Plato on Not-Being

Abstract

Platonists who doubt that they are Spectators of Being must settle for the knowledge that they are investigators of the verb “to be”. Their investigations make them familiar with certain commonplaces of the subject for which, among Plato’s dialogues, the Sophist is held to contain the chief evidence. But the evidence is not there, and the attempt to find it has obstructed the interpretation of that hard and powerful dialogue. The commonplaces that I mean are these:

In Greek, but only vestigially in English, the verb “to be” has two syntactically distinct uses, a complete or substantive use in which it determines a one-place predicate (“X is”, “X is not”) and an incomplete use in which it determines a two-place predicate (“X is Y”, “X is not Y”). To this difference there answers a semantic distinction. The verb in its first use signifies “to exist” (for which Greek in Plato’s day had no separate word) or else, in Greek but only in translators’ English, “to be real” or “to be the case” or “to be true”, these senses being all reducible to the notion of the existence of some object or state of affairs; while in its second use it is demoted to a subject-predicate copula (under which we can here include the verbal auxiliary) or to an identity-sign.²