Sorglose Nacht

Overview

After the critique of innate notions in Book I of the Essay, Book II sets forth Locke’s theory of ideas.

Because Book II is quite long, these notes focus primarily on what I understand to be the Book’s most salient chapters (with regard to Hume and subsequently to Kant, which is where I’m going). Generally speaking, the focus is on the Locke’s doctrines of simple and complex ideas, of primary and secondary qualities, and finally his still interesting theories of general and personal identity.

Again, these notes are made on a copy of the Essay usefully excerpted by Jonathan Bennett.

Outline

Chapter I: Ideas in General, and their Origin

1. Since it is beyond doubt that we have ideas, the first question is “how do we acquire them?” Locke’s critique of innate ideas will be received more favorably, he thinks, once he shows how ideas can be acquired.
2. Suppose the mind starts out blank, “like white paper.” If this is so, experience can fill it with ideas. Experience has two forms: (1) experience of things outside the mind and (2) experience of the mind reflecting on its internal operations.
   1. Sensation is the vehicle which conveys to the mind things in the world that produce perceptions (ideas).
   2. Reflection is a type of “inner sense.” By reflecting or becoming conscious of the operations of our mind - believing, reasoning, willing, knowing, etc. - we get a distinct set of ideas that are not triggered by sensations of things in the world.
3. Now Locke then challenges the reader to “search into his understanding” and see whether he has any ideas other than those of sensation and reflection.
4. Locke believes that empirical research into child development supports this theory. Children, he believes, develop ideas of qualities by experiencing them in the world, and eventually cataloging them in memory.
5. How many simple ideas a person has depends for ideas of sensation on what variety there is among the external objects that he perceives, and for ideas of reflection on how much he reflects on the workings of his own mind.
6. This reflection requirement is why it is quite late before most children get ideas of the operations of their own minds, and why some people never acquire any very clear or perfect ideas of most of their mental operations. Unlike the objects of external experience, we are not forced to turn inward and reflect on the mechanism of our thoughts (Locke likens them to the parts of a clock - we can experience the clock without ever having a clear idea of how it works).
7. Since perceptions are the same thing as ideas, people have ideas as soon as they can perceive things.
8. For some rationalists, as long as the soul exists, it actually thinks (much like actual extension is coextensive with the existence of the body).
   1. Contrarily, Locke believes that the perception of ideas is to the soul like motion (as opposed to extension) is to the body. That is, it is not something essential to it, but rather something it sometimes does.
   2. It is at least not self-evident, Locke thinks we can all agree, that the soul always thinks.
9. On the contrary, Locke thinks that when we are asleep, the soul isn’t thinking. If the soul is in some state of thought while the body is sleeping, and when that body wakes, it has no consciousness of those states, then the sleeping and unsleeping version of Socrates seem to be two different people (insofar as they have different sets of mental experience, presumably).
   1. Since we know some people sleep without dreaming, and since it is implausible that someone would think of something for several hours and be able to give no account of it, it is likely that during that time, the person is not thinking at all.
   2. He carries on about this at some length, the basic drift being several versions of the argument that, “Nature never makes excellent things for trivial uses or for no use; and it is hardly to be conceived that…the power of thinking…is so idly and uselessly employed, at least a quarter of the time.”
   3. He writes of thoughts that we do sometimes have in our sleep and remember after waking, pointing out that they are mostly “extravagant and incoherent.” He says that his present opponents, faced with this evidence, will have to say that the soul thinks better when employing the body (in waking, i.e.) that when thinking “apart” from the body. He evidently thinks that this is an intolerable conclusion.
   4. The discussion gradually moves to the thesis that the soul thinks only when it has ideas to think with, and allowing him to return to the discussion of how ideas are acquired. So, finally, the chapter circles back.
10. Since there don’t appear to be any ideas in the mind before the senses have conveyed some in, Locke concludes that the understanding arises at the same time as sensation.
    1. In time the mind “comes to reflect on its own dealing with the ideas acquired from sensation, and thereby stores up a new set of ideas” (ideas of reflection).
    2. Note that this means that in getting ideas, the understanding is passive. It cannot refuse the sense data it receives.

Chapter II: Simple Ideas

1. Some ideas are simple. Some are complex. Simple ideas cannot be broken down into smaller component ideas. His examples are sensory: softness, warmth, whiteness, sugariness, etc.
   1. “Nothing can be plainer,” he marks, than the “clear and distinct perception” of simple ideas.
2. Simple ideas are supplied to the mind by sensation and reflection.
   1. Stocked with simple ideas, the understanding can “repeat, compare, and unite them” in an almost infinite variety of ways, thus making new complex ideas.
   2. No one, though, can invent a simple idea - these only come through sensation and reflection - nor force the understanding to destroy those that it has acquired.
3. While it seems sure that there are other possible senses than our five (or six, Locke teases), we, constrained as we are, cannot imagine qualities outside of those delivered by these particular, contingent senses that we actually do have.

Chapter VIII: Some further ideas concerning our simple ideas

1. When an object causes the mind to have a perception, the perception is a positive idea, regardless of whether the quality which is being perceived is positive or negative.
   1. E.g. heat and cold, light and darkness, motion and rest, are all equally clear positive ideas in the mind, despite the fact that one of each pair is (qua the object itself) a mere privation.
   2. To explain this he appeals to the experience of perceiving a shadow: “the shadow of a man consists of nothing but the absence of light, but doesn’t it cause in an observer as clear and positive an idea as does the man whose shadow it is, even though he is bathed in sunshine? And the picture of a shadow is a positive thing.”
   3. Now, if a person can be said to truly see darkness, it is hard to know for sure whether darkness is any more a privation than light is, and thus whether there really are any ideas from a privative cause.
2. For reasons of intelligibility and convenience, it will be useful to distinguish the idea of a thing as it exists in our minds, and the thing itself as it exists in the world.
   1. Call the immediate object of perception an “idea”, and call the power to produce an idea inherent in an object a quality. (E.g. a snowball has whiteness, coldness qualities insofar as it produces white and cold ideas in our minds).
3. There are two kinds of qualities: those that are utterly inseparable from the body, whatever state it is in - primary qualities - and those that that “are really nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities” - secondary qualities.
   1. E.g. An ice cube has the primary qualities solidity, extension, shape, rest, and number, and these produce corresponding simple ideas in us.
   2. Our ice cube also has the secondary qualities of coldness, slipperiness, taste, etc.
   3. A third kind of quality may be called a “power”. Powers are those things by which the primary qualities of a body (e.g. fire) give it a power to affect another body (e.g. wax) in a way as to change the sensible properties of the latter.
4. How do bodies produce ideas in us? Obviously they do it by impact.
   1. But, since external objects are not directly touching our minds, there must be some bodies too small to be seen individually that go from the object to our sense-organ.
   2. We can conceive of these very small particles as conveyances of secondary qualities also (smell, taste, etc.)
   3. But, where the ideas of the primary qualities of bodies resemble them (they exist in the bodies themselves), the ideas of secondary qualities don’t resemble them at all.
   4. “What is sweet, blue, or warm in idea is nothing but the particular size, shape, and motion of the imperceptible parts in the bodies that we call ’sweet’, ‘blue’, or ‘warm’.”
5. Arguments against secondary quality inherence
   1. This only makes sense, too, because while it might be sensible to imagine that an icicle inherently contains the quality “cold”, it seems less sensible to imagine that it contains the quality “pain”, even though I could stab you with one.
   2. Consider a stone that is red and white in the light. Prevent light from reaching the stone, and its colours vanish. Can anyone think that any real alterations are made in the stone by the presence or absence of light?
   3. Imagine that one of your hands is very cold. Now imagine you put both hands in water. The water feels hot to one of your hands (the cold one) and cold to the other.
6. So the qualities that are in bodies are of three sorts.
   1. Primary - the size, shape, number, position, and motion or rest of their solid parts. These are in bodies whether or not we perceive them.
   2. Secondary - the ideas of colors, sounds, smells, tastes, etc.. These are the power that a body has, by reason of its imperceptible primary qualities, to operate in a special way on one of our senses.
   3. Powers - the power that a body has, by virtue of the particular set-up of its primary qualities, to change the size, shape, texture or motion of another body so as to make the latter operate on our senses differently from how it did before.
   4. Though the two latter sorts of qualities are merely powers, secondary qualities are often otherwise thought of as akin to primary qualities. However, by understanding one’s self as merely another body on which an object acts, one can easily see that secondary qualities work one’s senses precisely as the powers of one body (fire) work another (wax).
   5. The second sort of qualities “may be called secondary qualities, immediately perceivable,” and the third sort “secondary qualities, mediately perceivable.”

Chapter XXIII: Our complex ideas of substances

1. Our complex ideas of substances
   1. The mind is supplied with many simple ideas, and sometimes, when it perceives several simple ideas together regularly, it presumes that they are one thing (with one name).
   2. Then we “carelessly talk as though we had here one simple idea, though really it is a complication of many ideas together.”
   3. We become acclimated to the idea then that these simple ideas are reliant on some substratum, which we call substance.
   4. Pure substance is thus merely the supposition of an unknown support of the qualities that cause simple ideas.
   5. From this we form a “relative” idea of substance in general - that is, our idea of it consists only in how it relates to other things, it has no non-relational content.
   6. From there, we move to the idea of several substances, which are defined by regularly repeating combinations of simple idea producing substances: man, horse, gold, water.
   7. Hence, Our complex ideas of substances are made up of those simple ideas plus the confused idea of some thing to which they belong and in which they exist.
2. When we think of any particular sort of corporeal substance - a stone, e.g. - although our idea of it is nothing but the collection of simple ideas of qualities that we usually find united in the thing called a stone, we think of these qualities as existing in and supported by some common subject.
   1. We give this support the name “substance,” though we have no clear or distinct idea of what it is.
   2. We are led to think in this way because we can’t conceive how qualities could exist unsupported or with only one another for support.
   3. The same goes for the functions of mind, whose substratum we call spirit. We have an equally foggy idea of spiritual substance as we have of bodily substance.
3. The most perfect idea of any particular sort of substance results from putting together most of the simple ideas that do exist in it.
   1. §7-8 is an apology for the remainder of this section referring to all powers as simple ideas for brevity’s sake. They are not actually simple, Locke cautions, but they are “simpler than the complex ideas of kinds of substance, of which they are merely parts.”
4. Again, recall that our complex ideas of bodily substances are made up of primary, secondary, and (passive and active) powers. (E.g. your complex idea of gold involves the power of being melted without being burned away, etc.)
   1. And again, secondary qualities are also powers, this time powers of affecting us, e.g. gold’s “color” is its power to induce the sensation of that color in us.
   2. As further evidence that these secondary qualities are relational, e.g. the color of something appears quite different to the naked eye as it does under a microscope.
   3. Locke is inclined to believe that God has “suited our organs to the bodies that are to affect them, and vice versa.” E.g. if our senses were much more or less acute, Locke observes, we would be less adapted for survival, despite the additional depth of knowledge we may acquire from such senses.
   4. §13 is a great tangent, in which Locke imagines angels that can “flex” their senses (vary their acuteness of perception). He is somewhat obviously jealous of these conjectural angels, but admits that God must have his reasons.
5. Besides the complex ideas we have of material, sensible substances, we can also form the complex idea of immaterial mental (”spiritual”) subject from the simple ideas we have through our minds’ operations (e.g. thinking, willing, understanding, knowing).
   1. Empirical knowledge is always knowledge of both some stuff in the world and of some mindly processes which cohere into the idea of a thinking subject (Locke: a “spiritual” or “immaterial thinking” being).
   2. Again, we /really/ know about as much about bodies as we do about immaterial spirit.
      1. Bodies uniquely have the basic ideas of (1) holding together parts that are solid and therefore separable, and (2) of causing things to move by colliding with them.
      2. Spirit uniquely has the basic ideas of (1) thinking, (2) will - putting body into motion by thought, and (3) liberty.
      3. Bodies and spirit share the basic ideas of (1) existence, (2) duration, and (3) mobility (note that the mind has to go when the body does, and, Locke notes, also has to leave the body at death).
   3. Neither the idea of body (extended thing) nor that of spirit (thinking thing) is very clear.
      1. Body is “an extended solid substance, capable of transferring motion by impact.”
      2. Spirit is “a substance that thinks, and has a power of making a body move, by willing or thought.”
      3. If anyone says “I don’t know how I think,” I respond that he also doesn’t know how he is extended, that is, how his parts cohere.
6. The next three sections deal with the problem of parts cohering. Namely, we don’t have a compelling hard stop for the regress of progressively smaller particles that we use to explain the coherence of each set of immediately bigger particles. (E.g. we explain water wrt molecules and molecules wrt atoms and atoms wrt … etc.)
   1. §27 addresses the appeal to surrounding pressures: if things get held together by pressure, what’s holding the entire finite universe together?
7. From here, Locke addresses bodies’ other quality, the power of transferring motion by impact (alongside the soul’s power of inducing bodily motion by thought). Locke here suggests that we have no more empirically-derivable knowledge about how bodies transfer motion from one to another than we do about how minds transfer motion to bodies.
   1. In fact, minds moving bodies is actually more comprehensible than other bodies doing it, because we intuit that minds have exclusive claim on the active power of moving, and objects on the passive power.
   2. Since minds (created spirits) are not separate from matter, they are both active and passive. God is totally active.
   3. In conclusion: Sensation convinces us that there are solid extended substances, and reflection that there are thinking ones. Experience assures us that one has a power to move body by impact, the other by thought. “That much is sure, and we have clear ideas of it; but beyond those we cannot go.”
   4. So, in sum, “we have as much reason to be satisfied with our notion of immaterial spirit as with our notion of body, and of the existence of the one as well as of the other.”
8. Finally, it may be hard to conceive how thinking could occur without matter, but it’s at least as hard to conceive how matter could think.
   1. We can build up an idea of God as infinitely powerful, wise, etc. through a general procedure that involves taking simple ideas from the operations of our own minds and from exterior things and enlarging them to infinity. (E.g. I know something. From that, I conjecture that I can know twice as many things. And then twice as many again. Etc. And the same way for magnitude/perfection of knowledge.)
   2. “It is infinity - joined to existence, power, knowledge, etc. - that makes our complex idea of God … God may be simple and uncompounded, still our only idea of him is a complex one whose parts are the ideas of existence, knowledge, power, happiness, etc. - all this infinite and eternal.”
   3. §36 brings the angels back, suggesting that we can imagine them as posessing qualities to a degree and extent between those of ours and God. Angels also provide, he thinks, further evidence that we are limited to knowledge by reflection and sensation - we cannot imagine how to communicate or know in a way that is not embodied.
9. The existence, configuration, and genesis of our ideas of substances make three things evident:
   1. All our ideas of substances are collections of simple ideas, along with the supposition of some unclarified substratum (substance).
   2. All of these simple ideas are received either by sensation or by reflection.
   3. Most of the simple ideas that make up our complex ideas of substances are really only ideas of powers, however apt we are to interpret them as ideas of positive qualities.

Chapter XXVII: Identity and Diversity

1. Leading up to xxvii, Locke had been talking about our understanding of various relational properties (duration, place, etc.) Now he introduces identity, in which we compare something at time t1 with itself at t2.
   1. Two things can’t exist in the same place at the same time, nor can one thing exist in two places at once.
2. We have ideas of three types of substances: God, finite intelligences, and bodies.
   1. God is without beginning, eternal, unalterable, and everywhere; and so there can be no doubt concerning his identity.
   2. Finite spirits and bodies have determinate times and places of beginning to exist. Each one’s relation to it’s beginning time and place will determine its identity for as long as it exists.
   3. While we can conceive of overlap of all three kinds (e.g. God, a person, and some matter can occupy the same space), we can’t conceive that two of any single kind can occupy the same place at the same time.
   4. Modes and relations ultimately depend upon substances and therefore the identity and diversity of each of them will be determined in the same way as the identity of particular substances.
   5. Finally questions of identity and diversity don’t arise for things whose existence consists in a succession of events, such as actions (thought, movement) - these are ephemeral, and don’t have the requisite parts for identity, namely substantiality.
3. Hence, the principle of individuation is “existence itself,” by which a being is tied to an unsharable particular place and time.
   1. While this seems straightforward qua simple substances, it seems equally clear that you can’t just linearly apply it to complex ones. E.g. a living creature is self-identical throughout periods of fatness and thinness.
   2. This imples that such an identity doesn’t depend on merely accounting for the same particles at different times.
4. So, for one mass of matter (an oak tree): where the mass of matter is merely a cohesion of particles, the oak tree is the disposition of particles such that they consist in an individual life.
5. If we imagine a watch whose parts are “repaired, added to, or subtracted from, by a constant addition or separation of imperceptible parts, with one common life, it would be very much like the body of an animal.” The unique bit of animality being that motion comes from within, not without.
6. If you don’t conceive identity as the participation of some matter in a unified life, your only recourse to an intuitive concept of identity is by the soul.
   1. But if you do this, then you run the risk of leaving open the possibility that a single soul has inhabited many men over time (e.g. that Socrates, Pilate, and St. Augustine are the same man).
7. So there are at least three different types of identities: “it is one thing to be the same substance, another the same man [e.g. animal], and a third the same person.” (Assuming these three are different ideas.)
   1. To be clear, although man is an animal, the idea of a “rational animal” is wrong. There’s a long story about a rational parrot here. The point is that even if you believe there was a rational parrot, it’s still a parrot, not a man, and hence, rationality is not necessarily exclusively criterial for man-ness.
8. So much for the identity of a unified life (animal/man identity). Now, what about “same person”?
   1. Well, what’s a person? Locke thinks it is a “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing at different times and places.”
   2. The enabling faculty for this is consciousness: “Consciousness always accompanies thinking, and makes everyone to be what he calls ’self’ and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things; in this alone consists personal identity…”
9. While it may be reasonable to question whether (e.g. you or I) are self-identitical thinking substances (res cogitans) - e.g.when we are asleep, or focused on the present moment, or forgetful - this is not the same question as whether we are self-identical as persons.
   1. What makes a person self-identically him- or herself is his or her selfsame consciousness, regardless of whether the consciousness is tied to one substance (res cogitans, again) throughout.
   2. The classic appeal to amputation: if I cut off your hand, you’re still the same person, hence, personal identity isn’t constituted substantially.
   3. If you hold that thought is instantiated immaterially, you can appeal to a sameness of immaterial substance as criterial for personal identity, but these immaterialists have to explain why personal identity /couldn’t/ be preserved through a change of immaterial substance (since, by analogy, animal identity - unity of an individual life - can be preserved through a change of material substance).
   4. Either way, until we have a clearer idea of the nature of thinking substances, “we had better assume that such changes of substance within a single person never do in fact happen, basing this on the goodness of God. Having a concern for the happiness or misery of his creatures, he won’t transfer from one (substance) to another that consciousness that draws reward or punishment with it.”
   5. Locke finally dismisses reincarnation theories: his thought experiment involves showing that while it is logically possible that you and Nestor share a soul, you can’t really conceive of yourself and Nestor as one identical person.
10. Let’s now agree that the some sort of non-stringent body identity settles the “man” question. Hence, the same immaterial substance or soul does not by itself necessarily make the same man. Although this is the case, it is clear that consciousness unites actions into the same person, and thus is the basis of selfhood.
11. Personal identity is the basis for the justice of reward and punishment.
    1. “…to punish Socrates awake for something done by sleeping Socrates without Socrates awake ever being conscious of it would be as unjust as to punish someone for an action of his twin brother’s merely because their outsides were so alike that they couldn’t be distinguished.”
    2. If one man could have distinct disconnected consciousnesses at different times, that same man would be different persons at different times.
    3. This is intuitively understood by the fact that someone’s insanity can legally disprove their guilt: we don’t punish the sane man for what the madman did; they are treated as two persons.
    4. Meanwhile, we sometimes justly punish sober men for their bad actions while drunk, Locke thinks, because while their bad actions are proved against them, their lack of consciousness of those actions can’t be proved for them. It’s a sort of rough and ready juridical heuristic.
12. Whatever substance there is, and whatever it is like, there is no person without consciousness.
    1. On the question of contingent fact, “the more probable opinion is that this consciousness is tied to, and is a state of, a single immaterial substance.”
13. “Person” is a legalistic name for a self which applies only to active, thinking beings capable of law, happiness and misery.
    1. Through consciousness, this personality is concerned and accountable for its past and present actions.
    2. That concern and ownership derives from a fundamental concern for happiness which necessarily accompanies consciousness.
14. Thus, it appears that the obscurity that people have found in matters of identity has arisen from the sloppy thinking rather than from any obscurity in things themselves. To wit:
    1. Any substance that begins to exist must necessarily be the same substance so long as it continues to exist.
    2. Any complex of substances that begins to exist must during the existence of its component parts be the same.
    3. Any mode that begins to exist is throughout its existence the same.
15. The general point is that the complex idea we use when classifying a thing as being of a certain kind also determines what it is for a thing of that kind to continue in existence.
    1. Suppose a man is a “rational spirit”: then it is easy to know what is the same man, namely the same spirit - whether or not it is embodied.
    2. Suppose a man is a “rational spirit vitally united to a body with a certain structure”: then such a rational spirit will be the same man as long as it is united to such a body, though it needn’t always be the same body.
    3. Suppose a man is a “vital union of parts in a certain shape”: as long as that vital union and shape remain in a compound body, remaining the same except for a turnover in its constituent particles, it will be the same man.

Overview

Primary Truths was written shortly after Leibniz’s famous Discourse on Metaphysics, which places it about ten years after Freedom and Possibility, five before A New System, and almost twenty five before the mature position in the Monadology and the Principles of Nature and Grace.

This essay importantly develops at least two of Leibniz’s fundamental principles, the so-called “Predicate-in-Notion Principle” (PIN: that the notion of the predicate is in some way included in that of the subject - cf. §2.a below) and the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernables (PII), which he indicates here is derivable from combination of the Principles of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and Contradiction (PC) (cf. §4 below).

Brandon Look explains the implicit argument nicely:

1. Suppose there were two indiscernible individuals, a and b, in our world, W.
2. If this were the case, then there must also be a possible world, W^*, in which a and b are "switched".
3. But if this were the case, then God could have had no reason for choosing W over W^*.
4. But God must have a reason for acting as he does. (PSR)
5. Therefore, our original supposition must be false. There are not two indiscernible individuals in our world. (PII)

Outline

1. The primary truths are identities (A is A, everything is similar or equal to itself).
2. All other truths are reducible to these identities by resolving their definitions into their (progressively simpler) component propositions. This is called an a priori proof.
   1. Predicate in Notion Principle (PIN): Since all truths follow from primary truths, it follows that in any true proposition the predicate is always in the subject.
   2. This is the case for every (necessary or contingent) affirmative truth, and this tells us something about the nature of contingency and the challenges in thinking necessity (the fate of the free, e.g.).
3. The principle of sufficient reason
   1. Take this axiom: “There is no effect without a cause/Nothing is without reason.” (PSR, see Overview) If this were false, then there would be a truth that couldn’t be proved a priori (couldn’t resolve into identities). So, if this is false, Leibniz’s theory of truth is false. So, this follows from Leibniz’s theory of truth.
   2. This also applies to symmetries: Symmetry will follow from symmetry.
   3. Finally, there is even a reason about eternal truths. Imagine that we live in a world constituted by tiny spheres. There still needs to be a reason why they aren’t cubes.
4. The principle of the identity of indiscernibles
   1. From these considerations, it follows that in nature there can’t be two things that differ in number alone. (PII, see Overview)
   2. The basic idea in this argument seems to be that if x is identical to y in every way but in the fact that it one a second instance of the other, then there is no reason for them both to exist.
5. It also follows that there are no purely relational properties - that is, all properties are properties of things, and relational properties are grounded in non-relational ones. This, I think, is meant to follow from (2.a): Since all P’s of a given S are contained within S, it would seem to follow that if relational predicate R is attributable to S, then it would have to be contained in S, or at least in some P of S.
6. Any complete notion of a substance contains all its predicates: past, present and future. (If an S will have P, then it is now has T where T = “it is true now that it will have P”).
   1. This is a complete (perfect) notion of a substance, and from this we are meant to understand that God, who has knowledge of the possibilities for each of infinitely many potentially actual complete notions, would choose the ones that it, in its supreme wisdom, thought best.
7. Every individual substance contains in its complete notion the entire universe.
   1. For any given things x and y, there is a true proposition about how x relates to y only if they are related to each other.
   2. Since there are no purely relational predicates, both x and y must contain a predicate that explains their relationship.
   3. This must be the case for x viz. every other thing in the universe.
8. This means that all created substances are mirrors of the entire universe, which is to say, God, the universal cause. These expressions vary in perfection.
   1. This implies that every time any created substance changes, it changes all the others.
   2. However, strictly speaking, this does not mean that any created substances exercises metaphysical action or influence on anything else. This is to say that there is no inter-substance causal relationship, because each substance already contains within itself the entire universe, past, present, and future, which means that substances just harmoniously change without any sort of meaningful interaction.
   3. This theory also cleanly accounts for the correspondence of soul and body, without having to provide a medium of transport. By the nature of their complete concepts, they are simply in harmony already.
   4. Further, this implies that there is no atom (no body that could not be split). If there were atoms, there would be no cause to explain the effects of (e.g.) their size and shape. Every material thing requires smaller material things to explain its various properties.
   5. This means that every particle in the universe contains a world of infinitely many creatures.
   6. It also means that there is no determinate shape in actual things, because there is infinite complexity in any materially instantiated thing. Therefore, perfect circles, etc. exist only in our thoughts.
9. Bodies, Monads
   1. Since things have no determinate shape, this means that bodies are just extension and motion (which are “not substances, but true phenomena”)
   2. That means that something unextended is required for bodies, because material, extended stuff (as infinitely complex) can’t deliver unity. Since this can’t be atoms, all that remains is something analagous to souls.
   3. Corporeal substance comes into existence through creation (as opposed to construction) and leaves through annihilation (as opposed to dispersal), because there is no reason for them not to last forever. (Luckily, we know this argument gets better.)
   4. Therefore, animate things don’t come into or go out of existence entirely, but are merely transformed.

Bureaucratic Note

Finally, I should note that this ends my dalliance with pre-Kantian rationalism. Although I plan to come back to Spinoza at some point, for now, in order to push through to modernity, I’m going to take a step back to the roots of Kant’s other wellspring, British empiricism, and take a look at some bits of at least Locke and Hume, before finally arriving at Kant himself, who will represent the start of the period of philosophy in which I am most interested, German idealism. So, up next: John Locke.

Overview

A Stranger, a student of Parmenides, will set out to define the Sophist. Upon reaching the conclusion that the Sophist is one who sells the appearance of wisdom, he will announce that in order to prove this conclusion, an investigation into the nature of non-Being will be required. This will be approached by an investigation into Being itself, which will be divided into five great kinds. By analyzing these, he will prove that the negation of not-being operates on the predicate being, not the subject. Further, negation simply implies difference, not opposition.

Background

This is a late Platonic Dialogue. After criticizing the Middle Period conception of the forms (the theory of separate, immaterial forms) in Parmenides. The Sophist and Statesman show the author’s increasing interest in mundane and practical knowledge.

The Setup

SOCRATES asks an Eleatic STRANGER to help him define the terms “statesman”, “sophist”, and “philosopher”. They start with Sophist. Socrates, remembering the method employed in Parmenides by its’ namesake, asks whether the stranger would like to proceed by Q&A. The Stranger indicates that he would, if someone would not give him a lot of sass-back, but just acquiesce to his points (qua young Aristoteles in Parmenides). Socrates proposes that THEAETETUS will do just that.

1. DIAIRESIS: Since Sophists are slippery to define, the Stranger suggests that they begin by using their proposed method on something easier; say, an angler.
   1. Str. defines two classes of arts: productive (or creative) and acquisitive. Anglers belong to the acquisitive class, which can itself be separated into two: exchange and conquest. Conquest may be further separated into hunting and fighting. Hunting can be divided into animal hunting and the hunting of lifeless things. Animal hunting can be divided into by-land and by-water. By-water into fowling and fishing. Fishing into enclosure (fishing by nets) and striking (by spear). Striking into firing (by night) and barbing (by day). Barb-fishing into spearing and angling (by hook).
   2. This method of definition-finding is called diairesis. Now we’re going to try this method on the Sophist.
   3. The Sophist is acquisitive, and further is a hunter. And a by-land hunter at that.
      1. Hunting on land has two divisions: Hunting tame and wild animals.
      2. Tame animals into hunting with violence [piracy, tyranny], and hunting with persuasion [lawyer, orator].
      3. Persuasion into public and private.
      4. Private into receiving hire and bringing gifts (lovers).
      5. For hire into those whose reward is virtue and whose is money. The latter of these is the Sophist.
   4. Alternatively the Sophist could follow the path of exchange. Exchange divides into giving and selling.
      1. Selling into the sale of one’s own productions (retailers), the sale of others’ (merchants).
      2. Merchants into those who provide food for the body, and for the soul (music, paintings, marionette playing, knowledge).
      3. Food for the soul -> display and (n). (n) -> sale of knowledge of virtue and sale of other kinds of knowledge (art-seller). The former is the Sophist.
   5. A third alternative is that the Sophist follows the path of the fighting arts. This into competitive and pugnacious.
      1. Pugnacious into violent (bodily strength) and controversy (words). Controversey into forensic and disputation. Disputation into without rules and by rules (argumentation). Argumentation into wasting and making money. The later of which is Sophistry.
   6. Fourth, we run down this line: Let’s start with the arts of discernment. This can be split into a) arts that split like from like and b) those that split better from worse.
      1. The latter is called purification, which can be split into purification of living things and of inanimate objects. The former can be split into purification of bodies and souls. The latter can be split into: the purification of vice and of ignorance. (Alternatively the former can be split into gymnastic and medicine.)
      2. The purification of ignorance requires instruction, which can be split into admonition (resolves stupidity - ignorance which thinks it’s knowledgeable), and the dialectical remedy for plain ignorance. The latter of these is the domain of the Sophists.
   7. Thus the Sophist is determined to be:
      1. A paid hunter after wealth and youth (c).
      2. A merchant in the goods of the soul, a retailer of these wares (and one who manufactures them) (d).
      3. A hero of debate (e).
      4. A purger of souls, clearing away notions obstructive to knowledge (f).
2. COMBINATION: With five definitions in hand, they set out to find the common elements of contained within the five.
   1. The Sophist is a disputer, and teaches disputation. That is, the art of argumentation about anything. This means that the Sophists (otherwise they would be bankrupt) are assumed to have knowledge about everything. Thus, Sophists are in possession of a conjectural, non-truthful knowledge of all things.
   2. Sophists thus imitate wisdom, he is like a juggler. And the imitative art, like anything, can be split: a) likeness-making (painters) and b) appearance-making (that is, where one could not get a broad enough perspective on the reality to even understand if there is a likeness or not.
   3. And now, if the essence of the sophist is that he produces appearances, and more precisely false appearances. He imitates the wise man (Sophist 268b-c). But how can we make sense of this appearing but not being, this stating things but not true things? We have to contend once again with Parmenides’ old doctrine: “He who says that falsehood exists has the audacity to assert the being of not-being.”
3. THE RETURN OF PLATO’S BEARD:
   1. To define the sophist as an expert in deception, as someone who produces false appearances by means of statements, the Stranger needs to show that Parmenides was wrong; he needs to demonstrate that it is possible to say and to think that things that are not are, and to do so without contradiction.
      1. We can’t say “things which are not” nor “what is not” because in doing so we attribute singularity or plurality to non-Being, which is inapplicable.
      2. This is the basic Quinean position on Plato: by admitting things that aren’t, you are already contradicting yourself. (Note that this is what propositional logic theoretically resolves - contra term logic - via bound variables.)
   2. Parricide?
      1. We can’t make the “image”/non-being analogy, because the Sophist will show that
         by defining images, we predicate non-being.
      2. False opinion seems to think that things are not are, or vice versa.
      3. Hence, the Stranger will be forced to test the philosophy of Parmenides.
   3. Investigating Being: Number
      1. First of all, all previous theories of being may have taken the concept of “being” as lightly as Theaet. used to take non-being. Thus, let us investigate being first.
      2. Both the concepts of multiplicity and unity run into problems when you assert them of being. Starting with unity, we go through the standard Purity-F regimen:
         1. If Being is one then it is both being and one, and hence not one.
         2. Being can’t parts (a beginning, end).
         3. Yet, if being is not one, it lacks unity, and hence is not whole (everything). Etc.
      3. Hence, maybe we need to throw away the idea that Being is either one or two.
   4. Investigating Being II: Essence
      1. Let’s appeal to various notions of essence (essentially: materialist and Platonic notions).
      2. Starting with the materialists, Str. wants to suggest that being is that which has any power to affect another. Now the appeal is that given bodies (changing) and souls (unchanging; essential).
      3. Further, Being must contain both the movable (insofar as it contains mind, life, and soul) and unmovable (insofar as it contains sameness, etc).
      4. Which is a bit like the problems of (c) above, insofar as both rest and motion require predication, which is thus a third term.
      5. But if the many cannot be one, and the one cannot be many, how again will we attribute being to motion or to rest? In other words, we need an account of how one thing can be called by many names.
   5. Return to Participation: To show that one thing can be called by many names and that some names specify the object but mis-describe it, the Stranger introduces some machinery. He proposes that some kinds can partake of other kinds (these terms appear to be synonyms and to introduce an asymmetrical relation between an object and a property it has), whereas some kinds cannot blend with each other.
      1. Further, there are great kinds that enable the blending of kinds, much as vowels enable consonants to fit together. Even as some expertise is required to determine which letters can associate with which, so dialectic is required to determine which kinds blend and which do not, and which kinds hold everything together and make them capable of blending, and which are causes of division.
      2. The Stranger announces that there are five great kinds. He will ask two questions about them: (1) what are they like? and (2) what capacity do they have to associate with each other? The kinds to be discussed are: motion, rest, being, sameness and difference. Note that these five are not claimed to be exhaustive of all great kinds. Presumably, there are others, such as are discussed in the second part of Parmenides.
4. THE FIVE GREAT KINDS: TWO QUESTIONS
   1. The Stranger addresses question (1): What is each of the great kinds like? He distinguishes each of the five kinds from one another, starting with being, motion, and rest.
      1. Motion and rest, as opposites, do not associate with each other; but being associates with both, since both of them are. Being must be a third thing distinct from them:
      2. Similarly, sameness and difference are distinct from motion and rest. Furthermore, being is distinct from sameness. They have to be different, because if they were not, when we say that motion and rest both are, we could substitute the same, and motion would be the same as rest.
      3. Finally, the Stranger distinguishes difference from being. This argument introduces a crucial distinction between two modes of predication.
      4. Difference is distinct from being, because difference is always in relation to other things (pros alla) and more precisely in relation to something different (pros heteron), whereas being is both itself by itself (auto kath hauto) and in relation to other things (pros alla).
   2. Question (2): The Blending of Kinds
      1. The Stranger carries out the analysis for one great kind, motion, and argues very systematically that motion is non-identical with each of the other four kinds (motion is not rest, not the same, and so on), but partakes of three of the four - all but rest.
      2. The whole analysis is implemented with two relations: non-identity (F is not G, because F partakes of difference from G), and positive predication (F is G, because F partakes of G). Note that this leaves out negative predication - which is what one would think Plato would want to use to handle the problem of false statement.
5. NEGATION
   1. The Stranger made a serious mistake about negation in the last two (constructive) puzzles about not-being earlier in the dialogue. The mistake was to suppose that the negation in “not-being” indicates the opposite of being (opposites are polar incompatibles, and these include polar contraries, like black and white, which have some intermediate between them, and polar contradictories, like odd and even, and motion and rest, which do not).
      1. The opposite of being (its polar contradictory) is nothing. Parmenides was right to object that we cannot speak or think about nothing. If any speaking or thinking is going on, we are speaking or thinking about something. The Stranger showed in the first three (destructive) puzzles about not-being that any attempt to refer to nothing fails.
      2. But Parmenides was wrong to suppose that all talk about what is not is attempted talk about nothing.
      3. The problem of not-being is solved by recognizing two things: (1) the negation operates on the predicate, not the subject; (2) the negation need not specify the opposite of the item negated but only something different from it.
      4. Now, the negation appears to specify part of a wider kind which is determined by the positive term (e.g. large) that is negated (in this case size). Like varieties of applied mathematics, whose content is supplied by the domain to which the knowledge is applied, there are kinds of difference whose content is supplied by the objects differentiated.
      5. A kind of difference (say size) contains two parts, which are opposites (polar contradictories), such as large and not-large. Let us call this kind an incompatibility range.
   2. The Stranger distinguishes between names and verbs. A verb is a sign that is set over actions (or properties); a name is a sign that is set over the things that perform the actions (or have the properties). There cannot be a sentence that is simply a string of names or a string of verbs. A statement must fit a name together with a verb.
      1. The central idea is very simple. Statements are structured.
      2. For instance, “Theaetetus is sitting” is true, because “sitting” specifies something that is about Theaetetus, who is currently sitting. “Theaetetus is flying” is false, because “flying” specifies something different from what is about Theaetetus.
      3. As noted above (§4.b.ii), we need negative predication to explain the false statement: If “Theaetetus is flying” is false, it is false because the negative predication “Theaetetus is not flying” is true.
      4. The analysis of negative predication (as distinct from non-identity) is complex. This is what scholars of the Sophist talk about; which is a lot more detailed than we care to be.
6. MUTATIS MUTANDIS…
   1. The Sophist was left closed in the imitative art, which was a kind of creation. But now, we’re going to go back and note that creation is of two kinds: human and divine.
      1. Inside the human kind of creation, we have a split (again) between representational creation and appearance-based creation. Now, from above we remember that the latter was to partake of falsehood, it it could be shown that falsehood was a part of real being. We have now accomplished this, and thus, it is so.
      2. This diairesis continues until we come to our definition of a Sophist: “he…who…is an imitator of appearance, and is separated from the class of phantastic which is a branch of image-making into that further division of creation, the juggling of words, a creation human, and not divine-any one who affirms the real Sophist to be of this blood and lineage will say the very truth.”