The One and the Concept: On Hegel's Reading of Plato's Parmenides

Introduction

Hegel's interpretation of Plato's Parmenides during the early Jena period focuses largely on its methodological value as a radical exercise in negative skepticism, and, as such, as introduction to proper philosophizing. In his Relation of Skepticism to Philosophy, for example, Hegel characterizes Plato's dialogue as exhibiting "the negative side of the knowledge of the absolute" (die negative Seite der Erkenntnis des Absoluten)1 According to this interpretation, the dialogue's role in the history of philosophy is twofold. On the one hand, the negative dialectic of ideas that constitutes its backbone would exhibit the inadequacy of the understanding to provide true cognition. By showing that concepts (here understood as "determinations of the understanding [Verstandes-bestimmungen]") like similar and dissimilar, older and younger, continuous and discrete, or, more crucially, same and other, are intimately connected with their respective contradictory, Plato would demonstrate that to deny or attribute these opposites simultaneously to "finite" or "badly infinite," that is, non-self-reflexive,2 objects of thinking leads to utter unintelligibility. On the other hand, Hegel believes also that the dialogue works as indirect proof of the validity of a different cognitive mode-namely, reason-that Plato intends to display and account for in a separate trilogy: the Sophistes, the Politicos, and, in definitive form, the Philosophos.3 The Parmenides would then tacitly imply that "truly infinite," self-reflexive objects of thinking may actually be made intelligible precisely by the dialectic contradictions of which the dialogue shows only the negative results. On this interpretation, the dialogue would indirectly suggest that self-reflexive objects are knowable if they are being thought as dialectical unities of opposites.

In this early interpretation, then, Hegel views Plato's Parmenides essentially as negative reflection only paving the way to a positive or speculative science of the absolute. But already in 1807, his well-known remarks on this "greatest work of art of ancient dialectic" in the Preface to the Phenomenology extol the dialogue as containing more than potentially constructive but actually negative skepticism.

In the following development of Hegel's thinking, as attested by his commentaries on this and other Platonic dialogues in the Greater and Lesser Logic4 and in the lectures on ancient p...

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