Being, difference, and falsehood › Being and the combination of kinds

Before resolving non-being, the visitor examines competing accounts of being. He stages a disagreement between those who recognize only bodily things and defenders of intelligible, stable realities. Against a narrow bodily criterion, he proposes considering whatever has the capacity to act or be acted upon. This proposal introduces a test of being through power or capacity, but it occurs within an evolving argument, not as an isolated formula that settles the dialogue (Sophist 246a–248a).

The discussion also resists making the whole of reality motionless or treating everything as changing without qualification. Understanding needs an account that can accommodate movement and stability. Yet saying that motion and rest both are already shows that being cannot simply mean either motion or rest (Sophist 248a–250d).

The visitor then considers three possibilities about the combination of kinds. Perhaps no kind combines with another. Perhaps every kind combines with every other. Or perhaps some combine and some do not. Total separation would prevent even motion and rest from participating in being. Universal combination would allow motion itself to become rest. The argument therefore selects a discriminating account of combination (Sophist 251d–252e).

The visitor compares the required discrimination with knowing which letters can be joined. Understanding a language involves more than owning its alphabet. Correspondingly, understanding kinds involves recognizing their permitted relationships. The dialogue calls this philosophical expertise dialectic, connecting the ability to divide kinds with the ability to understand their combinations (Sophist 253a–e).

Motion and rest are distinct, yet each participates in being. Each is also the same as itself and different from the others. Being cannot be identical with Sameness: otherwise, admitting that motion and rest both are would make them the same. Difference likewise needs separate treatment, especially because being different is always being different from something (Sophist 254b–255e).

The distinction between identity and participation does substantial work here. If motion participates in being, it does not follow that motion is identical with Being. If it participates in Sameness, it is the same as itself; this does not make it identical with Sameness itself. Without attention to these different relations, the vocabulary can create the contradictions that the argument is trying to avoid.