminate dyad to constitute all being. The Same seems to be "beyond Being" and to be the principle of Being, that is, the eidetic Two, since Being must be both the Same and the Other

4 Cf. Greek Mathematical Thought, pp. 79-99, esp. p. 91 .

BOOK REVIEWS 379

together (p. 63). 5 Obviously, Klein follows Aristotle in attributing to Plato a tendency of thought that is very neo-Platonic. On his view, Plato treats the forms as being arithmological assemblages of the contraries the One (the Limit) and the Other (the Unlimited), with Being as the first offspring of the One that is beyond it. This view perhaps needs more defense than Klein has ever given it, and especially regarding its requirement that Plato accept an Absolute One, with no manyness about it at all, since the dialogues often conclude that absolute simplicity obstructs all intelligibility. 6

Besides the emphasis upon what the common usage of "both" in the Sophist suggests about Being and Not Being, and consequently about the philosopher and the sophist, perhaps most useful in the commentary on this dialogue is Klein's point- ing out that o f the seven divisions and collections made in order to locate the sophist, only the sixth division, the one that locates him as a purifier of souls, that is, as the philosopher, manages to have the final collection conform perfectly to the prior division (p. ~6). Also useful is his discussion of the puzzling passage 253d5-e2 (p. 5~). A serious er ror in Klein's summary is found on page 64 where he says that "speech ~:omes about by intertwining the looks (i.e. the e/de) with one another." This mistaken interpretation of ~59 e has often been made, 7 but the Stranger really says that the foundation of the possibility for speech is the intertwining of the forms with each other; yet speech itself is the intertwining of names (onomata) and verbs (rhemata), not of forms (a6~d).

The explanation Klein gives for treating the Sophist before the Theaetetus is that the errors Theaetetus commits in trying to say what knowledge is have to do with the principles o f all things, the "same" and the "other," which are dealt with in the Sophist (P. 5). Klein still holds strongly to his claim in his second book- -"The question raised in the Theaetetus, 'what is knowledge?' is dealt with thematically not in the Theaetetus but in the Sophist"S--when he contends, "The theme of the dialogue (Theaetetus) is not knowledge but the possibility of error, which is grounded in the 'similarity' of the 'Same' and the 'Other ' insofar as they are ruling beginnings (archai)" (p. 145 ), He thinks that the three key attempts o f Theaetetus to say what knowledge is--(a) sensa- tion (aisthesis), (b) true opinion, (c) true opinion with an account--reveal three errors, respectively: (a) the self-contradiction of identifying the "same" with the "other," (b) the m/stake of thinking that the "other" is the "same," (c) the tautology of thinking that the "same" is the "other" (see pp. t 19, 134, 145 ). But even if errors may be distinguish- able into self-contradictions, mistakes, and tautologies, as Klein argues, and because the Same and the Other are deceptively similar, still his reading of the Theaetetus seems extremely questionable. He simply ignores what the dialogue says and 'implies about knowledge. There is small exaggeration in claiming that his interpretation of the Theaetetus finds nothing besides the display of these three types of errors. The

Cf. Ibid. p. 98. 6 See Theaetetus 2o5c-e, Parmenides 141e-142a , and Sophist 248e-249 a. 7 For example: Francis M. Cornford, Plato's Theory of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Liberal Arts

Press, 1957), p. 3oo. s Commentary on Plato's Meno, pp. 27-28.

380 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

little he really has to say about the Thaetetus was said already in his second book. At the root of Klein's eccentric interpretation of the Theaetetus is his erroneous conten- tion that knowledge is dealt with thematically in the Sophist.

In Klein's treatment of the Statesman he makes much of the faultiness that crops up constantly in the divisions aimed at revealing the statesman (see pages 147, 16o, 161, t63, 17t, 172, t74, 191, esp. t61 and t72 ). He thinks this accords with the subject matter, the statesman, since statesmen seem to be so seriously faulty in their activities and most burdensome to men on account of it. Presumably the faults of the practicing statesman would be eliminated by a truly knowledgeable statesman, that is, a statesman who had the dialectical knowledge of the philosopher. It is Klein's major point in his discussion that the true king must have such knowledge, but he hardly argues for this conclusion. Whatever argument is to be found is on pages 176-77 (for confirmation o f this see p. 2oo); here he merely suggests that because the Stranger and young Socrates are becoming more dialectical about all matters, through their search for the statesman, the statesman must have dialectical knowl- edge about all things. This is no argument at all, unless it is shown that by becoming more dialectical the Stranger and the young Socrates become statesmen or closer to being statesmen. However, Klein never shows this.

An interesting point that Klein makes in his discussion of the Statesman is that the means the Stranger uses in the investigation, the method of division and the illustra- tion by models, can be linked directly to the outstanding model of the whole dia- logue, that o f weaving. The collections at the end of every division are like the taut, vertical warp, and the models, such as that of the age of Cronos, are like the looser, horizontal woof. When these are woven together there is the fabric of the dialogue (see pp. 165-66 ).

As has been indicated, this book can be useful; but it has serious flaws. Jacob Klein's earlier books, especially his first, are more highly recommended.

RONALD M. POLANSKY Duquesne University

Anthony Kenny. The Aristotelian Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Pp xi + 250. $22.5 o.

In The Aristotelian Ethics Anthony Kenny uses the tools of philosopher, classicist, and statistician to solve the mystery of the true home of the books common to the Eude- mian and Nicomachean Ethics. Were they lecture notes originally written by Aristotle or his redactor for the one, but then revised and joined onto the later edition for completeness' sake; or were they written expressly for the later work but then added onto the earlier; or were .they independent of both and later tagged onto each? Kenny opts for the second alternative, never seriously considering the first, and argues for the original completeness of the Eudemian and its chronological and philo- sophical seniority.

9 Ibid., pp. 27-3 I, 158-66.