On Plato's 'Sophist.'

ONCE THE STRANGER TAKES OVER THE DISCUSSION at the beginning of the Sophist,(1) and agrees to discuss the sophist, the statesman, and the philosopher, it is hard to remember that Socrates had arranged to meet with Theodorus, Theaetetus, and young Socrates once more, even after he had left Theaetetus completely barren, at least temporarily, and had encountered a resistance on Theodorus's part to his further participation in any argument which the interval of a single day could not, it seems, have overcome (Theaetetus 169c6-7; 183c5-d5). The Stranger's intrusion thus makes us fail to notice that the only possible interest Socrates could have had in the same group would have been in young Socrates, about whom he knows only that he developed with Theaetetus a way of classifying two kinds of number: those with integral square or cube roots and those without. If Socrates had engaged young Socrates in a discussion, and informed Euclides about it in the same way as he had reported his discussion with Theodorus and Theaetetus, we know that Euclides could not have transposed Socrates' report into direct discourse and omitted Socrates' I said and He said. A transposition of the kind Euclides practiced in the Theaetetus would have led to the indiscernability of the two Socrateses, since each would have addressed the other as Socrates, and there is no reason to believe that the wiser answers would have consistently belonged to only one of them. The dialogue between the two Socrateses, which does not occur at dawn on the day after Socrates' appearance before the kingarchon, would not perhaps be of any interest if it did not call attention to the characterization of thinking on which Socrates and the Stranger both agree: thinking is the silent conversation of the soul with itself (Theaetetus 189e4-190a7; Sophist 263e3-264a3). A double negation is assigned to thinking. Thinking is dependent in its presentation on the denial of two things that are indispensable for conversation: it must be before another, and it must be spoken. On the one hand, to strip speaking of its vocalic character is to assign it consonants by themselves and thus to deny it the possibility of any combination of elements, even though the combination of consonants with vowels is that which alone makes it possible to overcome the problem of nonbeing and falsehood (253a4-6). On the other hand, to strip speaking of a second participant in the conversation is to transform the single speaker into a double thinker, who retains in his doubleness the singular identity of the speaker, and who is going by the same name cannot control the split he needs in himself. Whatever thought one self gives birth to, the other self cannot test it objectively and must succumb, as fathers do, to favoring his own thoughts because they are his own. The Stranger's intrusion thus looks like a godsend for both Socrates and Plato. It is a godsend for Plato, since a philosopher of the same caliber as Socrates can continue the discussion in a form that Plato has no trouble transcribing. It is a godsend for Socrates, since he is not forced to face the true difficulty his own revision of Protagoras raises, namely, How is thinking possible if the thinker in becoming a double agent becomes thereby a double patient, and if whatever he thinks experiences a multiplicative effect that is in no time completely out of his control? Socrates proposes at the beginning of the Statesman to examine young Socrates as a means for his own self-knowledge (257d1-258a6). Whether or not he could have succeeded in such a task, we know that Plato could not have shown him in either his success or his failure had Plato continued to preserve the nonnarrated form of the Sophist and the Statesman. The missing dialogue Philosopher, which would have been the truth of which the Sophist and Statesman are two phantom images, could never have been written without Plato's reversion to Socrates' or Theodorus's narration of it. …