Complete Works (45 page)

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

S
OCRATES
: Memory of nothing? Or of something?

T
HEAETETUS
: Of something, surely.

S
OCRATES
: That is to say, of things which one has learned, that is, perceived—that kind of ‘something’?

T
HEAETETUS
: Of course.

S
OCRATES
: And what a man has once seen, he recalls, I take it, from time to time?

T
HEAETETUS
: He does.

S
OCRATES
: Even if he shuts his eyes? Or does he forget it if he does this?

T
HEAETETUS
: That would be a strange thing to say, Socrates.

[164]
S
OCRATES
: Yet it is what we must say, if we are to save our previous statement. Otherwise, it’s all up with it.

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, by Jove, I begin to have my suspicions too; but I don’t quite see it yet. You explain.

S
OCRATES
: This is why. According to us, the man who sees has acquired knowledge of what he sees, as sight, perception and knowledge are agreed to be the same thing.

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, certainly.

S
OCRATES
: But the man who sees and has acquired knowledge of the thing he saw, if he shuts his eyes remembers but does not see it. Isn’t that so?

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

[b] S
OCRATES
: But to say ‘He doesn’t see’ is to say ‘He doesn’t know’, if ‘sees’ is ‘knows’?

T
HEAETETUS
: True.

S
OCRATES
: Then we have this result, that a man who has come to know something and still remembers it doesn’t know it because he doesn’t see it? And that’s what we said would be a most extraordinary thing to happen.

T
HEAETETUS
: That’s perfectly true.

S
OCRATES
: Then apparently we get an impossible result when knowledge and perception are identified?

T
HEAETETUS
: It looks like it.

S
OCRATES
: Then we have got to say that perception is one thing and knowledge another?

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, I’m afraid so.

[c] S
OCRATES
: Then what
is
knowledge? We shall have to begin again at the beginning, it seems. And yet—whatever are we thinking about, Theaetetus?

T
HEAETETUS
: What do you mean?

S
OCRATES
: We appear to be behaving like a base-born fighting-cock, jumping away off the theory, and crowing before we have the victory over it.

T
HEAETETUS
: How are we doing that?

S
OCRATES
: We seem to have been adopting the methods of professional controversialists: we’ve made an agreement aimed at getting words to agree consistently; and we feel complacent now that we have defeated the theory by the use of a method of this kind. We profess to be philosophers, not champion controversialists; and we don’t realize that we are doing just what those clever fellows do. [d]

T
HEAETETUS
: I still don’t quite see what you mean.

S
OCRATES
: Well, I will try to explain what I have in mind here. We were enquiring into the possibility that a man should not know something that he has learned and remembers. And we showed that a man who has seen something, and then shuts his eyes, remembers but does not see it; and that showed that he does not know the thing at the very time that he remembers it. We said that this was impossible. And so the tale of Protagoras comes to an untimely end; yours too, your tale about the identity of knowledge and perception.

T
HEAETETUS
: So it appears. [e]

S
OCRATES
: But I don’t think this would have happened, my friend, if the father of the other tale were alive. He would find plenty of means of defending it. As things are, it is an orphan we are trampling in the mud. Not even the people Protagoras appointed its guardians are prepared to come to its rescue; for instance, Theodorus here. In the interests of justice, it seems that we shall have to come to the rescue ourselves.

T
HEODORUS
: I think you must. It is not I, you know, Socrates, but Callias,
[165]
the son of Hipponicus,
¹⁵
who is the guardian of Protagoras’ relicts. As it happened, I very soon inclined away from abstract discussion to geometry. But I shall be very grateful if you can rescue the orphan.

S
OCRATES
: Good, Theodorus. Now will you give your mind to this rescue work of mine—what little I can do? Because one might be driven into making even more alarming admissions than we have just made, if one paid as little attention to the words in which we express our assertions and denials as we are for the most part accustomed to doing. Shall I tell you how this might happen? Or shall I tell Theaetetus?

T
HEODORUS
: Tell us both, Socrates; but the younger had better answer. It will not be so undignified for him to get tripped up. [b]

S
OCRATES
: Well, then, here is the most alarming poser of all. It goes something like this, I think: ‘Is it possible for a man who knows something not to know this thing which he knows?’

T
HEODORUS
: What are we going to answer now, Theaetetus?

T
HEAETETUS
: That it is impossible, I should think.

S
OCRATES
: But it is not, if you are going to premise that seeing is knowing. For what are you going to do when some intrepid fellow has you ‘trapped in the well-shaft’, as they say, with a question that leaves you no way out: [c] clapping his hand over one of your eyes, he asks you whether you see his cloak with the eye that is covered—how will you cope with that?

T
HEAETETUS
: I shall say that I don’t see it with this one, but I do with the other.

S
OCRATES
: So you both see and do not see the same thing at the same time?

T
HEAETETUS
: Well, yes, in that sort of way I do.

S
OCRATES
: ‘That’s not the question I’m setting you,’ he will say, ‘I was not asking you in what way it happened. I was asking you “
Does
it happen that you don’t know what you know?” You now appear to be seeing what you don’t see; and you have actually admitted that seeing is knowing, and not to see is not to know. I leave you to draw your conclusion.’

[d] T
HEAETETUS
: Well, I draw a conclusion that contradicts my original suppositions.

S
OCRATES
: And that is the kind of thing that might have happened to you more than once, you wonderful fellow. It might have happened if someone had gone on asking you whether it was possible to know sometimes clearly and sometimes dimly; or to know near at hand and not from a distance; or to know the same thing both intensely and slightly. And there are a million other questions with which one of the mercenary skirmishers of debate might ambush you, once you had proposed that knowledge and perception are the same thing. He would lay into hearing and smelling and other perceptions of that kind; and would keep on refuting [e] you and not let you go till you had been struck with wonder at his wisdom—that ‘answer to many prayers’—and had got yourself thoroughly tied up by him. Then, when he had you tamed and bound, he would set you free for a ransom—whatever price seemed appropriate to the two of you.

But perhaps you’ll ask, what argument would Protagoras himself bring to the help of his offspring. Shall we try to state it?

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, surely.

S
OCRATES
: Well, he will say all the things that we are saying in our
[166]
attempt to defend him; and then, I imagine, he will come to grips with us, and in no respectful spirit either. I imagine him saying: ‘This good Socrates here—what he did was to frighten a small boy by asking him if it were possible that the same man should at once remember and not know the same thing; and when the boy in his fright answered “No,” because he couldn’t see what was coming, then, according to Socrates, the laugh was against
me
in the argument. You are too easy-going, Socrates. The true position is this. When you are examining any doctrine of mine by the method of question and answer, if the person being questioned answers as I myself would answer, and gets caught, then it is I who am refuted; but if his answers are other than I should give, then it is he who is put in [b] the wrong.

‘Now, to begin with, do you expect someone to grant you that a man has a present memory of things he experienced in the past, this being an experience rather like the original one, unless he is still experiencing them? That is very far from being true. Again, do you suppose he will hesitate to admit that it is possible for the same man to know and not know the same thing? Or—if he has misgivings about this—do you expect him to concede to you that the man, who is in process of becoming unlike, is the same as he was before the process began? Do you expect him even to speak of “the man” rather than of “the men,” indeed of an infinite number of these men coming to be in succession, assuming this process of becoming unlike? Not if we really must take every precaution against each other’s [c] verbal traps. Show a little more spirit, my good man,’ he will say, ‘and attack my actual statement itself, and refute it, if you can, by showing that each man’s perceptions are not his own private events; or that, if they are his own private events, it does not follow that the thing which appears “becomes” or, if we may speak of being, “is” only for the man to whom it appears. You keep talking about pigs and baboons; you show the mentality of a pig yourself, in the way you deal with my writings, and you persuade your audience to follow your example. That is not the way [d] to behave.

‘I take my stand on the truth being as I have written it. Each one of us is the measure both of what is and of what is not; but there are countless differences between men for just this very reason, that different things both are and appear to be to different subjects. I certainly do not deny the existence of both wisdom and wise men: far from it. But the man whom I call wise is the man who can change the appearances—the man who in any case where bad things both appear and are for one of us, works a change and makes good things appear and be for him.

‘And I must beg you, this time, not to confine your attack to the letter [e] of my doctrine. I am now going to make its meaning clearer to you. For instance, I would remind you of what we were saying before, namely, that to the sick man the things he eats both appear and are bitter, while to the healthy man they both appear and are the opposite. Now what we have to do is not to make one of these two wiser than the other—that is
[167]
not even a possibility—nor is it our business to make accusations, calling the sick man ignorant for judging as he does, and the healthy man wise, because he judges differently. What we have to do is to make a change from the one to the other, because the other state is
better
. In education, too, what we have to do is to change a worse state into a better state; only whereas the doctor brings about the change by the use of drugs, the professional teacher
¹⁶
does it by the use of words. What never happens is that a man who judges what is false is made to judge what is true. For it is impossible to judge what is not, or to judge anything other than what one [b] is immediately experiencing; and what one is immediately experiencing is always true. This, in my opinion, is what really happens: when a man’s soul is in a pernicious state, he judges things akin to it, but giving him a sound state of the soul causes him to think different things, things that are good. In the latter event, the things which appear to him are what some people, who are still at a primitive stage, call “true”; my position, however, is that the one kind are
better
than the others, but in no way
truer
.

‘Nor, my dear Socrates, should I dream of suggesting that we might look for wisdom among frogs. I look for wisdom, as regards animal bodies, in doctors; as regards plant-life, in gardeners—for I am quite prepared to [c] maintain that gardeners too, when they find a plant sickly, proceed by causing it to have good and healthy, that is, “true” perceptions, instead of bad ones. Similarly, the wise and efficient politician is the man who makes wholesome things seem just to a city instead of pernicious ones. Whatever in any city is regarded as just and admirable
is
just and admirable, in that city and for so long as that convention maintains itself; but the wise man replaces each pernicious convention by a wholesome one, making this both be and seem just. Similarly the professional teacher who is able [d] to educate his pupils on these lines is a wise man, and is worth his large fees to them.

‘In this way we are enabled to hold both that some men are wiser than others, and also that no man judges what is false. And you, too, whether you like it or not, must put up with being a “measure.” For this is the line we must take if we are to save the theory.

‘If you feel prepared to go back to the beginning, and make a case against this theory, let us hear your objections set out in a connected argument. Or, if you prefer the method of question and answer, do it that way; there is no reason to try to evade that method either, indeed an intelligent person might well prefer it to any other. Only I beg that you will observe this [e] condition: do not be unjust in your questions. It is the height of unreasonableness that a person who professes to care for moral goodness should be consistently unjust in discussion. I mean by injustice, in this connection, the behavior of a man who does not take care to keep controversy distinct from discussion; a man who forgets that in controversy he may play about and trip up his opponent as often as he can, but that in discussion he must be serious, he must keep on helping his opponent to his feet again, and
[168]
point out to him only those of his slips which are due to himself or to the intellectual society which he has previously frequented. If you observe this distinction, those who associate with you will blame themselves for their confusion and their difficulties, not you. They will seek your company, and think of you as their friend; but they will loathe themselves, and seek refuge from themselves in philosophy, in the hope that they may thereby become different people and be rid forever of the men that they once were. But if you follow the common practice and do the opposite, you will get the opposite results. Instead of philosophers, you will make your [b] companions grow up to be the enemies of philosophy.