Complete Works (46 page)

‘So, if you take my advice, as I said before, you will sit down with us without ill will or hostility, in a kindly spirit. You will genuinely try to find out what our meaning is when we maintain (
a
) that all things are in motion and (
b
) that for each person and each city, things are what they seem to them to be. And upon this basis you will inquire whether knowledge and perception are the same thing or different things. But you will not proceed as you did just now. You will not base your argument upon the use and wont of language; you will not follow the practice of most men, who drag [c] words this way and that at their pleasure, so making every imaginable difficulty for one another.’

Well, Theodorus, here is my contribution to the rescue of your friend—the best I can do, with my resources, and little enough that is. If he were alive himself, he would have come to the rescue of his offspring in a grander style.

T
HEODORUS
: That must be a joke, Socrates. It was a very spirited rescue.

S
OCRATES
: You are kind, my friend. Tell me now, did you notice that Protagoras was complaining of us, in the speech that we have just heard, [d] for addressing our arguments to a small boy and making the child’s nervousness a weapon against his ideas? And how he disparaged our method of arguments as merely an amusing game, and how solemnly he upheld his ‘measure of all things’ and commanded us to be serious when we dealt with his theory?

T
HEODORUS
: Yes, of course I noticed that, Socrates.

S
OCRATES
: Then do you think we should obey his commands?

T
HEODORUS
: Most certainly I do.

S
OCRATES
: Look at the company then. They are all children but you. So if we are to obey Protagoras, it is you and I who have got to be serious [e] about his theory. It is you and I who must question and answer one another. Then he will not have
this
against us, at any rate, that we turned the criticism of his philosophy into sport with boys.

T
HEODORUS
: Well, isn’t our Theaetetus better able to follow the investigation of a theory than many an old fellow with a long beard?

S
OCRATES
: But not better than
you
, Theodorus. Do not go on imagining that it is my business to be straining every nerve to defend your dead
[169]
friend while you do nothing. Come now, my very good Theodorus, come a little way with me. Come with me at any rate until we see whether in questions of geometrical proofs it is really you who should be the measure or whether all men are as sufficient to themselves as you are in astronomy and all the other sciences in which you have made your name.

T
HEODORUS
: Socrates, it is not easy for a man who has sat down beside you to refuse to talk. That was all nonsense just now when I was pretending that you were going to allow me to keep my coat on, and not use compulsion like the Spartans. So far from that, you seem to me to have leanings [b] towards the methods of Sciron.
¹⁷
The Spartans tell one either to strip or to go away; but you seem rather to be playing the part of Antaeus.
¹⁸
You don’t let any comer go till you have stripped him and made him wrestle with you in an argument.

S
OCRATES
: That, Theodorus, is an excellent simile to describe what is the matter with me. But I am more of a fiend for exercise than Sciron and Antaeus. I have met with many and many a Heracles and Theseus in my time, mighty men of words; and they have well battered me. But for all [c] that I don’t retire from the field, so terrible a lust has come upon me for these exercises.
You
must not grudge me this, either; try a fall with me and we shall both be the better.

T
HEODORUS
: All right. I resign myself; take me with you where you like. In any case, I see, I have got to put up with the fate you spin for me, and submit to your inquisition. But not further than the limits you have laid down; beyond that I shall not be able to offer myself.

S
OCRATES
: It will do if you will go with me so far. Now there is one kind of mistake I want you to be specially on your guard against, namely, that [d] we do not unconsciously slip into some childish form of argument. We don’t want to get into disgrace for this again.

T
HEODORUS
: I will do my best, I promise you.

S
OCRATES
: The first thing, then, is to tackle the same point that we were dealing with before. We were making a complaint. Now let us see whether we were right or wrong in holding it to be a defect in this theory that it made every man self-sufficient in wisdom; and whether we were right or wrong when we made Protagoras concede that some men are superior to others in questions of better and worse, these being ‘the wise’. Do you agree?

T
HEODORUS
: Yes.

S
OCRATES
: It would be a different matter if Protagoras were here in person [e] and agreed with us, instead of our having made this concession on his behalf in our attempt to help him. In that case, there would be no need to take this question up again and make sure about it. In the circumstances, however, it might be decided that we had no authority on his behalf, and so it is desirable that we should come to a clearer agreement on this point; for it makes no small difference whether this is so or not.

T
HEODORUS
: True.

[170]
S
OCRATES
: Then don’t let us obtain this concession through anybody else. Let us take the shortest way, an appeal to his own statement.

T
HEODORUS
: How?

S
OCRATES
: In this way. He says, does he not, that things are for every man what they seem to him to be?

T
HEODORUS
: Yes, that is what he says.

S
OCRATES
: Well, then, Protagoras, we too are expressing the judgments of a man—I might say, of all men—when we say that there is no one in the world who doesn’t believe that in some matters he is wiser than other men; while in other matters, they are wiser than he. In emergencies—if at no other time—you see this belief. When they are in distress, on the battlefield, or in sickness or in a storm at sea, all men turn to their leaders in each sphere as to gods and look to them for salvation because they are [b] superior in precisely this one thing—knowledge. And wherever human life and work goes on, you find everywhere men seeking teachers and masters, for themselves and for other living creatures and for the direction of all human works. You find also men who believe that they are able to teach and to take the lead. In all these cases, what else can we say but that men do believe in the existence of both wisdom and ignorance among themselves?

T
HEODORUS
: There can be no other conclusion.

S
OCRATES
: And they believe that wisdom is true thinking? While ignorance is a matter of false judgment?

T
HEODORUS
: Yes, of course.

S
OCRATES
: What then, Protagoras, are we to make of your argument? Are we to say that all men, on every occasion, judge what is true? Or that they judge sometimes truly and sometimes falsely? Whichever we say, it comes to the same thing, namely, that men do not always judge what is true; that human judgments are both true and false. For think, Theodorus. Would you, would anyone of the school of Protagoras be prepared to contend that no one ever thinks his neighbor is ignorant or judging falsely?

T
HEODORUS
: No, that’s not a thing one could believe, Socrates.

S
OCRATES
: And yet it is to this that our theory has been driven—this [d] theory that man is the measure of all things.

T
HEODORUS
: How is that?

S
OCRATES
: Well, suppose you come to a decision in your own mind and then express a judgment about something to me. Let us assume with Protagoras that your judgment is true for
you
. But isn’t it possible that the rest of us may criticize your verdict? Do we always agree that your judgment is true? Or does there rise up against you, every time, a vast army of persons who think the opposite, who hold that your decisions and your thoughts are false?

T
HEODORUS
: Heaven knows they do, Socrates, in their ‘thousands and [e] tens of thousands’, as Homer says,
¹⁹
and give me all the trouble that is humanly possible.

S
OCRATES
: Then do you want us to say that you are then judging what is true for yourself, but false for the tens of thousands?

T
HEODORUS
: It looks as if that is what we must say, according to the theory, at any rate.

S
OCRATES
: And what of Protagoras himself? Must he not say this, that supposing he himself did not believe that man is the measure, any more than the majority of people (who indeed do not believe it), then this
Truth
[171]
which he wrote is true for no one? On the other hand, suppose he believed it himself, but the majority of men do not agree with him; then you see—to begin with—the more those to whom it does not seem to be the truth outnumber those to whom it does, so much the more it isn’t than it is?

T
HEODORUS
: That must be so, if it is going to be or not be according to the individual judgment.

S
OCRATES
: Secondly, it has this most exquisite feature: Protagoras admits, I presume, that the contrary opinion about his own opinion (namely, that it is false) must be true, seeing he agrees that all men judge what is.

T
HEODORUS
: Undoubtedly.

[b] S
OCRATES
: And in conceding the truth of the opinion of those who think him wrong, he is really admitting the falsity of his own opinion?

T
HEODORUS
: Yes, inevitably.

S
OCRATES
: But for their part the others do not admit that they are wrong?

T
HEODORUS
: No.

S
OCRATES
: But Protagoras again admits
this
judgment to be true, according to his written doctrine?

T
HEODORUS
: So it appears.

S
OCRATES
: It will be disputed, then, by everyone, beginning with Protagoras—or rather, it will be admitted by him, when he grants to the person [c] who contradicts him that he judges truly—when he does that, even Protagoras himself will be granting that neither a dog nor the ‘man in the street’ is the measure of anything at all which he has not learned. Isn’t that so?

T
HEODORUS
: It is so.

S
OCRATES
: Then since it is disputed by everyone, the
Truth
of Protagoras is not true for anyone at all, not even for himself?

T
HEODORUS
: Socrates, we are running my friend too hard.

S
OCRATES
: But it is not at all clear, my dear Theodorus, that we are running off the right track. Hence it is likely that Protagoras, being older [d] than we are, really is wiser as well; and if he were to stick up his head from below as far as the neck just here where we are, he would in all likelihood convict me twenty times over of talking nonsense, and show you up too for agreeing with me, before he ducked down to rush off again. But we have got to take ourselves as we are, I suppose, and go on saying the things which seem to us to be. At the moment, then, mustn’t we maintain that any man would admit at least this, that some men are wiser than their fellows and others more ignorant?

T
HEODORUS
: So it seems to me, at any rate.

S
OCRATES
: We may also suggest that the theory would stand firm most successfully in the position which we sketched out for it in our attempt [e] to bring help to Protagoras. I mean the position that most things are for the individual what they seem to him to be; for instance, warm, dry, sweet and all this type of thing. But if the theory is going to admit that there is any sphere in which one man is superior to another, it might perhaps be prepared to grant it in questions of what is good or bad for one’s health. Here it might well be admitted that it is not true that every creature—woman or child or even animal—is competent to recognize what is good for it and to heal its own sickness; that here, if anywhere, one person is better than another. Do you agree?

T
HEODORUS
: Yes, that seems so to me.

S
OCRATES
: Then consider political questions. Some of these are questions
[172]
of what may or may not fittingly be done, of just and unjust, of pious and impious; and here the theory may be prepared to maintain that whatever view a city takes on these matters and establishes as its law or convention, is truth and fact for that city. In such matters neither any individual nor any city can claim superior wisdom. But when it is a question of laying down what is to the interest of the state and what is not, the matter is different. The theory will again admit that here, if anywhere, one counsellor is better than another; here the decision of one city may be more in conformity with the truth than that of another. It would certainly not have the [b] hardihood to affirm that when a city decides that a certain thing is to its own interest, that thing will undoubtedly turn out to be to its interest. It is in those other questions I am talking about—just and unjust, pious and impious—that men are ready to insist that no one of these things has by nature any being of its own; in respect of these, they say, what seems to people collectively to be so is true, at the time when it seems that way and for just as long as it so seems. And even those who are not prepared to go all the way with Protagoras take some such view of wisdom. But I see, Theodorus, that we are becoming involved in a greater discussion [c] emerging from the lesser one.