The Eleatic Palamedes
Read the full text in our reader
Socrates — τὸν Ἐλεατικὸν Παλαμήδην λέγοντα τέχνῃ… φαίνεσθαι τοῖς ἀκούουσι τὰ αὐτὰ ὅμοια καὶ ἀνόμοια καὶ ἓν καὶ πολλά μένοντά τε καὶ φερόμενα;
Socrates now lifts the point out of the courtroom and carries it to the summit of philosophy. He calls up the 'Eleatic Palamedes' — a witty nickname for Zeno of Elea, the philosopher who, by sheer force of argument, could make his hearers see the very same things as 'similar and dissimilar, one and many, at rest and in motion.' Zeno was famous for exactly this: his paradoxes argued that motion is impossible and that plurality is incoherent, forcing listeners to grant that what plainly seems one is many, what plainly moves is at rest. If even the profoundest metaphysics proceeds by making the same thing appear under opposite descriptions, then the power Socrates has been circling — the power to argue any side of anything — is not some grubby courtroom trick. It is a universal art, reaching from the pettiest lawsuit to the nature of being itself. And at the center of his list sits the pair that will unlock the whole argument: homoia kai anomoia, 'like and unlike.'
Socrates presses the generalization. The skilled speaker can make the same act appear just or, when he wishes, unjust; and before the assembly can make the same policy seem now good, now its opposite. Then he widens it all the way: don't we know the 'Eleatic Palamedes' — Zeno of Elea — who by his art could make the very same things appear to his hearers similar and dissimilar, one and many, at rest and in motion? The art of contradiction, it turns out, is not confined to courts at all.
By invoking Zeno, Plato does two things at once, and both matter. The first is a piece of intellectual honesty. He has been building a case that seems aimed at discrediting the art of arguing opposite sides — antilogic, the sophists' specialty — as a truth-blind knack. But here he cheerfully admits that his own philosophical ancestors, the revered Eleatics, practiced exactly this art: Zeno's paradoxes are pure antilogic, making the one appear many and the moving appear still. Plato will not let the argument become a simple condemnation of contradiction, because contradiction, wielded rightly, is the engine of philosophy itself — it is how Socrates cross-examines, how the dialogues proceed, how a false belief is exposed by being shown to contradict what the believer also holds. The power to make the same thing appear under opposite aspects is not the enemy; it is a tool, as available to the philosopher hunting truth as to the demagogue peddling illusion. What separates them is not the tool but whether it is guided by knowledge. The second thing Plato does is quietly plant the key that opens the rest of the discussion, and it is the word-pair at the heart of Zeno's list: like and unlike, homoion and anomoion. Watch what Socrates is about to build on it. He will argue that deception, the leading of a mind from truth to falsehood, always works by small steps across resemblances — you cannot fool someone by a wild leap, only by sliding him from a thing to something almost like it, and then to something almost like that, until he has traveled to the opposite of where he began. The whole art of misleading, therefore, depends on knowing precisely how things resemble and differ, on mapping the fine gradations of likeness among them. And that map is nothing other than knowledge of what the things truly are. So the very universality Socrates has just established — that this art can make anything appear anything, from a just act to the nature of motion — becomes the ground of his reversal. An art that powerful, operating everywhere by likeness and unlikeness, cannot be practiced well by someone ignorant of the truth of things, because he would not know which resemblances are real and which will collapse under scrutiny. Zeno could do what he did only because he understood being deeply. The Eleatic Palamedes is not a warning against the art; he is proof that the art at its height requires a philosopher.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 261d in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Phaedrus — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Phaedrus 261d — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/261d/