Complete Works (43 page)

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, I think so.

S
OCRATES
: Now it seems to me that these three statements that we have admitted are fighting one another in our souls when we speak of the example of the dice; or when we say that, within the space of a year, I (a full-grown man) without having been either increased or diminished, am now bigger than you (who are only a boy) and, later on, smaller—though I have lost nothing and it is only that you have grown. For this means [c] that I am, at a later stage, what I was not before, and that, too, without having become—for without becoming it is not possible to have become, and without suffering any loss in size I could never become less. And there are innumerable other examples of the same thing if once we admit these. You follow me, I take it, Theaetetus—I think you must be familiar with this kind of puzzle.

T
HEAETETUS
: Oh yes, indeed, Socrates, I often wonder like mad what these things can mean; sometimes when I’m looking at them I begin to feel quite giddy.

S
OCRATES
: I dare say you do, my dear boy. It seems that Theodorus was [d] not far from the truth when he guessed what kind of person you are. For this is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering: this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else. And the man who made Iris the child of Thaumas was perhaps no bad genealogist.
¹²
—But aren’t you beginning to see now what is the explanation of these puzzles, according to the theory which we are attributing to Protagoras?

T
HEAETETUS
: I don’t think I am, yet.

S
OCRATES
: Then I dare say you will be grateful to me if I help you to [e] discover the veiled truth in the thought of a great man—or perhaps I should say, of great men?

T
HEAETETUS
: Of course I shall be, Socrates, very grateful.

S
OCRATES
: Then you have a look round, and see that none of the uninitiated are listening to us—I mean the people who think that nothing exists but what they can grasp with both hands; people who refuse to admit that actions and processes and the invisible world in general have any place in reality.

T
HEAETETUS
: They must be tough, hard fellows, Socrates.
[156]

S
OCRATES
: They are, my son—very crude people. But these others, whose mysteries I am going to tell you, are a much more subtle type. These mysteries begin from the principle on which all that we have just been saying also depends, namely, that everything is really motion, and there is nothing but motion. Motion has two forms, each an infinite multitude, but distinguished by their powers, the one being active and the other passive. And through the intercourse and mutual friction of these two [b] there comes to be an offspring infinite in multitude but always twin births, on the one hand what is perceived, on the other, the perception of it, the perception in every case being generated together with what is perceived and emerging along with it. For the perceptions we have such names as sight, hearing, smelling, feeling cold and feeling hot; also what are called pleasures and pains, desires and fears; and there are others besides, a great number which have names, an infinite number which have not. And on the other side there is the race of things perceived, for each of these [c] perceptions perceived things born of the same parentage, for all kinds of visions all kinds of colors, for all kinds of hearings all kinds of sounds; and so on, for the other perceptions the other things perceived, that come to be in kinship with them.

Now what does this tale really mean, from our point of view, Theaetetus? How does it bear on what we were saying before? Do you see?

T
HEAETETUS
: Not really, Socrates.

S
OCRATES
: Look here, then, let us see if we can somehow round it off. What it is trying to express, presumably, is this. All these things are in motion, just as we say; and their motion is distinguished by its swiftness or slowness. What is slow has its motion in one and the same place, and [d] in relation to the things in the immediate neighborhood; in this way it generates and the offspring are swifter, as they move through space, and their motion takes the form of spatial movement.

Thus the eye and some other thing—one of the things commensurate with the eye—which has come into its neighborhood, generate both whiteness and the perception which is by nature united with it (things which would never have come to be if it had been anything else that eye or object [e] approached). In this event, motions arise in the intervening space, sight from the side of the eye and whiteness from the side of that which cooperates in the production of the color. The eye is filled with sight; at that moment it sees, and becomes not indeed sight, but a seeing eye; while its partner in the process of producing color is filled with whiteness, and becomes not whiteness but white, a white stick or stone or whatever it is that happens to be colored this sort of color.

[157]
We must understand this account as applying in the same way to hard and hot and everything else: nothing, as we were saying before,
is
in itself any of these. All of them, of all kinds whatsoever, are what things become through association with one another, as the result of motion. For even in the case of the active and passive motions it is impossible, as they say, for thought, taking them singly, to pin them down to being anything. There is no passive till it meets the active, no active except in conjunction with the passive; and what, in conjunction with one thing, is active, reveals itself as passive when it falls in with something else.

And so, wherever you turn, there is nothing, as we said at the outset, [b] which in itself is just one thing; all things become relatively to something. The verb ‘to be’ must be totally abolished—though indeed we have been led by habit and ignorance into using it ourselves more than once, even in what we have just been saying. That is wrong, these wise men tell us, nor should we allow the use of such words as ‘something’, ‘of something’, or ‘mine’, ‘this’ or ‘that’, or any other name that makes things stand still. We ought, rather, to speak according to nature and refer to things as ‘becoming’, ‘being produced’, ‘passing away’, ‘changing’; for if you speak in such a way as to make things stand still, you will easily be refuted. And this applies in speaking both of the individual case and of many aggregated together—such an aggregate, I mean, as people call ‘man’ or [c] ‘stone’, or to which they give the names of the different animals and sorts of thing.

—Well, Theaetetus, does this look to you a tempting meal and could you take a bite of the delicious stuff?

T
HEAETETUS
: I really don’t know, Socrates. I can’t even quite see what you’re getting at—whether the things you are saying are what you think yourself, or whether you are just trying me out.

S
OCRATES
: You are forgetting, my friend. I don’t know anything about this kind of thing myself, and I don’t claim any of it as my own. I am barren of theories; my business is to attend you in your labor. So I chant incantations over you and offer you little tidbits from each of the wise till [d] I succeed in assisting you to bring your own belief forth into the light. When it has been born, I shall consider whether it is fertile or a wind-egg. But you must have courage and patience; answer like a man whatever appears to you about the things I ask you.

T
HEAETETUS
: All right, go on with the questions.

S
OCRATES
: Tell me again, then, whether you like the suggestion that good and beautiful and all the things we were just speaking of cannot be said to ‘be’ anything, but are always ‘coming to be’.
¹³

T
HEAETETUS
: Well, as far as I’m concerned, while I’m listening to your exposition of it, it seems to me an extraordinarily reasonable view; and I feel that the way you have set out the matter has got to be accepted.

S
OCRATES
: In that case, we had better not pass over any point where our [e] theory is still incomplete. What we have not yet discussed is the question of dreams, and of insanity and other diseases; also what is called mishearing or misseeing or other cases of misperceiving. You realize, I suppose, that it would be generally agreed that all these cases appear to provide a refutation of the theory we have just expounded. For in these conditions,
[158]
we surely have false perceptions. Here it is far from being true that all things which appear to the individual also are. On the contrary, no one of the things which appear to him really is.

T
HEAETETUS
: That is perfectly true, Socrates.

S
OCRATES
: Well then, my lad, what argument is left for the person who maintains that knowledge is perception and that what appears to any individual also is, for him to whom it appears to be?

T
HEAETETUS
: Well, Socrates, I hardly like to tell you that I don’t know [b] what to say, seeing I’ve just got into trouble with you for that. But I really shouldn’t know how to dispute the suggestion that a madman believes what is false when he thinks he is a god; or a dreamer when he imagines he has wings and is flying in his sleep.

S
OCRATES
: But there’s a point here which
is
a matter of dispute, especially as regards dreams and real life—don’t you see?

T
HEAETETUS
: What do you mean?

S
OCRATES
: There’s a question you must often have heard people ask—the question what evidence we could offer if we were asked whether in [c] the present instance, at this moment, we are asleep and dreaming all our thoughts, or awake and talking to each other in real life.

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, Socrates, it certainly is difficult to find the proof we want here. The two states seem to correspond in all their characteristics. There is nothing to prevent us from thinking when we are asleep that we are having the very same discussion that we have just had. And when we dream that we are telling the story of a dream, there is an extraordinary likeness between the two experiences.

S
OCRATES
: You see, then, it is not difficult to find matter for dispute, [d] when it is disputed even whether this is real life or a dream. Indeed we may say that, as our periods of sleeping and waking are of equal length, and as in each period the soul contends that the beliefs of the moment are preeminently true, the result is that for half our lives we assert the reality of the one set of objects, and for half that of the other set. And we make our assertions with equal conviction in both cases.

T
HEAETETUS
: That certainly is so.

S
OCRATES
: And doesn’t the same argument apply in the cases of disease and madness, except that the periods of time are not equal?

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, that is so.

S
OCRATES
: Well now, are we going to fix the limits of truth by the clock?

[e] T
HEAETETUS
: That would be a very funny thing to do.

S
OCRATES
: But can you produce some other clear indication to show which of these beliefs are true?

T
HEAETETUS
: I don’t think I can.

S
OCRATES
: Then you listen to me and I’ll tell you the kind of thing that might be said by those people who propose it as a rule that whatever a man thinks at any time is the truth for him. I can imagine them putting their position by asking you this question: ‘Now, Theaetetus, suppose you have something which is an entirely different thing from something else. Can it have in any respect the same powers as the other thing?’ And observe, we are not to understand the question to refer to something which is the same in some respects while it is different in others, but to that which is wholly different.

T
HEAETETUS
: In that case, then, it is impossible that it should have anything
[159]
the same, either as regards its powers or in any other respect, if it is a completely different thing.

S
OCRATES
: And aren’t we obliged to admit that such a thing is also unlike the other?

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, I think so.

S
OCRATES
: Now supposing a thing is coming to be like or unlike to something, whether to itself or to something else; are we to say that when it is growing like it is coming to be the same, and when it is growing unlike it is coming to be a different thing?

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, that must be so.

S
OCRATES
: Now weren’t we saying, at an earlier stage, that there is a number—indeed an infinite number—of both active and passive factors?

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

S
OCRATES
: Also this, that when a thing mixes now with one thing and now with another, it will not generate the same things each time but different things?

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, certainly. [b]

S
OCRATES
: Well, now let us apply this same statement to you and me and things in general. Take, for example, Socrates ill and Socrates well. Shall we say Socrates in health is like or unlike Socrates in sickness?

T
HEAETETUS
: You mean the ill Socrates as a whole compared with the well Socrates as a whole?

S
OCRATES
: You get my point excellently; that is just what I mean.

T
HEAETETUS
: Unlike, then, I suppose.

S
OCRATES
: And different also, in so far as he is unlike?

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, that follows.

S
OCRATES
: Similarly, you would say, when he is asleep or in any of the [c] conditions we enumerated just now?

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, I should.