Plato Grows from Derrida

The Plato familiar to his students has not been redone here. A different and fully organized structure of thought emerges from a close reading of his Dialogues and Letters. The purpose of the book is to put it together. The project has steadily grown through the labour of some thirty years from the primary sources – Plato’s Dialogues and Letters and Plotinus’ The Six Enneads, while the author read side by side the existentialists and Derrida. Parmenides, Plato’s Dialogue of that name, is the genesis of the metaphysics of Dialogues. Old Parmenides is the teacher here and young Socrates the learner. Socrates is unable to defend his growing doctrine of ideal forms against the battery of Parmenides’ logic. How could one idea appear in many phenomena and yet be one? How could it enter time and yet be eternal? Socrates is unable to explain. Parmenides then propounds the oneness of the amorphous being beneath the illusory appearance of the phenomenal multiplicity as the reality which Socrates had altogether missed. Parmenides’ purpose is constructive in this. It is first to teach Socrates that the shadows have the indeterminate wall to pass on and its reality must be recognized. As to the original substances which the shadows indicate Socrates is on the right track, he sees. So, secondly, Parmenides supplies him correct argument to develop his budding thesis. Socrates does not discern the aporia within Parmenides’ argument demolishing all forms. But Parmenides is aware of it all along. So he draws Socrates’ attention to it and deconstructs himself for Socrates. By proving his thesis that all being is indeterminate, Parmenides says, he disproves it as well. He proves it with the use of discourse. He calls his indeterminate reality ‘one’, for example. But what is one if not a universal idea determinate as such? Any stone or tree or man or animal could become ‘one’ by partaking of the idea of oneness. And what are stone, tree, etc., but ideas? Joining of many ideas in terms of signs in a necessary grammatical order is discourse. Then grammar, too, has to be universal of which every particular sentence partakes to become a single structure of many verbal parts. Every language is an abstract system of signs and grammar Saussure calls Langue. The signs in it do not stay apart but inhabit one another. This is the principle pronounced first by Parmenides, not Derrida. Every speech Saussure calls parole draws on the Langue constituted in the consciousness of a speech-community. But Langue draws on what? ‘On universal language’, seems to be the Parmenidean answer developed further in Cratylus and Sophist. It is the shadow of the ideal presence and inborn to us as the reminiscence. As such it seeks to raise what it knows but lacks by distinguishing, interrelating and naming all things. The languages differ owing to differing signs and grammars but alike participate in the universal structure. Silence is the suitable expression of the indeterminate reality of Parmenides’ notion. But silence can make no discourse and without discourse there can be no philosophy. The linguistic signs the discourse is made of indicate forms. So the forms establish themselves in the very act of demolishing the forms. If a man, Parmenides says, “does away with ideas of things and will not admit that every individual thing has its own determinate idea which is always one and the same, he will have nothing on which his mind can rest.” He will “utterly destroy the power of reasoning” and discourse for it requires names which indicate the ‘iterable’ universals in structural relations. “But, then, what is to become of philosophy? Whither shall we turn, if the ideas are unknown?”