Complete Works (68 page)

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

V
ISITOR
: So since there is true and false speech, and of the processes just mentioned, thinking appeared to be the soul’s conversation with itself, [b] belief the conclusion of thinking, and what we call appearing the blending of perception and belief, it follows that since these are all the same kind of thing as speech, some of them must sometimes be false.

T
HEAETETUS
: Of course.

V
ISITOR
: So you realize we’ve found false belief and speech sooner than we expected to just now. Then we were afraid that to look for it would be to attack a completely hopeless project.

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

V
ISITOR
: So let’s not be discouraged about what’s still left. Since these [c] other things have come to light, let’s remember the divisions by types that we made earlier.

T
HEAETETUS
: Which ones?

V
ISITOR
: We divided copy-making into two types, likeness-making and appearance-making.

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

V
ISITOR
: And we said we were confused about which one to put the sophist in.

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

V
ISITOR
: And in our confusion about that we plunged into even greater bewilderment, when an account emerged that disagreed with everyone, by denying that there are likenesses or copies or appearances at all, on [d] the ground that there isn’t ever any falsity in any way anywhere.

T
HEAETETUS
: That’s right.

V
ISITOR
: But now since false speech and false belief both appear to be, it’s possible for imitations of
those that are
to be, and for expertise in deception to arise from that state of affairs.

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

V
ISITOR
: And we agreed before that the sophist does fall under one of the two types we just mentioned.

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

V
ISITOR
: Then let’s try again to take the kind we’ve posited and cut it in two. Let’s go ahead and always follow the righthand part of what we’ve [e] cut, and hold onto things that the sophist is associated with until we strip away everything that he has in common with other things. Then when we’ve left his own peculiar nature, let’s display it, especially to ourselves but also to people to whom this sort of procedure is naturally congenial.
[265]

T
HEAETETUS
: All right.

V
ISITOR
: Didn’t we begin by dividing expertise into productive and acquisitive?

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

V
ISITOR
: And under the acquisitive part the sophist appeared in hunting, combat, wholesaling, and types of that sort.
²⁸

T
HEAETETUS
: Of course.

V
ISITOR
: But now, since he’s included among experts in imitation, first we obviously have to divide productive expertise in two. We say imitation is a sort of production, but of copies and not of the things themselves. Is [b] that right?

T
HEAETETUS
: Absolutely.

V
ISITOR
: First of all, production has two parts.

T
HEAETETUS
: What are they?

V
ISITOR
: Divine and human.

T
HEAETETUS
: I don’t understand yet.

V
ISITOR
: If you remember how we started,
²⁹
we said production was any capacity that causes things to come to be that previously were not.

T
HEAETETUS
: I remember.

V
ISITOR
: Take animals and everything mortal, including plants and everything [c] on the earth that grows from seeds and roots, and also all lifeless bodies made up inside the earth, whether fusible or not. Are we going to say that anything besides the craftsmanship of a god makes them come to be after previously not being? Or shall we rely on the saying and the widespread belief that … ?

T
HEAETETUS
: That what?

V
ISITOR
: Are we going to say that nature produces them by some spontaneous cause that generates them without any thought, or by a cause that works by reason and divine knowledge derived from a god?

T
HEAETETUS
: I often shift back and forth on that from one view to the [d] other, maybe because of my age. When I’m focusing on you now, and supposing that you think they come to be by the agency of a god, that’s what I think too.

V
ISITOR
: Fine, Theaetetus. If we thought you were the kind of person who might believe something different in the future we’d try to use some cogent, persuasive argument to make you agree. But since I know what [e] your nature is and I know, too, that even without arguments from us it will tend in the direction that it’s pulled toward now, I’ll let the issue go. It would take too much time. I’ll assume divine expertise produces the things that come about by so-called nature, and that human expertise produces the things that humans compound those things into. According to this account there are two kinds of production, human and divine.

T
HEAETETUS
: Right.

V
ISITOR
: Since there are two of them, cut each of them in two again.

T
HEAETETUS
: How?

[266]
V
ISITOR
: It’s as if you’d already cut production all the way along its width, and now you’ll cut it along its length.

T
HEAETETUS
: All right.

V
ISITOR
: That way there are four parts of it all together, two human ones related to us and two divine ones related to the gods.

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

V
ISITOR
: Then if we take the division we made the first way, one part of each of those parts is the production of originals. Just about the best thing to call the two parts that are left might be “copy-making.” That way, production is divided in two again.

[b] T
HEAETETUS
: Tell me again how each of them is divided.

V
ISITOR
: We know that we human beings and the other living things, and also fire, water, and things like that, which natural things come from, are each generated and produced by a god. Is that right?

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

V
ISITOR
: And there are copies of each of these things, as opposed to the things themselves, that also come about by divine workmanship.

T
HEAETETUS
: What kinds of things?

V
ISITOR
: Things in dreams, and appearances that arise by themselves during the day. They’re shadows when darkness appears in firelight, and [c] they’re reflections when a thing’s own light and the light of something else come together around bright, smooth surfaces and produce an appearance that looks the reverse of the way the thing looks from straight ahead.

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, those are two products of divine production—the things themselves and the copies corresponding to each one.

V
ISITOR
: And what about human expertise? We say housebuilding makes a house itself and drawing makes a different one, like a human dream made for people who are awake.

[d] T
HEAETETUS
: Of course.

V
ISITOR
: And just the same way in other cases, too, there are pairs of products of human production, that is, the thing itself, we say, and the copy.

T
HEAETETUS
: Now I understand better and I take it that there are two kinds of double production, divine and human in each division. One kind produces things themselves, and the other kind produces things similar to them.

V
ISITOR
: Let’s recall that one part of copy-making is likeness-making. The other kind was going to be appearance-making, if falsity appeared to be truly falsity and by nature one of
those that are
. [e]

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, it was.

V
ISITOR
: But falsity did turn out that way, so are we going to count likeness-making and appearance-making as indisputably two forms?

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

V
ISITOR
: Then let’s divide appearance-making in two again.
[267]

T
HEAETETUS
: How?

V
ISITOR
: Into one sort that’s done with tools and one that uses one’s own self as the tool of the person making the appearance.

T
HEAETETUS
: What do you mean?

V
ISITOR
: When somebody uses his own body or voice to make something similar to your body or voice, I think the best thing to call this part of appearance-making is “imitating.”

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

V
ISITOR
: Let’s set this part off by calling it imitation, and let’s be lazy and let the other part go. We’ll leave it to someone else to bring it together [b] into a unit and give it a suitable name.

T
HEAETETUS
: All right, let’s take the one and let the other go.

V
ISITOR
: But the right thing, Theaetetus, is still to take imitation to have two parts. Think about why.

T
HEAETETUS
: Tell me.

V
ISITOR
: Some imitators know what they’re imitating and some don’t. And what division is more important than the one between ignorance and knowledge?

T
HEAETETUS
: None.

V
ISITOR
: Wasn’t the imitation that we just mentioned the kind that’s associated with knowledge? Someone who knew you and your character might imitate you, mightn’t he?

T
HEAETETUS
: Of course. [c]

V
ISITOR
: What about the character of justice and all of virtue taken together? Don’t many people who are ignorant of it, but have some beliefs about it, try hard to cause what they believe it is to appear to be present in them. And don’t they imitate it in their words and actions as much as they can?

T
HEAETETUS
: Very many people do that.

V
ISITOR
: And are they all unsuccessful at seeming to be just without being just at all? Or is the opposite true?

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes, the opposite.

[d] V
ISITOR
: I think we have to say that this person, who doesn’t know, is a very different imitator from the previous one, who does.

T
HEAETETUS
: Yes.

V
ISITOR
: Where would you get a suitable name for each of them? Isn’t it obviously hard to, just because the people who came before us were thoughtless and lazy about dividing kinds into types, and so they never even tried to divide them. That’s why we necessarily lack a good supply of names. Still, even though it sounds daring let’s distinguish them by [e] calling imitation accompanied by belief “belief-mimicry” and imitation accompanied by knowledge “informed mimicry.”

T
HEAETETUS
: All right.

V
ISITOR
: Then we need to use the former term, since the sophist isn’t one of the people who know but is one of the people who imitate.

T
HEAETETUS
: He certainly is.

V
ISITOR
: Let’s examine the belief-mimic the way people examine iron, to see whether it’s sound or has a crack in it.

T
HEAETETUS
: All right.

[268]
V
ISITOR
: Well, it has a big one. One sort of belief-mimic is foolish and thinks he knows the things he only has beliefs about. The other sort has been around a lot of discussions, and so by temperament he’s suspicious and fearful that he doesn’t know the things that he pretends in front of others to know.

T
HEAETETUS
: There definitely are both types that you’ve mentioned.

V
ISITOR
: Shall we take one of these to be a sort of sincere imitator and the other to be an insincere one?

T
HEAETETUS
: That seems right.

V
ISITOR
: And are there one or two kinds of insincere ones?

T
HEAETETUS
: You look and see.

[b] V
ISITOR
: I’m looking, and there clearly appear to be two. I see that one sort can maintain his insincerity in long speeches to a crowd, and the other uses short speeches in private conversation to force the person talking with him to contradict himself.

T
HEAETETUS
: You’re absolutely right.

V
ISITOR
: How shall we show up the long-winded sort, as a statesman or as a demagogue?

T
HEAETETUS
: A demagogue.

V
ISITOR
: And what shall we call the other one? Wise, or a sophist?

T
HEAETETUS
: We can’t call him wise, since we took him not to know [c] anything. But since he imitates the wise man he’ll obviously have a name derived from the wise man’s name. And now at last I see that we have to call him the person who is really and truly a
sophist
.

V
ISITOR
: Shall we weave his name together from start to finish and tie it up the way we did before?

T
HEAETETUS
: Of course.

V
ISITOR
: Imitation of the contrary-speech-producing, insincere and unknowing sort, of the appearance-making kind of copy-making, the word-juggling part of production that’s marked off as human and not divine.
[268d]
Anyone who says the sophist is of this “blood and family“
³⁰
will be saying, it seems, the complete truth.