Plato’s Sophist is the second part of an unfinished quadrilogy of dialogues: The Theaetetus, the Sophist, the Statesman, and the unwritten Philosopher. Plato makes an effort to define the sophist by a digression into the nature of being and non-being. To understand the sophist would be better if we think of them as a pretender of non-being or an illusionist. The Philosopher is concerned with that which is being; the form of something. The sophist is concerned with that which is not-being; only an appearance of something. The problem of being and nonbeing is solved by understanding the predication use of the word ‘is.’
The discussion of being and non-being is brought up in the Theaetetus (188d-189b) in socrates’ argument about false belief. Instead of talking about knowing and not knowing, they shift to the idea of being and non-being. It is not possible to talk about or know non-being just as one cannot have visual content to non-sight.It does not make sense to say, I have the object of nothing in my view. There is no such thing as the object of nothing and hence false belief also does not make sense; one cannot know that which is not. That which is not does not exist and cannot be the content of perception, knowledge or being. The content of knowledge cannot be false or not exist because it is content and content is of something. This poses a problem that will be later solved via the predication use of ‘is’.
In the Sophist (246b-252a), the Visitor discusses categorization in the ontology of being; which kinds of being exist. The two primary groups distinguished being and becoming. The realm of being, the ‘Gods’, is immaterial and unchanging, does not act or is acted upon, and is intelligible. The realm of becoming, the ‘Giants,’ is material, changes, acts or is acted upon, and can be perceived by our senses. These two groups compose the ‘Battle of the Gods and the Giants.’
Deciding between the gods and giants is solved by the Philosophers accepting both change and rest as elements of being. (Soph. 249c10-d4) A common property must compose the nature of the two in being.The Visitor identifies the distinguishing mark of being as capacity stating, “a thing genuinely is if it has some capacity…either to act on another thing, of whatever nature, or to be acted on, even to the slightest degree and by the most trivial of things, and even if it is just the once...what marks off the things that are as being.” (Soph. 247e1-4) The capacity to act or be acted on is decided as the definition of Being.
The issue of non-being can be understood as a problem in our use of language. The Visitor states, “since we’re quite puzzled about it all, it’s for you to clarify for us what exactly you intend to indicate when you utter the word “is.”” (Soph. 244a4-7) There are two different functions of the term ‘is,’ one is of predication and the other is of identity. X = X, would be an example of identity. If we are understanding ‘is’ in the context of predication, we move beyond tautologies and can make a claim about something as something else like X is red.
In the context of predication, when we assert that x is red, we are combining the form of X with the form of redness. Through the use of ‘is’ the two forms are combined. Being is such a form that combines different forms via predication. Other forms like sameness, difference, rest and change (Soph. 255e) also has this mechanism of combining unlike forms together. The solution to non-being lies in identifying it with difference, “the pairs of sentences use the same ‘is’ [...]: ‘x is y’ is a positive predication, whereas ‘x is not y’ is a statement of non-identity whose explication relies on difference.” (Gill 54) The problem of non-being is solved by identifying it with difference and through an understanding of negation in the use of ‘is’ as predication.
In the universe of discourse, negation is everything that does not fall into the category of the subject in discussion. The Visitor states, “when a negation is uttered we will not concede that it signals an opposite…only…that ‘not’ and ‘not-’...point to something other than those names - or rather other than the things to which the names following the negation relate.” (Soph. 257b9-c3) ‘Non-Being’ is not ‘being’ of nothing. ‘Non-being’ is anything other than being.
References
Gill, Mary Louise. “C RIVELLI (P.) Plato’s Account of Falsehood. A Study of the Sophist. Pp. xii + 309. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Cased.” The Classical Review. Cambridge University Press. 2015. 65(1) pp. 53-55
Plato. Rowe, Christopher. “Theaetetus and Sophist.” Cambridge University Press. United Kingdom, 2015.
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