A Hidden Code in Plato?

As someone who thinks he has found something hidden in Plato, I try to keep an open mind about others who make the same claim. Alerted by (of all people) Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, I followed his link to learn of one J.B. Kennedy, who claims to have found a hidden code in Plato (here). His claim is based on stichometry, which I admit I had never heard of before. This refers, according to Wikipedia, to counting the number of lines (of a standard length) in an ancient work for the purpose of calculating the scribe’s pay. Kennedy believes that one can learn something else, that Plato’s philosophy is fundamentally Pythagorean and that certain Pythagorean themes that are hidden within the text can be revealed by looking closely at the patterns made by the lines.

Right away, I have a problem. Kennedy writes that “modern scholars have often strongly denied [Pythagorean influence on Plato], in part because Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans are hardly mentioned in the dialogues.” Actually, I’m not familiar with anyone who takes this line, and Kennedy mentions no one who does. Scholars like Guthrie and Vlastos certainly affirm it, as did Aristotle.

Anyway, it’s a bit disappointing to learn that the hidden code is nothing other than Pythagorean themes and that they are somehow encapsulated within the form of the dialogues. That is to say, using Aristotle’s terminology, this hidden code is more about form than content. The content in fact is nothing other than what appears in the dialogues, as far as I can see.

As to whether there actually is a hidden code, I cannot say for certain since much of what he says is beyond the scope of my training and is really for classicists to decide. Much of it depends upon how the ancients calculated the length of a “line” (since spaces between words were generally left out and punctuation may have also been left out) and whether this had been standardized by Plato’s time.

Nevertheless, what I can say is that Kennedy seems to be cherry-picking his evidence. He claims that in the middle of Plato’s dialogues, one finds similar themes (on justice and God and kingship), though the dialogues he mentions are from Plato’s middle period, so this doesn’t impress me much. When mentioning the middle of the Parmenides, he is forced to revert to a dubious reference to the Pythagoreans on the Golden Mean. The Theaetetus he leaves out altogether.

He admits (in footnote 72) that Aristotle seemed unfamiliar with this code, though I suppose in his favor he could argue that since the code was supposed to be a secret, Aristotle may have just been maintaining that secret. Still, I’m not at all sure what was supposed to be secret here, since there is nothing that is significantly different from what is stated directly in the dialogues. By contrast, consider that the so-called unwritten doctrines held by Plato are not to be found in the dialogues (or are hard to find in them), so this hidden code doesn’t seem to amount to much.

The one surprising claim is that Kennedy insists that these patterns can be found even in early works like the Apology, though most of us think that Pythagorean influence didn’t begin until his middle period. I would need something more than an alleged code to be convinced of this. Clearly, the biggest influence on Plato in his early period was Socrates, as is seen by his towering presence in dialogue after dialogue. The Pythagorean influence seems to begin in the middle period, when Pythagorean themes (such as reincarnation) and characters (such as Simmias and Cebes) are introduced. Why introduce these Pythagorean elements if you want to keep Pythagorean influence a secret? It doesn’t make sense.

Now I said at the beginning that I believe I have found something hidden in Plato. Let me explain that I don’t think Plato meant to keep it hidden. It is a statement made in the Parmenides, which was probably written for Plato’s own students, and I’m fairly certain that all of them knew what he was talking about. I refuse to speculate on why we moderns fail to see it, because in retrospect it seems perfectly obvious what he was getting at.

The statement in question is Parmenides 135a3-4. From 1973 to 1993 I read that statement many times, and I always thought of it as nothing but unimportant blather from Plato. Then one day I realized that Plato was actually saying something important there. Consider that this statement comes almost right after the character Parmenides has delivered some objections against the forms, so we would expect an explanation or a summation at this point. Yet, it seems that we don’t get that. For those who think that the objections are mere exercises for the reader or some such, we don’t find Parmenides saying, “Well, Socrates, you have your work cut out for you in finding the errors in these objections.” And for those who think that the objections forced Plato to revise his theory, we don’t find Parmenides saying, “Well, Socrates, it looks as though you will have to modify your theory so as to avoid these objections.” Instead, here is what Parmenides said:

“The result [of hearing these objections] is that the hearer is confused and concludes that [the forms] don’t exist.”

When I finally figured out that this statement was important, I realized what had happened. Someone had invented those objections and was using them to argue that the forms don’t exist. We can infer that that person had persuaded many other people, for Plato (via Parmenides) had talked of “the hearer” (rather than merely "some hearers") as though nearly everyone who heard these objections was convinced by them. Plato went on in this passage to complain about how stubborn these people were and how they wouldn’t be persuaded, and then he observed that without the forms, thought and discourse would be impossible.

That is as far as I got by looking at just the Parmenides. By doing some background reading, I soon figured out whom Plato was primarily referring to in this passage: his own nephew Speusippus. Speusippus is known to have rejected the forms, yet this knowledge has never inspired scholars to imagine that somehow that rejection ever had any effect on Plato’s dialogues. However, it should be perfectly obvious that two philosophers from the same era residing in the same city who were even from the same extended family would have engaged in many debates on their philosophical differences. So, it is likely that these debates found their way into the dialogues, and the Parmenides is a great candidate for this since it contains objections against the theory of forms. There is even some slight evidence that Speusippus used one of these objections (the Third Man) to argue that forms do not exist. But even if that evidence didn’t exist, it would be extremely likely that he would have used it.

Anyway, my thesis is simple: for the last few decades of his life, Plato found himself in a great debate, a battle royal with his nephew Speusippus over the existence of forms. I’m not going to argue for this at great length, since I’ve already done so here, here, and in an essay in here. Suffice it to say that although Aristotle never explicitly mentioned a debate between the two, he probably alluded to it frequently. In passage after passage he referred to the views of two (and sometimes even three) parties, which the scholia have identified as Plato and Speusippus (with the third person, Xenoocrates, attempting a compromise between the two).

Now let me ask, which is more interesting, that Plato used some hidden code to express some Pythagorean themes, which are already expressed in his dialogues anyway, or that there was a grand debate between Plato and Speusippus that has been forgotten by history but whose existence can be inferred? I can’t say what others will think, but I will say that uncovering the existence of this debate was intellectually exciting and one of the highlights of my life as a scholar.

Let me conclude by noting that had I submitted Kennedy’s article, it would have been rejected with the usual line about my not knowing the literature (concerning what most scholars believe about Pythagorean influence), though somehow Kennedy’s article escaped this fate. This proves how uneven the standards are in peer review.

Comments

[Alrenous]

So are you personally convinced about the existence of forms?

[John Pepple]

Nope. I believe I'm pretty good at interpreting Plato, but I'm definitely not a Platonist. Likewise, someone could be a great interpreter of Karl Marx while not at all being a Marxist.

[Alrenous]

I see, thanks.