Two riddles resolved: the claim that Being neither rests nor changes and the claim that we are in the dark about Being

After it has been agreed that Being is atriton ti, the Stranger makes three assertions about Being: that by its own nature, Being neither rests nor changes (250c6-7); that Being is beside Kinêsis and Stasis (250d2-3); that we are in aporia about Being (250e1-2). In the Introduction to the present chapter, I had set up as a criterion for a successful explanation the ability to give an account of these statements. Let us now see how the part-whole relation can explain them. On the whole, critics have identified the problem as stemming either from the move from ‘Being is atriton ti’to ‘Being, by its own nature, neither rests nor changes’, or from the move from ‘Being, by its own nature, neither rests nor changes’ to ‘Being is beside Kinêsis and Stasis’.243 _{On the contrary, I shall argue that the three}

aforementioned assertions simply unfold what ‘Being is a triton ti’ means.

Starting with the first one, we have seen that it is characteristic of Plato’s view on composition that the whole is over and above its parts. This view is set against the Eleatics’ position, according to which the whole is the sum of its parts. On the Eleatic view, the relation between the parts and the whole is that of identity: the whole is the same as its parts, such that the nature of the whole is the sum of, or the fusion of, the nature of its parts. In the case of Being, this would amount to saying that the nature of Being is the nature of Kinêsis and the nature of Stasis taken together. This is precisely the relation that is denied at 250c6-7. By saying that Being, by its own nature, neither rests nor changes, the Stranger is denying that Being is the mere sum of its parts. However, this does not imply that Kinêsis and Stasis contribute nothing to the nature of Being, but only that Being is made of its parts but is not its parts. Take the example of a cake. There is a sense in which a cake is not the mere sum of its parts, for it does not suffice to make a fusion of all the

ingredients to have a cake. Indeed, the ingredients are related to one another according to certain proportions, a certain order in which they are mixed with one another, and a certain process that the ingredients undergo. As a result, the nature of the cake is not just that of the ingredients taken together, but a different nature to which the ingredients contribute, without the cake being reducible to any one, or to all, of them.

Turning to the second assertion, critics have found it problematic on the grounds that Being, qua genos, that is qua intelligible entity, must be at rest. Furthermore, as already mentioned in the introduction, the assertion is puzzling because it implies that Being is not one of the beings, for what has been established in the Gigantomachia is that to be is either to be an akinêton or to be a kinoumenon. The disjunction is not only exclusive, it is also exhaustive, for each and every being is either the one or the other. This is reasserted in our passage, for the Stranger asks how it is possible that Being is not at rest if it is not changing, and conversely, how it is possible that Being is not changing if it is not resting at all.244 _{The conclusion, which seems to follow from that, and that Theaetetus’s}

answer, ‘this is most impossible’, seems to capture, is that Being is not itself a being. Hence, is it a not-being?245_{Again, the part-whole relation gives us an explanation of this}

assertion, namely: a whole is not a proper part of itself. Being a whole, Being is not itself a proper part of what it is the whole of, that is, it is not itself one of the beings.246_However,

this does not imply that Being is nothing at all. The spatial vocabulary developed at 250b7-10 is helpful here. As a whole, Being encompasses Kinêsis and Stasis from outside. In this way, Being delimits the beings. It is thus not outside in the sense of having nothing to do with the beings, but outside in the sense of being the border, the limit of the beings. As a result, it is not a being in the sense of the other beings, but it is not a not-being either.

Finally, we shall address the epistemological paradox with which the passage ends. Following the assertion that Being neither rests nor changes but is outside of Kinêsis and Stasis, the Stranger admits that they now find themselves in a state of aporia which is comparable to that which they found themselves in about Not-Being. The aporiai about Not-Being are developed from 237 onwards, following the series of divisions whose goal is to catch the sophist. They have for a starting point, of which the Stranger now reminds 244.Soph. 250c12-d2.

245.Soph. 250d4: Πάντων µὲνοὖνἀδυνατώτατον.

246.That Being is not itself one of the beings has already been defended by Frede (1996), pp. 194-195. However, Frede’s claim is not based on an understanding of Being as a whole over and above its parts, but on his analysis of the Third Man argument.

Theaetetus, that it is hard to grasp what Not-Being is the name of without being trapped in

aporiai.247 _{From what we have just said, there is, indeed, a good reason to be puzzled by}

what Being itself is the name of, for Being itself is the whole that contains the beings, but again, it is not itself another being. In this way, Being is not the same as a being, but it is not not-being either, for as we have seen, Being is what contains the beings. Furthermore, recall the view of composition that is at issue: the whole is something over and above its parts, such that the relation between the parts and the whole is not that of identity. As a result, knowledge of the whole does not follow from knowledge of the parts. To take the example of the cake again, you might have already tasted all the ingredients of the cake separately, it does not follow that you will know how the cake will taste. For this reason, notwithstanding the fact that we know things about Being, and in particular its parts, it remains that we do not know yet what Being is.

3. 4. Conclusion:

The opening question of this chapter was that of the structure of the relation among Being, Kinêsis and Stasis, so as to account for the extensional and essential relation among the three genê, as well as the puzzling 249d-251a passage. The answer, which has been defended throughout this chapter, is that the relation is that of a whole to its parts, in the case where the whole is not the mere sum of its parts but something over and above its parts. We have seen, first, that this relation is introduced early in the dialogue, briefly in the Hot and Cold passage and in a much more developed way in the debate with the Monists. There, it has emerged that although the Monist theory, on the whole, is rejected, the view about composition according to which a whole is a unity over and above its parts is not criticised. Instead, it is reasserted in the very last bit of the argument (B2), which deals with Being itself and not any more with the One-Being of the Monists. Second, I have argued that the claim is made about themegiston genosBeing itself in thetriton tipassage. In this passage, we find the two elements which we had identified, at the beginning of the third part, as being characteristic of a whole over and above its parts, namely: (i) the claim that Being is a complex thing, which emerges from the description of Being as

247.The formulation is also very close. Compareποῖ χρὴ τοὔνοµ'ἐπιφέρειν τοῦτο,τὸµὴ ὄνat 237c1-2 with

‘encompassing’, ‘containing’ Kinêsis and Stasis, and (ii) that Being is nevertheless not reducible to them but something distinct, which has turned out to be the key to solving the different puzzles of the passage.

CHAPTER IV: The communion of kinds reconsidered: Sameness and