Nine interpretations of the Parmenides
An overview of the background assumptions different scholars make when writing about Plato's hardest dialogue.
Plato’s Parmenides is his hardest dialogue to understand. That is pretty much the only thing that everyone agrees about it. Many think Plato himself tried to signal this to the reader: Socrates—the lightning-fast, intellectually-dazzling protagonist of most of Plato’s other dialogues, who reduces other people to dazed confusion (aporia) by his genius refutations—is the one who ends up in aporia in the Parmenides.
In the first part of the dialogue, Socrates lays out the famous ‘theory of Forms’, which Plato defends in many of his other works. Then, the new character Parmenides seems to eviscerate this theory with a number of arguments, including the so-called ‘Third Man’. In the second part of the dialogue, Parmenides suggests we can maybe save the theory of Forms, and presents the ‘Deductions’: arguments about the nature of ‘the One’. These are incredibly confusing and seem to completely contradict one another, and the dialogue concludes with the statement that:
‘…whether One is or is not, it and the others both are and are not, and both appear and do not appear all things in all ways, both in relation to themselves and in relation to each other.’
‘Very true.’ [Plato, Parmenides, trans. Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan, 166c.]1
What on earth does this mean, and how does it relate to the theory of Forms? Well, that’s the question!
This post is not about the Parmenides. This post is about the meta-level: what other people have said about the Parmenides. Because the dialogue is so difficult, it’s basically inevitable that you end up having to rely on the secondary literature to read it; but (again, because it is so difficult) everybody in the secondary literature disagrees with everybody else about almost everything. After a decent amount of work, I now feel like I understand the very broad contours of where most scholars are getting their assumptions from. This post is what I wished I had when I started looking into the Parmenides: not a review article, not an overview of the literature, just the crudest possible typology of schools of thought.
Some of the different views I discuss are related. In some ways the ‘Tübingen interpretation’ is a modern update of the ‘Neoplatonic interpretation’, but it could also be seen as an extension of the ‘Aporetic interpretation’, which itself is like a fortified version of the ‘Confused interpretation’. The ‘Straussian’ and ‘Joke’ views are very similar in how seriously they take the character of Parmenides. And obviously ‘Weak Progressivism’ and ‘Strong Progressivism’ are very closely related. Many people combine different elements from these different strands, too. But I still think it’s helpful to have this overview.
For every interpretation, I mention an archetypal proponent—not necessarily someone who presents the purest version of that view, but instead someone who has been an influential proponent of the view—and also some reasons why people might favour it and why other people think it’s wrong. But ultimately, no matter the high-level reasons for and against, interpreting the Parmenides comes down to explaining what the Deductions are supposed to mean, and how they are supposed to relate to the theory of Forms: if somebody can’t give a good explanation of the Deductions, it doesn’t matter how well their theory fits with everything else; and if they can give a convincing explanation, the ‘vibes’ of that explanation should be irrelevant. I can’t go into the details of the Deductions in this post, so nothing below gives you any real reason to accept or reject these interpretations. But with the Parmenides, everything is baby steps.
The Strong Progressivist interpretation
Plato thought the arguments against the Forms in the Parmenides were completely right. At some point after writing his most famous dialogues—the Republic, the Phaedo, the Symposium, etc., which all insist that the Forms are key to understanding knowledge, justice, and virtue—Plato actually rejected the theory of Forms, and started writing dialogues like the Theaetetus which analysed concepts like knowledge without any reference to Forms. The Parmenides records the moment when Plato changed his mind, and the arguments that convinced him.
Pro: The main point in favour of the Strong Progressivist interpretation is that many people throughout history have thought, and continue to think, the arguments in the first part of the dialogue are actually sound objections to the theory of Forms. Aristotle, for example, just borrowed the ‘Third Man’ argument wholesale; and Aristotle was taught by Plato himself, so it’s very unlikely that he just missed the point.
Con: Sometimes people act as if the main issue with Strong Progressivism is that it posits an order for the dialogues that can’t be proven or disproven. I think it’s almost the opposite: the issue is that it posits an order for the dialogues that can be disproven. Strong evidence tells us that the Timaeus—one of Plato’s most Form-y dialogues—was written pretty close in time to the Laws, and we know the Laws was the last thing Plato ever wrote. And the same type of evidence tells us that the Theaetetus was not written in the same period as the Laws, so must be an earlier dialogue. There are late dialogues with Forms, and earlier dialogues without Forms, so there cannot be a single moment when Plato rejected the Forms—and so, a fortiori, the Parmenides cannot be that moment.
Key proponent: Gilbert Ryle.
The Weak Progressivist interpretation
The Parmenides records a change of mind, though not such a simplistic one as the Strong Progressivists say. Plato thought the arguments in the first part of the dialogue were sound, and rejected at least some of the assumptions behind the theory of Forms; if he continued to believe in Forms afterwards, it was more tentatively, or he understood their nature differently, or they were less central to his system. Plato certainly did not think the Deductions refuted the arguments made earlier in the dialogue, although they might point towards a new way of thinking about Forms.
Pro: Again, this has the benefit of taking seriously the feeling that many readers have, that the arguments in the first part of the Parmenides are good arguments against the Forms; but it avoids making overly strong claims about Plato’s other writings.
Con: Weak Progressivism might not take readers’ sympathy for the first part seriously enough. These readers—e.g., Aristotle—think arguments like the ‘Third Man’ show that there are no Forms, full stop. Strong Progressivists agree, and take these arguments to be evidence that Plato changed his mind. Weak Progressivists don’t want to just accept this. But if we have to admit that Plato believed some version of the theory could survive the ‘Third Man’, then what reason do we have for assuming he changed his mind at all?
Key proponent: Samuel C. Rickless.
The Confused interpretation
Plato was just as baffled by the arguments in the Parmenides as his readers. He didn’t know if they were sound or not, and he didn’t know what wider conclusions he should draw if they were sound. The Deductions were some thoughts he couldn’t quite reconcile with each other that may or may not have been relevant to the arguments in the first part of the dialogue. The Parmenides isn’t necessarily coherent—indeed, it probably isn’t. It’s Plato throwing some ideas about Forms at the wall to see what sticks.
Pro: The big advantage of the Confused view is that, well, the Parmenides is fucking confusing! Especially the Deductions. Plato was an excellent prose stylist, one of the best writers in Greek full stop, so this isn’t just a matter of a bad writer unable to be clear. Why would he write something so baffling, unless he was baffled himself?
Con: If Plato didn’t know what to make of these ideas, why would he bother writing them down? We know he sometimes wrote dialogues that end in confusion / aporia, but usually those dialogues started from the ‘common sense’ of his Athenian contemporaries, which Plato usually wanted the reader to reject. He never wrote anything that was pointless. What benefit would someone get from reading the equivalent of Plato’s unfiltered, inconclusive, confusing internal monologue?
Key proponent: Gregory Vlastos.
The Unitarian interpretation
Plato thought the arguments in the first part of the dialogue, although they were tempting and might seem like they were right, were ultimately not sound. He maintained the same theory of Forms throughout his career, although he may have had to change how he presented it or qualify some of the conclusions he drew from it. The Deductions do not point away from the old theory; quite the opposite, they support the theory, being successful counterarguments to the objections of the first part.
Pro: This is, essentially, the simplest interpretation of the dialogue. Parmenides explicitly says that if someone is convinced by the objections in the first part of the dialogue and ‘won’t allow that there are forms for things’, then ‘he will destroy the power of dialectic entirely’. Meanwhile, he says that if you are a ‘very gifted man’, you will ‘know that for each thing there is some kind [i.e., a Form]’.2 And then he sets out the Deductions as a means to properly understand the Forms. To be sure, this is the character of Parmenides, not Plato’s authorial voice. But the most straightforward read is that Plato agrees, thinks the objections to the theory of Forms are not ultimately sound.
Con: Plato was a good philosopher and a good writer. (Hot take.) In many of his dialogues, he sets out an argument that might seem tempting, and then shows where he thinks it goes wrong; he is able to do this with clarity and skill. If that is all he intended to do in the Parmenides, he could have done it in the same way he did it in all his other dialogues, rather than writing such a confusing pile of seemingly-contradictory and potentially meaningless ideas. So perhaps he meant to signal that he was doing something else.
Key proponent: Constance Meinwald.
The Aporetic interpretation
Plato thought the arguments in the first part of the dialogue were unsound, but he also didn’t think the Deductions were sufficient to explain where those arguments went wrong. While he was not merely confused, and continued to believe in the Forms, nonetheless he was more interested in leaving an ‘exercise for the reader’: the Parmenides is designed to guide the reader to understand potential questions for the theory of Forms, not to provide ready-made answers.
Pro: Plato wrote many dialogues that end in aporia, and even non-aporetic dialogues are structured dialectically, and often make reference to the importance of working through difficult philosophical questions on your own. He definitely wanted to leave questions for his readers to answer. If we find a dialogue where it’s not clear what Plato actually thinks, it might be a good bet that this is what he’s doing.
Con: It’s a bit of a cop-out, no? The hard part of understanding the Parmenides is making sense of the Deductions as a coherent set of arguments. But Aporetic interpreters often don’t bother, and not because they think Plato himself couldn’t do it (like the Confused readers, or the Strong Progressivists who sometimes say the Deductions are deliberately contradictory to show that the theory of Forms is unsalvageable). Aporetic interpreters say that Plato himself could have done it, and that he wanted the reader to do it, but nonetheless completing the task is outside the scope of interpreting the dialogue. Some Aporetic readers, to their credit, do suggest ways to render the Deductions coherent; but it’s not all of them, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the popularity of this view comes down to how easy it is to lay out an Aporetic interpretation.
Key proponent: R. E. Allen.
The Neoplatonic interpretation
The arguments in the first part of the dialogue are not sound objections to the theory of Forms, but they do point towards a gap in the theory as it is presented: it doesn’t mention the One. The One is the basis of all reality, above and prior to the Forms, and the only way to understand the Forms—including understanding what’s wrong with the arguments against the theory—is to gain (mystical) access to the One. The Deductions are a spiritual exercise: if the reader works through them, they will understand how all things derive from the One, and take a step towards knowledge of the One itself, which knowledge is a kind of union with the divine.
Pro: I mean, apart from being really fun? It’s one of the only readings that explains where the idea of ‘the One’ comes from. Other interpretations might make a decent attempt at explaining what Plato means when he writes about ‘the One’, but they do struggle to avoid the sense that it comes out of left field: the historical figure Parmenides certainly thought the idea of ‘One’ was important, but that just raises the question of why Plato picked him for the main character of this dialogue. By putting the One at the heart of their interpretation, Neoplatonists can actually make pretty good sense of where the Deductions come from.
Con: Plato didn’t write like he thought he had unlocked the secret to mystical union with the divine—people who think that sort of thing tend to write a lot more like the Neoplatonists. There’s also not much external evidence to suggest that Plato was convinced he had achieved direct contact with the metaphysical principle underlying reality, which is the kind of thing you’d think other people might mention about him.
Key proponent: Proclus. See also E. R. Dodds’ famous article which first made modern scholars aware of the connection between Neoplatonic metaphysics and the Parmenides.
The Tübingen interpretation
Plato did not think the arguments in the first part of the dialogue were sound, but the Deductions are also not valid as they stand. The dialogue is deliberately incomplete and unclear, to point readers towards the need for contextualisation and explanation, which Plato would have provided at the Academy to capable students. If we reconstruct the ‘unwritten doctrines’ Plato taught at the Academy, we can bring them to bear on the Deductions to produce new, valid arguments.
Pro: Like the Neoplatonists, the Tübingen school argue that Plato believed he had unlocked some deep truth, which the Deductions point towards without explicitly describing. But unlike the Neoplatonists, the Tübingen school (a) don’t think this deep truth can only be accessed through mysticism—it can straightforwardly be taught, and was taught by Plato; and (b) they think that they have proof: testimony from Aristotle and others about Plato’s ‘unwritten doctrines’. If this is correct, it would explain why the Parmenides seems so confusing for readers who haven’t heard the oral doctrines that make sense of it.
Con: We’d have to be pretty damn sure that we can reconstruct the ‘unwritten doctrines’ accurately if this is going to work. You may worry that a few fragments of second-hand testimony from Aristotle—or a few fragments of third-hand testimony from Aristotle’s students, since the ‘works of Aristotle’ are probably lecture notes—can’t be enough to base our entire interpretation on.
Key proponent: Hans Joachim Krämer.
The Straussian interpretation
Plato wanted his smart readers to understand that what was written on the page was not just incomplete but actively incorrect. In all of his dialogues, Plato was willing to mislead the common reader, while leaving hints for subtle and sophisticated readers about what he actually thought. In the Parmenides in particular, keyed-in readers will focus on the reversal of roles: Parmenides is setting the terms of the discussion, while the intelligent and virtuous Socrates has little sway over the direction of conversation. The takeaway from the dialogue is not to be found in this or that interpretation of the Deductions, but is instead the revelation that a ‘Parmenidean’ approach to philosophy is misguided.
Pro: As mentioned many times, the Deductions seem to make no sense. Other interpretations either try to make sense out of them (Weak Progressivist, Unitarian, Neoplatonic) or explain why actually it’s somehow good that they make no sense (Strong Progressivist, Aporetic, Tübingen). But the Straussians can face up to this fact head-on: no, you’re supposed to think that they don’t make sense, and that they are bad philosophy. That’s the point of the whole dialogue!
Con: The Straussians fail to account for why the Parmenides is so different to everything else Plato wrote. If Plato was always being sneaky, and yet he managed to make his sneaky prose into something beautiful and flowing in the Republic, then why on earth is the Parmenides such a confusing mess? In particular, if Plato was trying to reveal certain things to some readers while having others blithely accept the surface meaning, then it would seem he fucked up: everyone wonders if they’re missing something in the Parmenides.
Key proponent: Catherine H. Zuckert.
The Joke interpretation
The Parmenides is satirical, a parody of the type of philosophy that the historical Parmenides engaged in, which Plato thought was ridiculous. The arguments in the first part are not sound—quite the opposite, we’re supposed to find them laughably bad. And the Deductions are supposed to be even more absurd.
Pro: Philosophy is too dry sometimes (the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on humour is a case in point). It would be good to have more jokes.
Con: Nobody’s laughing.
Key proponent: Mehmet Tabak.
A few concluding thoughts
I’m not an expert, and in fact still have no idea how to understand the Deductions. So don’t trust me. But I do feel relatively confident in the following Hot Takes.
We should avoid leaning on other dialogues for interpreting the Parmenides. This is not to say that, in general, we can’t interpret one Platonic dialogue in light of another—it’s that in this particular case we’re not going to get much help. For example, in deciding how plausible Weak Progressivism is, it would definitely be helpful to know if the Timaeus (written late) has the same theory of Forms as the Republic or Phaedo; but people’s answers to this question tend to be pre-determined by whether they are sympathetic to Progressivism or not, so it’s a bit question-begging. Because the Parmenides is so hard, broader questions about how to interpret Plato are most acute in this case, and so people’s answers to these broader questions will usually be tied up with how they read the Parmenides. We can’t isolate the former and use them to make progress with the latter.
My impression is that many (maybe most?) Anglophone scholars today seem to think that, in the second part of the dialogue, ‘the One’ is just an example of a Form. This assumption is very rarely argued for: sometimes people will defend it by pointing out that the Neoplatonic interpretation makes a big deal out of the One, and then saying ‘Neoplatonism is mumbo-jumbo mysticism’; but even at best, this is just guilt-by-association. I think the assumption is basically implausible for a number of reasons, and the One (whatever it is) seems to be particularly important for Plato’s intentions (whatever they are). Hence why I have explicitly made room for the Neoplatonic interpretation on this list, even though it has few contemporary defenders.3
Probably none of these interpretations are right. I’m struck by how many unexplored combinations of these ideas there are, and how many gaps exist in the literature: more focus on the central importance of the ‘One’ without bringing in mystical Neoplatonism; using the Progressivist view that the Parmenides is a turning point in Plato’s thought to explain the role-reversal Straussians are so fixated on; taking the detailed and technical ideas the Unitarians have dreamt up to explain the Deductions, and using them to cast more light on what the ‘unwritten doctrines’ might have been; etc. Only a small subspace of possible interpretations has been explored thus far, and there’s no reason to expect that we’ve even hit upon the basic contours of the correct view.
If the Parmenides is a joke, it is possibly the worst / least successful joke in history, and suggests Plato would have been awful at parties.
Have I missed, or misunderstood, anything? Comments welcome.
I have capitalised ‘One’, and do so consistently in the rest of the post, because—even though this is generally considered bad form in the literature, because it is thought to prejudice our interpretation of the dialogue in some directions rather than others—it could otherwise be confused for a personal pronoun in English, which I don’t think is a risk in Greek. If you’re very familiar with the Parmenides your brain will know not to make this error, but most of us aren’t.
135a–d.
Though see Mitchell H. Miller, Plato’s Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul (1986).