Platonic Synergy: A Circular Reading of the Sophist and Timaeus

ABSTRACT

The Sophist, with its ostensible goal of locating and defining the sophist, is among the Platonic dialogues often read by rhetoricians. Plato’s Timaeus, less so. This has been an oversight because the Timaeus provides a metaphysical explanation for Plato’s anxieties about sophistry and rhetoric. When read together, the Sophist and Timaeus warn of the dangers of sophistry, though they do so in contrasting ways. The Sophist directs us to the external world while the Timaeus directs us inward toward an eternal, unchanging reality. We learn from the Timaeus that sophistry causes both corporeal and metaphysical wandering, a type of motion which runs counter to that of the natural order of the universe and which Plato associates with opportunism and instability. He contrasts wandering with the circular motion associated with philosophical steadfastness. Reading these dialogues in tandem reveals a set of overlapping dichotomies which connect the Timaeus to other dialogues in which Plato addresses sophistry and rhetoric.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Amy Anderson, Martin Camper, Ned O’Gorman, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts, and to Jim Crosswhite, Michele Kennerly, and Malcolm Wilson for their ongoing encouragement.

Notes

1. Translations of the Timaeus are modified from Cornford (1937). Greek editions of Plato’s dialogues referenced throughout are the Oxford Classical Texts.

2. See, for example, Ulmer (1994); Rice (2007); Arroyo (2013); Rickert (2013); and Alford (2016).

3. Ironically, the word “planet” is itself a misnomer: according to Plato in the Laws, celestial bodies only appear to move at random, when in fact they follow consistent paths (Plato 1907, 7.822a).

4. Plato’s association of wandering with moral deficiency is related to his understanding of harmonia. See, for example, Lynch (2020). On harmonia in Aristotle, see Vatri (2016).

5. In fact, Montiglio (2000) tracks the significance of two verbs that mean “to wander” in ancient Greek philosophy, alāsthai and planāsthai, though I focus only on the latter in this essay, since this is the verb Plato uses to describe sophists in the Timaeus.

6. See also Montiglio (2005), especially chapters 5 and 7. She points out that physical “wandering highlights the Sophist’s unphilosophical character and matches his Protean mutability” (2005, 106).

7. For a book-length reading of the Phaedrus, see Ferrari (1987), and see Pfister (2020) for a nuanced reinterpretation of Plato’s cicada imagery. Kennerly notes that Socrates, though closely associated with Athens and loath to wander away from it, has been employed historically as an atopic topos to express feeling out of place: “Socratica embed Socrates in Athens. Within them, he leaves his polis only to protect it in battle (Symposium), but he wanders beyond its walls temporarily to splash in the Illisus (Phaedrus), to walk the road between the Academy and the Lyceum (Lysis), to attend upon two philosophers staying just outside the city walls (Parmenides), and to pray to a Thracian goddess at the Piraeus (Republic). He will not leave Athens even to evade his death sentence and save his life (Crito 52b)” (2017, 198).

8. According to Montiglio, Presocratic philosophers, too, “valued and practised wandering as a means of expanding their horizon through the observation of diverse people and places,” but that in all other ways “they shared the predominantly negative connotations attached to wandering in contemporary Greece” (2000, 91-92).

9. I’ve argued previously that Plato’s emphasis on circular motion and a unique, spherical universe in the Timaeus is connected to the Parmenidean tradition of “well-rounded truth” (Myers 2018, 69 n.15). This connection between truth and circularity is also relevant to the Sophist because of the Eleatic Stranger’s personal relationship with Parmenides.

10. Muckelbauer holds that the Eleatic Stranger is a more ambiguous figure than he appears to be, and points to his name, Xenos, which both “[resonates] with a sense of the unfamiliar and uncertain” and “intimates a necessary sense of hospitality,” as a sign of this ambiguity (2001, 228). “This guide is a stranger-friend,” he argues, “or rather, a stranger who must be welcomed as a friend in order to proceed” (2001, 228).

11. Translations of the Sophist by White in Plato (1997).

12. On mimēsis and Plato, see, for example, Haskins (2000); Grethlein (2020); and Kastely (2015).

13. In spite of the rumors, Socrates argues, he does not charge a fee for his services, unlike prominent sophists who can do so in any city of their choosing (Apol. 19d-e), and he instead lives in poverty (23b).

14. On the Stranger’s seven definitions of the sophist, see Esses, who gauges the Stranger’s success in this way: “The Visitor’s principal aim in the Sophist, however, is simply to reach a satisfactory definition of sophistry, and he succeeds at that. His success lies not only in how he illuminates sophistry’s essence, but also in how he affirms and develops Socrates’ judgment that ignorance makes philosophers and sophists appear the same” (2019, 313-314).

15. McCoy (2008) makes a similar observation in her reading of the Sophist and Theaetetus in chapter 6.

16. Essential book-length treatments of the Timaeus include Sallis (1999); Johansen (2004); Broadie (2012); and Ruben (2016). See Poulakos and Crick (2012); and Sutton (2015) for other examples of the connection between rhetoric and natural philosophy, albeit in Aristotle.

17. A comprehensive history of the postclassical textual transmission of the Timaeus can be found in Hoenig (2018). See Das (2020) for the Arabic reception of the Timaeus.

18. Ordering Plato’s dialogues is a speculative endeavor, though there are generally agreed-upon groupings of dialogues based on language, style, and philosophical content. For an overview of these groupings, see Irwin (2019).

19. On the strangeness of the Timaeus in both form and content, see chapter 6 in Kahn (2013). Kahn reads the Timaeus as Plato’s reconciling of his theory of the Forms with the natural world, and the form of this dialogue—namely, a creation myth told in one long speech—“reflects a shift in philosophical method as well as in literary form” (2013, 177). On genre and Plato’s dialogues, see Nightingale (1995).

20. It is worth mentioning, as McCabe does, that the “two-day conversation Socrates had after the festival of a goddess” references in the beginning of the Timaeus is decidedly not the event that has taken place in the Republic, as a reader familiar with both dialogues may expect (2019, 114). The first clue that the opening of the Timaeus does not reference the gathering in the Republic is the goddess honored at each festival: in the Republic, Bendis, a Thracian goddess, is honored, while in the Timaeus, Athena is honored. This discrepancy is not due to Platonic carelessness. Rather, the marked difference encourages the reader to think more critically about the relationship between the two dialogues, leading one to notice that the summary of the previous day’s conversation at the beginning of the Timaeus “in fact leaves out all the central metaphysical and epistemological material of [Republic] books V—VII” (2019, 115). Though the opening of the Timaeus does not refer directly to the Republic, Plato brings the two dialogues into conversation through a kind of intertextual paraleipsis, prompting the reader of the Timaeus to keep the Republic, particularly those left-out central books, in mind.

21. Cornford assumes a tripartite narrative, with the first section containing the works of Reason, the second that which comes about from Necessity, and the third how “the two strands of rational purpose and necessity are woven together in a more detailed account of the human frame” (1937, 32-33).

22. On the phrases eikos logos and eikos mūthos, see Brisson (2012). Casnati (2011) unpacks the relationship between eikos (“likely”) and pseūdos (“lie”), and Crivelli (2012) offers a study of falsehood in the Sophist.

23. Concerning the types of sensation, see Fletcher (2016). This tripartite soul echoes that of the Phaedrus (246a ff.)

24. Plato further elucidates the tripartite soul in Republic 4.439c-e, where he refers to the reasoning part of the soul as the logistikon, the appetitive part the epithumetikon, and the spirited part the thumoeidēs.

25. I shamelessly borrow “antidote” (pharmakon) from Derrida (1981).

26. In the Laws, the Athenian Stranger prescribes rocking babies constantly in one’s arms to lull them to sleep. The reason this rocking works is because of the poor, agitated condition of babies’ souls: “ … applying external motion subdues the fear and agitation within, and inspires an apparent stillness and calm in the soul … ” (Plato 1907, 7.791a, my translation).

27. Here, khōlēn (from khōlos) does, in fact, mean “limping” or “lame,” and the ableist language in Plato’s corpus and in the ancient Greek world at large should not be overlooked. See Holmes (2010); and Kiefer (2014). On the place of disability studies in classical reception, see Adams (2021); Penrose (2015); Silverblank and Ward (2020); and the “Special Section on Metis” from Disability Studies Quarterly (2020).

28. My equating philosophy with movement is influenced in part by Muckelbauer’s argument about distinguishing Copy from Simulacrum in the Sophist: “This conclusion, that the distinction between the Copy and the Simulacrum emerges only through the repeated and differential movement of encounters, is perhaps less provocative than it appears. What it amounts to is nothing more than the point our guide has been showing us all along (had we only been able to see): in order to hunt down the Sophist, one must travel—not because the Sophist is located elsewhere, but because travel is the necessary condition for locating” (2001, 238-39).

29. On philosophy, sophistry, and Athenian political life, see Johnstone (2009).

30. I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for connecting sophistic wandering with both Becoming and Plato’s xenophobia.

31. Regarding Plato’s opinions about democracy and its relationship with sophistry, Muckelbauer describes Plato as “an idealist who abhorred the Sophist’s interest in practical discursive wisdom” and “a reactionary aristocrat who resented the Sophists for selling speeches and encouraging democracy” (2001, 226), and Pernot makes similar observations, stating that Plato’s criticism of rhetoric and its practitioners, the sophists, has “a political slant” in that Plato was “an adversary of the democracy” who could “only denounce the art of oratory, one of the mainsprings of this type of government” (2005, 46).

Additional information

Funding

Work on this essay was supported by a Research Fellowship awarded by the International Society for the History of Rhetoric.