Sophist

Str. Then let not anyone assert that we declare that not-being is the opposite of being, and hence are so rash as to say that not-being exists. For we long ago gave up speaking of any opposite of being, whether it exists or not and is capable or totally incapable of definition. But as for our present definition of not-being, a man must either refute us and show that we are wrong, or, so long as he cannot do that, he too must say, as we do, that the classes mingle with one another, and being and the other permeate all things, including each other, and the other, since it participates in being, is, by reason of this participation, yet is not that in which it participates, but other, and since it is other than being, must inevitably be not-being. But being, in turn, participates in the other and is therefore other than the rest of the classes, and since it is other than all of them, it is not each one of them or all the rest, but only itself; there is therefore no doubt that there are thousands and thousands of things which being is not, and just so all other things, both individually and collectively, in many relations are, and in many are not.

Theaet. True.

Str. And if any man has doubts about these oppositions, he must make investigations and advance better doctrines than these of ours; or if he finds pleasure in dragging words about and applying them to different things at different times, with the notion that he has invented something difficult to explain, our present argument asserts that he has taken up seriously matters which are not worth serious attention; for this process is neither clever nor difficult, whereas here now is something both difficult and beautiful.

Theaet. What is it?

Str. What I have spoken of before—the ability to let those quibbles go as of no account and to follow and refute in detail the arguments of a man who says that other is in a sense the same, or that the same is other, and to do this from that point of view and with regard for those relations which he presupposes for either of these conditions. But to show that in some sort of fashion the same is the other, and the other the same, and the great small, and the like unlike, and to take pleasure in thus always bringing forward opposites in the argument,—all that is no true refutation, but is plainly the newborn offspring of some brain that has just begun to lay hold upon the problem of realities.

Theaet. Exactly so.

Str. For certainly, my friend, the attempt to separate everything from everything else is not only not in good taste but also shows that a man is utterly uncultivated and unphilosophical.

Theaet. Why so?

Str. The complete separation of each thing from all is the utterly final obliteration of all discourse. For our power of discourse is derived from the interweaving of the classes or ideas with one another. [*](The denial, that is to say, of all the interrelations of ideas leads to purely negative results. Examples of this are the exclusive antithesis of being and not-being and the mutual exclusion of rest and motion. The difficulty is solved at once when we recognize that positive and negative are necessarily interwoven in the nature of things, that the negative has only a relative existence and is not the opposite of the positive, but only different from it.)

Theaet. True.