The Eleatic Stranger — the unnamed philosopher from Elea who serves as principal interlocutor in Plato’s Sophist and Statesman — occupies a peculiar position within the depth-psychology corpus: he is the voice through which Plato enacts his most sustained critique of Eleatic monism, yet he speaks from within that very tradition. The Sophist passages reveal him conducting the famous ‘parricide’ against Parmenides, demonstrating that Not-being must in some sense be, thereby making possible a theory of false opinion, image-making, and the Sophist’s deceptive art. The Stranger’s method — rigorous diacritical division — stands in productive tension with the Socratic elenchus: where Socrates exposes ignorance through interlocutory pressure, the Stranger constructs knowledge through systematic bifurcation. The Statesman passages show him extending this method into political philosophy, subordinating rhetoric to a sovereign science of governance. Commentators represented here — chiefly through Jowett’s editorial apparatus — situate the Stranger at the junction of Eleatic ontology, Megarian eristic, and emergent Platonic dialectic, noting that the resolution of Being and Not-being he achieves in the Sophist becomes the metaphysical foundation for the correlation of Forms. His significance for depth psychology lies in his demonstration that apparent opposites — being and non-being, same and other, motion and rest — admit of participation and admixture, a structural insight with far-reaching implications for any psychology of contradiction.
This is especially true of the Eleatic philosophy: while the absoluteness of Being was asserted in every form of language, the sensible world and all the phenomena of experience were comprehended under Not-being.
This passage establishes the Eleatic philosophical inheritance the Stranger inherits and must overcome — the absolute opposition of Being and Not-being that the Sophist dialogue is constructed to dissolve.
, Sophist, -360thesis
And surely contend we must in every possible way against him who would annihilate knowledge and reason and mind, and yet ventures to speak confidently about anything.
The Stranger argues that any adequate ontology must include motion alongside rest, because a static Being incapable of mind or life cannot ground knowledge — a direct challenge to Eleatic immobility.
, Sophist, -360thesis
‘Since, then, we are in a difficulty, please to tell us what you mean, when you speak of being; for there can be no doubt that you always from the first understood your own meaning, whereas we once thought that we understood you, but now we are in a great strait.’
The Stranger presses the ‘Friends of the Forms’ and materialists alike to define Being, revealing that all prior accounts collapse into contradiction — the aporia that necessitates his own reconstruction.
, Sophist, -360thesis
If not-being has no part in the proposition, then all things must be true; but if not-being has a part, then false opinion and false speech are possible, for to think or to say what is not—is falsehood.
The Stranger demonstrates that the possibility of false speech depends on Not-being having genuine participation in Being, completing his parricide against Parmenides and grounding his account of the Sophist’s deception.
, Sophist, -360thesis
Motion and rest are neither the other nor the same… Whatever we attribute to motion and rest in common, cannot be either of them.
The Stranger’s analysis of the five greatest kinds — Being, Same, Other, Motion, Rest — shows that no simple identification among them holds, requiring a logic of participation that supersedes Eleatic monism.
, Sophist, -360thesis
There is some part of the other which is opposed to the beautiful… the not-beautiful turns out to be the opposition of being to being.
The Stranger redefines negation as relative otherness rather than absolute non-existence, thereby rehabilitating the not-beautiful and not-just as genuine kinds within Being.
, Sophist, -360thesis
When we speak of things which are not, are we not attributing plurality to not-being?… not-being in itself can neither be spoken, uttered, or thought, but that it is unthinkable, unutterable, unspeakable, indescribable.
The Stranger drives the Eleatic paradox of Not-being to its limit — showing that any predication applied to it immediately contradicts itself — in order to motivate his alternative account of otherness.
, Sophist, -360thesis
They are compelled to use the words ‘to be,’ ‘apart,’ ‘from others,’ ‘in itself,’ and ten thousand more, which they cannot give up, but must make the connecting links of discourse; and therefore they do not require to be refuted by others, but their enemy, as it were, speaks from within.
The Stranger turns the monists’ own linguistic practice against them, demonstrating that the connectedness of discourse presupposes the very participation and mixture they deny.
, Sophist, -360supporting
The false says what is other than true?… And therefore speaks of things which are not as if they were… say that things are real of you which are not.
The Stranger completes his account of false statement by showing that falsehood consists in attributing otherness-as-identity — saying that what is not is — thereby validating the concept of the image and the Sophist’s craft.
, Sophist, -360supporting
Being and Not-being are no longer exhibited in opposition, but are now reconciled; and the true nature of Not-being is discovered and made the basis of the correlation of ideas.
Jowett’s summary situates the Sophist’s Eleatic Stranger as the culmination of a trajectory begun in the Parmenides, where the reconciliation of Being and Not-being grounds the Platonic theory of Forms.
, Parmenides, -370supporting
He is a many-sided animal, and not to be caught with one hand… let us try another track in our pursuit of him.
The Stranger’s method of successive diacritical division, applied to the Sophist as quarry, models his broader dialectical procedure — a controlled, bifurcating hunt through conceptual kinds.
, Sophist, -360supporting
His art may be traced as a branch of the appropriative, acquisitive family—which hunts animals,—living—land—tame animals; which hunts man,—privately—for hire,—taking money in exchange—having the semblance of education; and this is termed Sophistry.
The Stranger arrives at his first definition of the Sophist through exhaustive dichotomous division, demonstrating the productive power of his diacritical method against the Sophist’s self-concealing multiplicity.
, Sophist, -360supporting
Animal hunting may be truly said to have two divisions, land-animal hunting, which has many kinds and names, and water-animal hunting, or the hunting after animals who swim.
The Stranger’s elaborate taxonomy of hunting types illustrates the formal structure of division by which he will eventually locate the Sophist within the broader genus of acquisitive arts.
, Sophist, -360supporting
The Megarians are said to have been Nominalists, asserting the One Good under many names to be the true Being of Zeno and the Eleatics, and, like Zeno, employing their negative dialectic in the refutation of opponents.
Jowett situates the Eleatic Stranger’s interlocutory context against the background of Megarian and Cynic eristic, both of which distort or exploit Eleatic premises in ways the Stranger’s positive dialectic is designed to correct.
, Sophist, -360supporting
The science which determines whether we ought to persuade or not, must be superior to the science which is able to persuade… Which, if I am not mistaken, will be politics?
In the Statesman, the Eleatic Stranger extends his diacritical method into political philosophy, subordinating the persuasive arts — rhetoric among them — to a supreme science of governance.
, Statesman, -360supporting
In the Parmenides we seem to breathe the spirit of the Megarian philosophy, though we cannot compare the two in detail. But Plato also goes beyond his Megarian contemporaries; he has split their straws over again.
Jowett positions Plato — and by implication the Eleatic Stranger’s dialectic — as surpassing Megarian over-refinement, combining negative dialectic with a constructive theory unavailable to pure eristic.
, Parmenides, -370aside
To try to show that nature exists is comical; for it is obvious that there are many such [i.e. changing] things. And to show the obvious through the obscure is what someone does who is unable to distinguish what is self-evident from what is not.
Nussbaum’s citation of Aristotle against Parmenides obliquely contextualizes the Eleatic problematic that the Stranger addresses, showing how the demand to demonstrate motion and change generated the very puzzles his ontology resolves.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986aside
He finds that he has received from him a real enlargement of mind, and much of the true spirit of philosophy, even when he has ceased to believe in him.
Jowett’s extended comparison of Hegel to the Platonic tradition gestures toward the dialectical inheritance — negative and positive — that links the Eleatic Stranger’s enterprise to later philosophical idealism.
, Sophist, -360aside