Reading Summary of Meditation 2 - "If the one is not, nothing is."
This meditation begins with the epigraph from Plato's Parmenides which reads, "If the one is not, nothing is." Christopher Norris begins his commentary on this Meditation in Badiou's Being and Event by explaining how high the stakes are "when Badiou returns to Plato in Meditation Two and stages a further dialectical encounter which in fact involves four disputants - himself, Plato, Parmenides and Socrates - although their voices are mostly unmarked" (46). The general impasse of Plato's dialogue "is that of establishing that both the one and the others do and do not possess all thinkable determinations, that they are totally everything...and that they are no so...."
This Meditation is a journey through what is "usually designated as hypotheses six, seven, eight and nine under the condition of the thesis 'the one is not'..." within Parmenides. The name bearer to Plato's dialogue, Parmenides, was committed to the indivisibility of the One. Plato, however, said that it was "necessary for the one to be the non-being one." Or rather, "it is a law of rational nomination of non-being to concede - to what is not - the being in eclipse of this non-being of which it is said that it is not." The general idea is that for something to be declared as non-being, at the very least it must "propose its proper name to presentation." Thus in Badiou's reading of Plato, the "name" of the one is that "which is subsumed here as the minimal being of the non-being one." We shall see the implications of this more fully in Meditation Four: The Void: Proper name of being.
A central thrust of Meditation Two is to illustrate Plato's attempt to think inconsistent and consistent multiplicity through a close reading of the text. As A.J. Bartlett has noted in his chapter "Plato" in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts:
"...Plato rejects the Parmenidean ontology of the indivisibility of the One in favour of a division in being that admits that 'the nothing is'....Thus, as is demonstrated in the Sophist, what is not has being. For Badiou, this turns on the distinction made in Parmenides between two types of multiplicity: plethos and polla, the first being inconsistent multiplicity, the second 'consistent' or 'structured' multiplicity. For Badiou, Plato deductively 'intuits' the former but lacks the means to its formalization. Instead, Plato has recourse to the 'astonishing metaphor of a speculative dream'....For Badiou, it is Cantor who will turn the dream into a paradise" (111).
This meditation begins with the epigraph from Plato's Parmenides which reads, "If the one is not, nothing is." Christopher Norris begins his commentary on this Meditation in Badiou's Being and Event by explaining how high the stakes are "when Badiou returns to Plato in Meditation Two and stages a further dialectical encounter which in fact involves four disputants - himself, Plato, Parmenides and Socrates - although their voices are mostly unmarked" (46). The general impasse of Plato's dialogue "is that of establishing that both the one and the others do and do not possess all thinkable determinations, that they are totally everything...and that they are no so...."
This Meditation is a journey through what is "usually designated as hypotheses six, seven, eight and nine under the condition of the thesis 'the one is not'..." within Parmenides. The name bearer to Plato's dialogue, Parmenides, was committed to the indivisibility of the One. Plato, however, said that it was "necessary for the one to be the non-being one." Or rather, "it is a law of rational nomination of non-being to concede - to what is not - the being in eclipse of this non-being of which it is said that it is not." The general idea is that for something to be declared as non-being, at the very least it must "propose its proper name to presentation." Thus in Badiou's reading of Plato, the "name" of the one is that "which is subsumed here as the minimal being of the non-being one." We shall see the implications of this more fully in Meditation Four: The Void: Proper name of being.
A central thrust of Meditation Two is to illustrate Plato's attempt to think inconsistent and consistent multiplicity through a close reading of the text. As A.J. Bartlett has noted in his chapter "Plato" in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts:
"...Plato rejects the Parmenidean ontology of the indivisibility of the One in favour of a division in being that admits that 'the nothing is'....Thus, as is demonstrated in the Sophist, what is not has being. For Badiou, this turns on the distinction made in Parmenides between two types of multiplicity: plethos and polla, the first being inconsistent multiplicity, the second 'consistent' or 'structured' multiplicity. For Badiou, Plato deductively 'intuits' the former but lacks the means to its formalization. Instead, Plato has recourse to the 'astonishing metaphor of a speculative dream'....For Badiou, it is Cantor who will turn the dream into a paradise" (111).
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