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Derrida's Aporias

Aporias. By Jacques Derrida. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford University Press, 1993.

1. Like most of Derrida's recent works this text (from Le Passage des frontières, Editions Galilée, 1994) consciously exploits its status as an oral performance, engaging the audience from the start: 'in advance, I thank you for your patience in what you are going to endure' (ix). Derrida enacts the aporias of time, finitude and ending, through references to the temporal duration of his speech: 'in the time that we have here' (47); 'The end is approaching. Precipitation and prematuration make the law, even when the thing lasts too long' (72) - a parody of the precipitation and prematuration of Sein und Zeit, which is the target of Derrida's admiring criticism. Artfully keeping his hearers in suspense, he promises from early on to deconstruct Heidegger's efforts to define or delimit the phenomenon of death: 'But we are not there yet; this will come only near the end' (28). As the speech - delivered in Cerisy-la-Salle in mid-July 1992 - lasted six hours, his disciples may have been grateful for such encouragements.

He tells us how he composed the speech - first picking a title out of the air, the word 'aporias', which has surfaced more and more insistently in his recent meditations. He refers to various other texts in which he has tried to endure an aporetic situation, that is, one in which thought can find no passage through, in which it cannot even pose a straightforward problem, so that it is menaced with paralysis (12-17). The notion of death is perhaps the one that most forces the mind into aporetic straits - witness Hamlet's soliloquy. Here it inspires one of Derrida's most intense exercises in reflection. 'Death' or 'my death' is supreme among concepts that elude definition and whose frontiers cannot be satisfactorily drawn, the kind of concepts or non-concepts on which deconstruction thrives:

“if there is one word that remains absolutely unassignable or unassigning with respect to its concept and to its thingness [sa chose - its referent], it is the word 'death'.  Less than for any other noun, save 'God' - and for good reason, since their association here is probably not fortuitous - is it possible to attribute to the noun 'death', and above all to the expression 'my death', a concept or a reality that would constitute the object of an indisputably determining experience.” (22)

A theologian might object that there can be a religious clarification of the sense of death, as of the sense of 'God', and that a reflection that finds in them only an occasion for aporia has merely a transitional or preliminary status. The challenge to the theologian is to show, in a way that does full justice to Derridian scruples, how religion dissolves the aporia or at least allows a way of dealing with it that robs it of its paralysing sting.

Heidegger explores an ontological pre-understanding of death which precedes all the ontic discourses on death in biology, metaphysics or theology:

“To put it quickly - in passing, and in an anticipatory way - the logic of this Heideggerian gesture interests me here. It does so in its exemplarity. However, I only want to assert the force of its necessity and go with it as far as possible, apparently against anthropological confusions and presumptions, so as to try to bring to light several aporias that are internal to the Heideggerian discourse.” (27)

He shows the necessity of Heidegger's analysis in a critique of anthropologists and historians who write about death without prior philosophical clarifications (24-7, 46-50). But empirical anthropology makes a comeback as he goes on to criticize Heidegger's concern with methodology, definition, order, and hierarchy, as a traditional philosophical strategy unsuited to the phenomena Sein und Zeit sought to bring into view.

Death troubles all tidy borders and undermines the basic decisions of phenomenology:

“According to Heidegger these [ontological] regions are legitimately separated by pure, rigorous, and indivisible borders. An order is thus structured by uncrossable edges. Such edges can be crossed, and they are in fact crossed all the time, but they should not be… If the property of this death proper to Dasein was compromised in its rigorous limits, then the entire apparatus of these edges would become problematic, and along with it the very project of an analysis of Dasein, as well as everything that, with its professed methodology, the analysis legitimately conditions.” (29-30)

The existential analytic of death is based on many questionable presuppositions: 'the distinction between perishing [verenden] and dying has been established, as far as Heidegger is concerned, as he will never call it into question again, not even in order to complicate it' (31). As a sensitive reader of Kafka, Celan, Beckett and Blanchot, it is just such complication which Derrida argues for. Heidegger's clean differentiation of human from animal death, or of authentic from inauthentic being-toward-death, serves to conjure away the troubling, irremediable obscurity of mortality. For Derrida, the greatness of Sein und Zeit resides in the way it exceeds its own explicit intention, through undergoing the aporias of death in the very process of trying to repress them.

Derrida speaks of death as 'the absolute arrivant' - what arrives, one who arrives, with an echo of revenant, ghost - and 'such an arrivant affects the very experience of the threshold, whose possibility he thus brings to light before one even knows whether there has been an invitation, a call, a nomination, or a promise' (33), thus undermining 'all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage' (34). It seems that the this-worldly space cleared in Heidegger's analytic of Dasein, its limit marked by death, is just such an assured legitimate homeland, whose borders are put in question when the aporetic nature of death is faced up to more fully. The claim that only humans, with their gift of language, are capable of experiencing 'death as such', is a comforting essentialism, a linguistic illusion, for there is no 'as such' to be found (36-7, 76). Hence the cultural and historical diversity of human structurations of death, which cannot be levelled out.

Heidegger's own discourse on death is culture-bound, and must forgo its claims to determine the essence of death in a universal sense. His effort to found all talk of death in a prior ontological clarification 'belongs to the great ontologico-juridico-transcendental tradition, and I believe it to be undeniable, impossible to dismantle, and invulnerable (at least this is the hypothesis I am following here) - except perhaps in this particular case of death' (45). Death becomes the last refuge of the deconstructor. Derrida speaks of 'life-death', which coincidentally is the equivalent of the Buddhist jāti-maraṇa (birth-death), designating our samsaric existence. 'Life-death' is the keystone in the entire set of aporetic structures he has analysed over the years: presence-absence, speech-writing, gift-contract, meaning-dissemination, truth-undecidability, singularity and iterability of the historical date or the proper name - in each case the second member is the condition of possibility and of impossibility of the first, both its life and its death.

2. When Derrida comes to fulfil his promise to shows aporias in Heidegger's text, he gets off to a disappointing start, falling into a simple misreading. Heidegger writes:

“The question about what is after death can first be posed with methodical security only when death has been grasped in its full ontological essence. Whether such a question is at all a possible theoretical question we need not here decide.” (Sein und Zeit,  Niemeyer, 1986, 248)

The question is about life after death; what remains undecided is whether it can be posed as a theoretical question (as opposed to an existential one); the second sentence here is a quasi-Kantian obiter dictum, incidental to the course of the main argument. According to Derrida's reading of this sentence, Heidegger, having asserted that the essence of death is to be clarified from this side (diesseitig), not from the beyond (Jenseits), expresses a hesitation on this basic methodological principle:

“Heidegger allows something undecided to remain suspended as to whether the point of departure is 'on this side' and not on that side of a possible border. For perhaps in the form of avowal, he then declares: 'Whether such a question is a possible theoretical question at all must remain undecided here [bleibe hier unentschieden]'. He does not use the indicative: this remains undecided [bleibt unentschieden]. Instead, by another decision whose performative incision must remain still undisputable and undisputed… he uses the subjunctive… and 'here'. The theoretical question concerning the here, the 'this side' as point of departure must remain here, on this side, undecided, that is to say, decided without any theoretical question, before any theoretical question, without proof.” (53-4)

The question referred to by Heidegger is the question 'what is after death?'; there is nothing in the text that puts in question the basic principle that the prior clarification of the essence of death must proceed 'from this side'. Derrida's remarks on the banal idiom 'bleibe hier unentschieden' are quite misplaced. Heidegger is not making an undisputable edict; he is merely waiving discussion of the quasi-Kantian question about a theoretical formulation of inquiries about life after death.

Derrida's critique of Heidegger's hierarchical delimitations has plenty of validity in its own right, independently of his efforts to put Heidegger's text in contradiction with itself. His argument against Heidegger's methodological purism is strongest when it appeals to the phenomena - to the complexity of what we actually say and think about death. The attempt to show that Heidegger's own text undermines his methodological decisions, in line with the basic deconstructionist thesis that thought is always contaminated by its textual inscription, or that the concept is 'cooked' when it is put in writing (Glas), runs aground in this case on the vigilance and solidity of Heidegger's argumentation, to which it fails to do justice.

Rich and suggestive is Derrida's own alternative topology of death, which foregrounds aspects that Heidegger's method relegates to secondariness:

“A mortal can only start from here, from his mortality. His possible belief in immortality, his irresistible interest in the beyond, in gods or spirits, what makes survival structure every instant in a kind of irreducible torsion, the torsion of a retrospective anticipation that introduces the untimely moment [le contretemps] and the posthumous in the most alive of the present living thing [du présent vivant], the rearview mirror of a waiting-for-death [s'attendre-à-la-mort] at every moment, and the future anterior that precedes even the present, which it seems only to modify, all this stems first from his mortality, Heidegger would say. No matter how serious all this remains, it would thus only be secondary. The very secondariness testifies to the primordiality of being-toward-death.” (55)

This primordiality of the this-worldly experience of finitude goes hand in hand with the basic bias of phenomenology, 'the pre-archic originality of the proper, the authentic, and the eigentlich' (56). Against this metaphysics of presence Derrida urges the claims of 'mourning and ghosting [revenance], spectrality or living-on, surviving, as non-derivable categories', which trouble the frontiers of the ego:

“lf Jemeinigkeit, that of Dasein of that of the ego (in the common sense, the psychoanalytic sense, or Levinas's sense) is constituted in its ipseity in terms of an originary mourning, then this self-relation welcomes or supposes the other within its being-itself as different from itself.” (61)

The other is the condition of possibility and of impossibility of the ego, but conversely our relation to the other, without or within, is always a 'bereaved apprehension' (61). 'With death, Dasein awaits itself (s'attend lui-même) in its ownmost potentiality-for-being' (64, translating Sein und Zeit, 250: 'Mit dem Tod steht das Dasein selbst in seinem eigensten Seinkönnen bevor'). The untranslatable word, 's'attendre', reveals nuances unsuspected in Heidegger's analysis. In death 'Dasein is revealed to itself in its essence, and this in the mode of being-ahead-of-itself' (Sein und Zeit, 251). But this self-awaiting at the limit-situation of death is always bound up with expecting something that will happen as the completely other than oneself. Moreover, s'attendre can mean waiting for each other:

“the waiting for each other is related to death, to the borders of death, where we wait for each other knowing a priori, and absolutely undeniably, that, life always being too short, the one is waiting for the other there, for the one and the other never arrive there together… Both the one and the other never arrive at this rendezvous, and the one who waits for the other there, at this border, is not he who arrives there first or she who gets there first.” (65-6)

Such 'anachronism of the waiting for each other in this contretemps of mourning' complicates the temporality of being-toward-death, and also solicits the associated notion of truth - Dasein's certitude of death as its ownmost possibility, which it testifies to as an incomparable truth (68).

The idea that death is 'the possibility of being-able-no-longer-to-be-there' or 'the possibility of the pure and simple impossibility of Dasein' (Sein und Zeit, 250) sets off a chain of explosions in the existential analytic, ruining its basic premises, claims Derrida (68). For Heidegger death is

“an impossibility that one can await or expect, an impossibility the limits of which one can expect or at whose limits one can wait, these limits of the as such being, as we have seen, the limits of truth, but also of the possibility of truth. Truth and nontruth would be inseparable… Truth is the truth of non-truth and vice versa”. (73)

Derrida suggests that this kind of thinking is on the brink of self-dissolution: 'What difference is there between the possibility of appearing as such of the possibility of an impossibility and the impossibility of appearing as such of the same possibility?' (75). The impossibility in question is the impossibility of the 'as such', the impossibility of a securely defined identity for Dasein or for its death, and this impossibility is incapable of appearing 'as such'. The phenomenological focusing of death in anticipatory resolve must yield to a more complex aporetic waiting which can no longer map the limits of truth. Derrida accepts here Heidegger's equation of truth with a phenomenological authenticity, and his reduction of the truth of rational judgement to secondary, derivative status; but if we contest this derivation, Derrida's critique of Heideggerian truth fails to touch truth in the latter sense (as I argue in Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth, ch. 4).

Humans cannot anticipate death in its purity 'as such'; the only death we know is the death of the other, or of ourselves as other. Death is 'the most improper possibility and the most ex-propriating, the most inauthenticating one. From the most originary inside of its possibility, the proper of Dasein becomes from then on contaminated, parasited, and divided by the most improper' (77). Even this aporetic situation can never simply be endured as such: 'The ultimate aporia is the impossibility of the aporia as such. The reservoir of this statement seems to me incalculable' (78).

Sein und Zeit is still haunted by the structures of biblical anthropology (80).These structures, Derrida claims, remain inescapable in our Western thinking of death. But he has problematized them so radically that we seem to be left in some grey limbo of perpetual mourning. Or am I missing something? If one agrees with Derrida that death is insolubly aporetic and is never identified in its essence, then perhaps an answering obliqueness in religious discourses about death may have a certain justification. The historicity, plurality and relativity of these discourses does not prevent them, each in its own way, from making sense of death and pointing beyond it. None is a total clarification of the riddle, but each is a valuable existential witness. The plurality of these constructions does not render their claims to truth delusory. Truth emerges only in context-bound, culture-bound perspectives, and the true statements made within such perspectives are subject to subsequent redescription. Derrida's aporias risk inducing a paralysis of our ability to say anything at all; the challenge is to integrate fully the aporetic structures he has noted into a discourse that goes beyond them, in order to venture positive statements of truth, however fragmentary and analogical.

3. There are a number of inaccuracies in Derrida's text. The translator corrects Derrida's differe to differre (5), but fails to correct si exigua contentio de modo finium (4), for si exigua contentio est de modo finium; Libellus de optima genera oratorum (5), for Libellus de optimo genere oratorum: and de bene moriendi (60) for moriendo.

He also corrects Derrida's 'Vincent' to 'Thomas' (28). Louis-Vincent Thomas, author of Anthropologie de la mort, has come in for some captious criticism for his manner of citing Heidegger on the previous page; now Derrida has forgotten his name!

Heidegger (Sein und Zeit, 248) says that the analysis of Death 'interprets the phenomenon [of death] only in regard to how as a possibility of being of every Dasein it is lodged in the former [in dieses hereinsteht], that is, in Dasein. Derrida mistranslates: 'the possibility of being of every Dasein is engaged, invested, and inscribed in the phenomenon of death' (53).

There is no such German word as unentscheidet (56).

Derrida has Heidegger talk about having 'the heart (Mut) to approach or confront (aufkommen) this anxiety before death' (6l). What Heidegger actually wrote is: 'Das Man lässt den Mut zur Angst vor dem Tode nicht aufkommen' (Sein und Zeit, 254), that is, 'The They does not allow the courage for anxiety before death to arise'. Aufkommen means 'arise', and is an intransitive verb. Derrida's 'approach or confront' is etymological guesswork based on a grammatical oversight.

On Sein und Zeit, 265, according to Derrida, 'Heidegger wonders how the simple impossibility of existence becomes possible, when the moment when this impossibility becomes possible remains both absolutely certain and absolutely indeterminate' (72). The passage referred to has a quite different sense: Heidegger asks how the certainty and the indeterminacy of death are disclosed existentially; his answer is that the certainty of death is registered only in existential anticipation, and its indeterminacy is registered in the way this anticipation opens itself to a constant menace, in the mood (Stimmung) of anxiety.

From: International Journal of Philosophical Studies 4 (1996)

Two Books on Greek Philosophy

Nicholas Denyer, Language, Thought and Falsehood in Ancient Greek Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

William Jordan, Ancient Concepts of Philosophy.
London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

Reviewed in Philosophical Studies (Dublin) 33 (1991-92), pp. 238-46.

For some reason a deluge of little black volumes on every subject has been pouring out of Routledge. The two books reviewed here belong to a series, Issues in Ancient Philosophy, under the editorship of Malcolm Schofield. They deserve praise for the lucidity and thoroughness of their argumentation and for their pedagogic show of patience and orderliness. Denyer pursues the problem of how false judgment is possible through five Platonic dialogues (Euthydemus, Republic, Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophist) and shows a virtuoso skill in argument and exposition, which sometimes risks becoming tangential to the central issue. Jordan faithfully introduces many schools and philosophers, but his discussion is not strongly unified, and often lapses into desultoriness.
  Socrates, Plato and Aristotle had an insatiable appetite for logical argument, shared by the present authors, who seem however to carry disinterestedness to the point of aimlessness. Greek argumentation usually has a palpable bearing on life and civilization; but in these studies the arguments presented lack the chiaroscuro, the harmonics, that a firmer sense of historical context could provide. Like many logical analysts of Greek philosophy, the authors fail to quit the aseptic seminar rooms which set bounds to what they consider of philosophical interest.
  Heidegger sought tremors of ontological wonder in Plato and Aristotle; at other times they have been interrogated in terms of the great themes of the hour: truth, beauty, the good, the soul. The Greeks seem to have nothing momentous to say to Denyer and Jordan, nor they to the Greeks. Could this be because the philosophers have yielded up all their ore and there is nothing new to be said? Or is it that our authors have failed to find any interesting questions to ask because of the smallness of their own philosophical world? Denyer - whose book is more original and more valuable than Jordan's - seems unable to take an interest in any topic except in terms of the logical problems it may suggest. Jordan - who essays a wider spectrum of humanistic reference - tends to be rather half-hearted in his argumentative engagement with his sources, while his allusions too often seem to be giving them a factitious topicality.
  Both authors address the question, "why study ancient philosophy?" Jordan considers some views that would limit the value of the history of philosophy: the positivist notion that philosophy tends to contract, as the interesting problems are solved one by one or as domains of inquiry are ceded to science; Rorty's view that philosophy has no coherent history, either because its problems stem from extra-philosophical sources in society or the sciences, or because it undergoes paradigm shifts that make the philosophical questions of the past incommensurable with those of the present; Nozick's view that "the history of philosophy will consist of a growing stock of arguments about apparent excluders of scientific, or everyday, truths" (119). His own conclusion is that "we study past philosophers to gain some idea of what range of outlooks is possible in a given area." The notion of a "given area" in this context strikes me as unhistorical; "areas" of philosophical investigation are themselves historical constructs. The next sentence seems oblivious to the rich differences between one historical epoch and another: "And their arguments, when we accept them, yield something like data which we must organise into a unified philosophical theory." Sounds rather dreary, to be patching together the acceptable bits of Aristotle, Descartes and Hegel. Surely it is abusive to quote Wittgenstein in support of this view: "every new problem which arises may put in question the position which our previous partial results are to occupy in the final picture." Understanding of history means an ever deeper discovery of the strangeness and otherness of the past, something that cannot be attained by what Jordan calls the "recataloguing" of the ancient findings in light of new ones.
  Denyer's theme consigns him to the strange past, in that no one any longer asks the question "How can one say something false?" since that problem has been definitively solved by Plato. (This is Denyer's view; but as a result of reading him I draw the opposite conclusion: that Plato has left the problem unsolved and that the ontology of false statements still remains enigmatic.) Why summon up this ghost? Because it shows us that "our 'truisms' have a great deal of philosophical bite to them, and that they are not quite so bland as they look"; because it is "a case history of philosophical progress"; moreover "we might learn something from ancient views about thought and language that will help us to solve what I have called our modern problems of truth" (6-7), i.e. the Problem of the External World, the Problem of Other Minds, the Problem of the Reality of the Past and the Problem of Induction. Certainly these problems deserve to be put as soundly to rest as Plato is claimed to have put the problem of falsehood to rest. I doubt, though, if straightforward logical argument can do anything to solve the first three of these. Rather the philosophical arguments may have to be referred back to their context - human, historical, social, psychological, political, cultural - for their full understanding and for the discovery of their effective solution. If so, the methods of analytical philosophy can never show us the way out of the fly-bottle.
  "In seeing how there once was a workable philosophy [Aristotle's] which held truth to be the normal condition of our thoughts, we may be helped to identify those assumptions of modern times that have made truth seem so problematic," so that we can either abandon them or learn why Aristotle's epistemological optimism is no longer tenable. This is an attractive enough context for Denyer's inquiry (though a glance at the last page of his book shows that he does not deliver the goods promised here). But can the difference between Aristotle and Descartes be reduced to a matter of assumptions and problem-solving? Don't we need to open up the wider hermeneutical issue of their different understandings of being and truth, studying - a la Heidegger - the predominance of consciousness and the subject as the touchstone of the real in Descartes and the emergence of certitude as the essential mark of the true?
  Jordan disagrees with a colleague's judgment that Aristotle's philosophy is "flat, tedious and underambitious," yet that is exactly the impression his own account of Aristotle leaves. What did Aristotle learn from Plato? Nothing less than the "important insight" that "there is a crucial difference between predications such as 'Socrates is a man' and 'Socrates is pale'" (122). Aristotle's own "new and interesting theory of being" is that unless we take substances (rather than nonsubstantial forms, now reduced to categories) as "metaphysically basic" we will have "great difficulty in coming to know or understand the world" (126). Did Aristotle offer only an elegant and sensible resolution of Parmenidean and Platonic problems? If one pursued the question whether the substance-ontology is an adequate account of the texture of being or reality one might find many suggestive undertones to Aristotle's inquiries. But Jordan proceeds: "no philosopher today, within the analytic tradition, is likely even to present a theory of being (though we should note that the concept of being is central to the philosophies of Heidegger and Sartre)." Jordan is under no obligation to read Heidegger or to deal with the questions raised by him. He is entitled to believe that philosophy is incapable of dealing with such elusive phenomena as existence or being and must treat them as "that whereof we cannot speak". But he claims that he has wrapped up the issue by dint of mere logic: "we think that there is identity, predication, and existence... There is also class inclusion... And we recognize that in Greek, einai also sometimes carries a veridical sense. This analysis of being is thought of as philosophical progress" (127-8). Both Denyer and Jordan seem happy to be fobbed off with semantics. Such grammatical notes leave untouched the questions raised by our talk of being and truth, however we analyse it. The reduction of philosophical inquiry to semantic clarification seems to close off awareness of the enigmatic and thought-provoking character of such expressions, taken not just as quirks of language but as namings of reality. It recalls the tag actually quoted by Denyer at the end of his study of Plato: Parturiunt montes; nascetur ridiculus mus.

Plato's Sophist
The Sophists argued that false judgment was impossible, since what is not can neither be thought nor spoken of. Theaetetus 189-199 tries to explain false judgement as heterodoxia (taking one thing for another), but the analogies of the wax tablet and the bird-cage suffer from the defect of explaining how false judgment is possible by referring it back to prior false judgment, as Denyer shows (111-17). Then Socrates proposes "a distinction between a mere name and a full logos, a distinction which rests wholly on relative simplicity and complexity" (118-9) - the logos of something is an "orderly description in terms of its elements" (Theaet. 207 c). If falsehood can be located precisely, at the level of logos, the ontological problem it raises may disappear. Denyer elaborately demonstrates that this will work only if "the complexes which true logoi express are not complex objects [as Plato still thinks], but facts" (127). He will show in the analysis of Sophist that through clarifying the semantics of sentences Plato solves the ontological riddle of false statements.
  This dialogue founds the reduction of negation to otherness in a general ontology of the five Great Kinds (being, same, other, motion, rest). Denyer argues well against the anachronism of interpreting the discussion of being in terms of the copulative and existential senses of "is": "Plato would acknowledge the difference between, for example, 'Cicero is Tully' and 'Cicero is an orator.' But he would not think that difference due to any difference in the meaning of the word 'is'. Rather, he would think it due to a difference in the expressions that go to the right of the 'is'" (135). Similarly: "When we negate a term by prefixing it with 'not' we thereby produce a new term, a term for what is other than what the original term was a term for" (137). So negation does not imply naming what is not. Not-red, not-Socrates are designations of things that are, i.e other-than-red, other-than-Socrates.
  Could it be that Plato is papering over an ontological gulf at this point, stifling the uncanny thought of non-being? Denyer does not pause to consider such murky questions, but proceeds instead to clear up what seems a minor point of Plato's logical grammar: Plato "was under a misapprehension about otherness, and indeed about relations generally" (139). Distinguishing the domain ['north' as all points on earth except the South Pole] and the extension [ordered sets of the type <Belfast, Cork>] of a relation he asks "what belongs to the kind Other? Do I belong? Do you? Or should we say rather that the members of the kind Other are such ordered pairs as <I, you> and <you, I>" (139-40). Denyer argues the domain of each of the Great Kinds is simply everything there is. If Plato had identified membership of the kinds with extension then each kind - with the exception, presumably, of the non-relational kind, being; or does Denyer see that as relational too? - would comprise a different set of ordered pairs. Ordered pairs are "less straightforwardly ingredients of reality than the individuals that they are now to replace" (145). This eliminates the problem of the existence of forms for relations and corrects "Platonic conjunctivitis" ("that the nature of the other is all cut up into little bits," Sophist 257 c). The division of a relational proposition into two conjuncts (Philip as father, Philip as belonging to Charles) leads to an infinite regress and to unacceptable extensions of the relational elements: Philip also belongs to William, and since he is a father, it transpires that "Philip is not only William's grandfather but his father as well: and the House of Windsor is no less incestuous than the House of Laius" (143). This grooming of ancient texts by ironing out logical confusions is surely of immense value; would that someone would do it with the same sureness of touch to the texts of the theological tradition! In any case, "even though it is expounded within the context of a poor theory of relations, Plato's otherness theory of negation remains unrefuted by our recent discussions" (145).
  But a blemish remains: the theory takes expressions as terms for things, when in fact expressions must be differentiated into names and verbs. As stated thus far the otherness theory can account for talk of what is not: not-Socrates is an expression for things other than Socrates. But it cannot account for the possibility of false statements: in "Socrates is not-mortal" the shadow of non-being arises not in the negative expression after the copula but in the false conjunction of subject and predicate. "By Sophist 258 b 7 he has legitimated talk of what is not. It is not however until Sophist 263 d 4 that he takes himself to have legitimated talk of falsehood" (146). 263 d 1-4 reads: "Now when things are said about you, but things other are said as the same and things that are not as things that are, it appears that when such a combination is formed of verbs and nouns we have really and truly false discourse." Denyer's comments focus exclusively on the combination of verb and noun (name) and avoids talk of same and other, are and are not. Are the latter presumed to be tacitly carried over from the foregoing discussion of talk of what is not? But why does Denyer not articulate the connection between the name-verb discussion and the otherness theory? He shows that the interweaving of noun with verb is not a mingling of forms. But the laws of that interweaving do not seem to be what essentially makes possible the occurrence of falsehood; rather this depends on the mingling of being and otherness. What of the issue of correspondence between statements and facts? Is this passed over as another of the mystical ideas about which philosophy should be silent? Denyer does get as far as saying that names designate objects and that verbs are true or false of objects, but beyond this, it appears, there is nothing to be said. Plato's ontological conditions (the great kinds) dissolve without residue into the semantics of sentences.
  A false statement requires that one be able to say what is not in a more special sense than what has been legitimated so far. To say "Theaetetus flies" requires the existence of his flying so that it can be spoken of and its non-existence so that the statement can be false. But the problem of how false statements can be made is not resolved by distinguishing different senses of "existent". Denyer amusingly notes the quandaries to which this would lead: "Would the nonexistent fact of the kiss that Gladstone gave Disraeli be identical with the nonexistent fact of the furtive kiss he gave him?... But if they are two distinct nonexistent facts, then should we not count as a third the nonexistent fact of Gladstone's kissing Disraeli furtively on the cheek? And then where will it end? How many nonexistent kisses will the two great statesmen have exchanged?" (148). Such examples, unlike Jordan's allusions, make abstract lines of argument memorable.
  Brooding on those nonexistent kisses one might gives Plato's problem a new lease of life. For are not those kisses as vivid and memorable as any historical fact reported of the statesmen? And will not any historical report contain an element of the fictive, if only in the choice of words? Each such report is a new presentation or interpretation of the fact. Even if the kisses report is falsified and the historical report verified, the former retains a certain fictional truth and the latter cannot be purged of an element of fiction. It is impossible to make a purely true or a purely false statement. Even if one goes out of one's way to say what is not, the result is a new fictional creation which may tell as much truth in its own way as the most scrupulously exact report. Perhaps Plato's predecessors were fascinated by just this shimmering interplay of fact and fiction, and Plato broke the fascination with the same puritanical rigour as he brought to the fancies of the poets.
  Plato approaches his solution through a distinction of names and verbs, which make meaningful sentences when combined. This is "a contribution to syntax, because it makes assertions about how expressions can be combined" and "a contribution to semantics, because it makes assertions about which expressions mean what" (150); Denyer detects some subtle errors in both aspects. It is not true that every sentence must contain a name (e.g. "No one admires everybody"); moreover, verb-free and name-free notations can be artificially constructed. This kind of criticism seems rather otiose; it were better simply to clarify the domain of normal language in which Plato's observations make perfect sense. Denyer spends a lot of time showing that Plato's analysis also applies to his artificial notations; it is not clear how this deepens the insight that "we should say that verbs and names are interwoven. For nothing less will do justice to the intimacy of their connection, the connection of objects to the characteristics that they have and to the relations in which they stand" (158). The name and the verb are kinds of a rather special sort interwoven to make the sentence. Plato muddies things by speaking of names and verbs as "designating" reality (Sophist 261 e): "The difference between names and verbs is far greater than any that Plato allows" (164) - names designate objects but verbs do not. Plato commits a variety of the "Fancy Goods Fallacy" just as do those who see adjectives as denoting universals or "I" as denoting not "the human animal Nicholas Denyer" but "a self which I use it to name" (165). There follows an elaborate discussion of Frege and Dummett which does not seem to me to favour engagement with the texture of Plato's thought. The logical refinements are in excess of the relatively simple issue under discussion and distract from other intrinsic complexities of Plato's text. A sharper differentiation between the dialogue with Plato and the general logical issues would be welcome.
  The conclusion that "whereas names designate objects, verbs by contrast stand to objects in the quite different relation of being true of them" turns out in any case "to be more or less present in the Sophist" in references to "things that are said to 'be concerning (einai peri) Theaetetus' in such sentences as 'Theaetetus sits'" (173); the phrase can also be translated "be true of". Dealing with the thesis that verbs can be false of objects, Denyer launches on another of his logical descants. If one says the verb in "Neil has visited Mars" plays the role of "being true of all and only those who have visited Mars" one runs into trouble. The reasoning is quite rarefied: "Since no one has visited Mars, any expression whatsoever that is not true of anything will be true of an object if and only if that object has visited Mars. A name is such an expression [for the syntactical reasons analysed above]... Yet if we try to replace the verb in our sentence by the name 'Yuri', we reduce our sentence to the list: Neil Yuri" (174). The point of this is that a verb may be true of nothing  but still be "false of things, and thus make that contribution to the significance of the sentences in which is occurs" (176) whereas "names have no such thing as 'being false of'" (175). The conclusion then is as follows: "A basic sentence gets its significance from being made up out of a significant name together with a significant verb. Names in turn get their significance from designating objects; while verbs get their significance from the objects of which they are true and from the objects of which they are false. In none of this is there any relation of sentences to facts, still less to facts that do not exist. And in none of this is there any suggestion that a sentence will have one meaning if true, and another meaning, or no meaning at all, if false" (181). This is presented as the "crashingly banal" solution to the problem of falsehood. Yet I am left wondering how a verb in a sentence can be false of the name without by the same token the sentence as a whole being in a false relation of some kind to the facts. Moreover, can a verb get all its meaning from the objects of which it is true or false? Does this grammar, Denyer's and the Stranger's, really touch the issue of falsehood at all? Surely the five great kinds continue to preside over the issue of false statements, however they are to be articulated with the noun-verb analysis. The heart of the solution is the reduction of negation to otherness; one can say what is not only in the sense that one can say what is of what is, but of the wrong what is.
  If Denyer knows the philosophical secret whereby the lofty issues of being and truth have been finally dispelled by a stroke of semantics, he has kept it from this reader, leaving me with the impression that in the end he has talked past the real problem, with a calm assurance suggesting that this procedure is habitual in his philosophical circles.

Further Remarks
My impression that there has been a failure to engage with the historical and ontological texture of Greek philosophy can be rounded out by a glance at other aspects of the works before us.
  Parmenides is an author who tests one's historical and ontological sensitivities to the utmost - unless he was a hollow sham, which is how he is made to seem in many peremptory accounts. How does he fare here? Jordan sees him as a proto-Cartesian seeking secure epistemological foundations. "Descartes finds what he is looking for in the thought cogito, ergo sum'. Esti plays the same role for Parmenides" (30). He is also a proto-Kantian: "he is intent on exploring the conditions of successful knowing and indicating, in the manner of Kant... Parmenides may be offering here the first example of a transcendental argument in philosophy" (31). These references to Descartes and Kant are too facile and show little historical sensitivity. Parmenides is praised for an interesting attempt, but the foundation he established is so much at variance with our everyday view of the world that if he believed in it himself he must have been mad (34-5). There is good classical precedent for such dismissiveness in Aristotle. But is Parmenides primarily an epistemologist? Is there no room for a hermeneutical retrieval that could explain the awe in which Plato held him? Rather than being a mere problem-poser and problem-solver might he not have wanted to say something about the nature of being and the nature of thinking? For Denyer the spell cast by Parmenides reveals that "many found the very idea of speaking or thinking what is not intolerably paradoxical" (26). Again the focus is on a negative logical problem, with no attempt to retrieve the positive ontological vision.
  Jordan's volume ranges too widely and treats each of its topics in terms of interesting arguments it may provoke. This argumentational focus is not guaranteed to bring out the essential concerns of the philosophies treated. Take the account of how Plato "formulates new ideas about philosophical method, new philosophical doctrines about the nature of knowledge and reality, and a new conception of the philosophical way of life" (70). Philosophy differs from eristic by its openness to truth and readiness for self-correction, and differs from rhetoric – "a mere knack that panders to the worst in human beings" (76) – by its emphasis on care of the soul. The latter point is developed in a rehearsal of arguments in the Gorgias: "Plato's position on vulnerability is that it is indeed possible to become invulnerable by becoming a powerful orator; but that all powerful orators have paid a price for their invulnerability - they are all unjust" (78). Ethical musings of this sort do not take us very far towards a keen grasp of Plato's "concept of philosophy". Nor does the leisurely discussion of Plato's criticism of art that follows. The topical reference does not increase the urgency or pertinence of such remarks as the following: "the place of art in the state is not nowadays a burning topic in political theory (at least it was not, prior to Iran's death threat against Salman Rushdie)" (82-3). Jordan is always ready to stop and murmur "I wonder" in a manner that is peculiarly ingenious and desultory: "This poses the question whether it is enough to say, of art, 'I enjoy it'? It suggests that we need to be able to say, at least, what sort of enjoyment it gives us, and where this enjoyment fits into our lives" (85). This is briefly aired with reference to Rousseau, Jane Austen, Lionel Trilling. Conclusion: "The self must remain within its own bounds if it is to preserve its integrity. Of course, it could be argued that it is beneficial to act alien roles." Such pleasant, but feeble and banal reflections shed little light on the topic of the book. Jordan goes on to talk about philosophy as preparation for death and queries Plato's stark claim that "we must either practise life, accept the reports of our sense and pursue bodily pleasures, or practise death and lead the life of the philosopher focusing on the soul's view of the world" (89). "Plato's case against bodily pleasures," he lamely remarks, "certainly has its strengths as well as its weaknesses... It is hard to see how we could hope to derive any meaningful overall life-plan simply from devoting ourselves wholly to bodily pleasures" (91). He comes close to his theme in dealing with Plato's suspicion of the senses, raising the question of "how effective Plato is in giving substance to his own conception of the objective standpoint" (93), that of philosophy. But this peters out in remarks on the immortality of the soul. Next, Jordan discusses Plato on love. Plato is accused of using the beloved as a mere stepping-stone towards love for the Form of Beauty, but in measuring the beloved against that Form he is able to see him in a non-idealized way. Freud, Hardy, Melanie Klein and Proust are invoked on lovers' idealizations. Lacan's commentary on the Symposium (in the recently published Volume VIII of the Seminaire) is a more effective engagement with Plato on these themes and shows a keener sense of the subtlety of Plato's genius. And what has all this to do with Plato's concept of philosophy? Well it shows "how a set of beliefs in metaphysics and epistemology can bear directly on the conduct of our everyday lives" and moreover "we have perhaps learned something about the scope of philosophy" (if so, why was the discussion conducted entirely in terms of psychoanalyis and literature?). A concluding discussion of political philosophy fills out the picture of Plato. The topic of ancient concepts of philosophy merits a more rigorous and focused treatment.
  Denyer's closing chapter on Aristotle - a discussion of his theory of perception and intellection, with an exposition of his theory of causation as background - has nothing to do with the foregoing discussion. His philosophical method is then shown to rest on this "innocent optimism about the powers of the human mind" (212). The book ends with a rather sudden declaration of how hard it is for us today to believe that "the natural condition for our thoughts is truth". This tangential ending hardly does justice to the sense of the fragility of the mind's hold on truth in such post-Aristotelian authors as Sextus Empiricus or Plotinus. The limit of Denyer's grasp, I feel, is marked by his avoidance of the obscure ontological issues in favour of masterable logical ones. A gifted logician will always find something to dance pirouettes on, but for that a toothpaste label might be as convenient a launching-pad as the texts of Plato and Aristotle. Logic must be at the service of a coherent hermeneutic project; otherwise, though it may clarify limited issues, it leaves one in the lurch when one seeks a really penetrating grasp of what Plato or Aristotle thought.