Europe and the Stranger

ABSTRACT

With few exceptions, the prominent role of the Stranger in Plato’s late dialogue on the Sophist has drawn little attention in Plato scholarship. Yet, in this dialogue Plato charges the expatriated Stranger, who, furthermore, lacks a patronym and thus is not identifiable, remaining a stranger to the end, with the task not only of rejecting all philosophy hitherto as nothing more than a kind of storytelling about Being, but also of committing the parricide of Parmenides, the father of Greek philosophy itself. By refuting Parmenides’ thesis on Being, including the claim that Non-being is unthinkable and unsayable, the Stranger develops a philosophy that for the first time merits this title. The core of his doctrine of the “greatest kinds” consists in recasting Non-being in terms of otherness, thus unseating the priority of the principle of opposition that, until then, dominated philosophical thinking. This paper delves into what it means for Greek philosophy to invite a stranger to uproot its founding principles and replace them with a philosophy of alterity. I argue that, insofar as Europe, or the West, claims to have its origin in Greece, the Stranger’s philosophy of alterity is, perhaps, Europe’s most important but also least attended origin.

Notes

1 This text is a short version of a longer piece destined to be included in a forthcoming companion volume to my book on Europe, or the Infinite Task.

2 Waldenfels, Topographie des Fremden, Vol. 1, 16–17.

3 Plato’s Sophist: The Professor of Wisdom.

4 Liddel and Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, 1189.

5 Rosen, Plato’s Sophist, 140.

6 Socrates’ question concerning whether the Stranger’s philosophical companions think the three names pertain to one thing or to three different kinds (gene) links the question of what the philosopher, the sophist, and the statesman are from the start of the dialogue to the question of logos, that is, to the question of the elementary constituents of intelligibility that will be the object of the central part of the dialogue.

7 See Gadamer, ‘Das Vaterbild im griechischen Denken’.

8 Rosen, Plato’s Sophist, 245, 281.

9 The Stranger continues: “Then whenever the negative is said to signify a contrary, we won’t grant it, but only this: that ‘non’ and ‘not’, when placed before the names that come after them, proclaim something other than those names, or rather proclaim something other than the things to which the names uttered after the negative are given” (257b–c).

10 Liddel and Scott, 893, 943.

11 Rosen, Plato’s Sophist, 284.

12 Ibid.

13 Rosen has convincingly argued that absolute Non-being cannot be a form. Even though Non-being as such cannot be a form, awareness of the context in which the Stranger refers to “the form of Non-being” (258d), namely, his evocation of the stakes of the debate with Parmenides, make it unnecessary to elaborate on the possible meaning of what a form of Non-being could carry with it.

14 Friedländer and Meyerhoff, Plato, 274.

15 Ibid.