Autour d’une charnière (Parménide B8.50-61 DK = D8.55-66LM)

Une discussion posthume avec Jean Bollack

Abstract

Around Parmenides’ hinge (28B8.50-61 DK = 19D8.55-66 LM) must we read Parmenides without going through Plato, as Jean Bollack asserts in the very first sentence of his book Parménide, de l’étant au monde (2006)? While relying on a radically new interpretation of B8.53-54a put forward by Bollack as early as 1966, I argue, on the contrary, that it is only on the condition of having Plato in mind that one can read the poem as a whole. The Republic or the Symposium, the Sophist and the Timaeus, taken in conjunction (and not as witnesses of a development of Plato’s thought), provide a key to grasp the meaning of the hinge between the two parts of the goddess’ exposition, which is the real core of the poem. Radicalizing a line of interpretation opened by Jonathan Barnes (1979) and Patricia Curd (1997), I argue that there is a sense in which non-being is eliminated from the second part of the goddess’ exposition, and multiplicity given a legitimate ontological status. If so, the parricide which the Sophist pretends to perpetrate concerns Parmenides’ ancient interpreters rather than Parmenides himself. This is the only sense in which we could indeed say that we have to read Parmenides without going through Plato.