Theaetetus

DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

GENERAL EDITOR: SUSAN L. RATTINER

EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: JANET B. KOPITO

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2018, is an unabridged republication of a standard edition of the Francis M. Cornford translation of Theaetetus.

International Standard Book Number

ISBN-13: 978-0-486-82553-3

ISBN-10: 0-486-82553-1

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

82553101 2018

www.doverpublications.com

CONTENTS

THEAETETUS

INTRODUCTION

SINCE the commentary aims at furnishing the reader with information as the need arises, it will be enough, by way of introduction, to indicate the place of the Theaetetus and the Sophist¹ in the series of Plato's dialogues, and to define briefly the position from which the inquiry starts.

Our two dialogues belong to a group consisting of the Parmenides, the Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman. As M. Diès has observed,² Plato leaves no doubt that the dialogues are meant to be read in this order. The Parmenides describes a meeting imagined as taking place about 450 B.C. between Socrates, who would then be about twenty, and the Eleatic philosophers, Parmenides and Zeno. To suppose that anything remotely resembling the conversation in this dialogue could have occurred at that date would make nonsense of the whole history of philosophy in the fifth and fourth centuries; and I believe, with M. Diès, that the meeting itself is a literary fiction, not a fact in the biography of Socrates. No ancient historian of philosophy mistook it for the record of an actual event, which, had it occurred, would have been a very important landmark. The Theaetetus (183E, p. 101) alludes to this meeting, and it is once more recalled in the Sophist (217C, p. 166) in terms that can only refer to the Parmenides. The Theaetetus, again, ends with an appointment which is kept at the beginning of the Sophist; and the Sophist itself is openly referred to in the Statesman.

As for the order of composition, no one doubts that the Sophist and the Statesman, which contain one continuous conversation, are later than the Theaetetus. In the Theaetetus many critics have noticed that the style changes towards the end in the direction of Plato's later manner. If that is so, stylometric results based on the dialogue as a whole will be misleading. The latter part of the Theaetetus, as we have it, may have been finished years after the beginning, and the Parmenides may have been composed in the interval. On the other hand, we need not suppose any very long gap between the completion of the Theaetetus and the composition of the Sophist and the Statesman.

It is now agreed that this group as a whole is earlier than the Timaeus, the Philebus, and the Laws, and later than the Meno, the Phaedo, and the Republic. The Republic is the centre of a group of less technical works, intended, not primarily for students of philosophy, but for the educated public, who would certainly not read the Parmenides and would find the Theaetetus and the Sophist intolerably difficult. These more popular writings would serve the double purpose of attracting students to the Academy and of making known to the Greek world a doctrine which, in common with most scholars, I hold to be characteristically Platonic. Its two pillars are the immortality and divinity of the rational soul, and the real existence of the objects of its knowledge—a world of intelligible ' Forms ' separate from the things our senses perceive.¹ Neither doctrine clearly appears in any dialogue that can be dated, on grounds of style, as distinctly earlier than the Meno. Both are put forward in the Phaedo in a manner suggesting that Plato arrived at them simultaneously and thought of them as interdependent.

The Meno had already announced the theory of Anamnesis: that knowledge is acquired, not through the senses or as information conveyed from one mind to another by teaching, but by recollection in this life of realities and truths seen and known by the soul before its incarnation. Socrates bases this doctrine on an account which he believes to be true,² learnt from men and women who are wise in religious matters and from inspired poets. The human soul is immortal (divine) and is purified through a round of incarnations, from which, when completely purified, it may finally escape. ' So the soul is immortal and has been many times reborn; and since it has seen all things, both in this world and in the other, there is nothing it has not learnt. No wonder, then, that it can recover the memory of what it has formerly known concerning virtue or any other matter. All Nature is akin and the soul has learnt all things; so there is nothing to prevent one who has recollected—learnt, as we call it—one single thing from discovering all the rest for himself, if he is resolute and unwearying in the search; for seeking or learning is nothing but recollection '.

Socrates goes on to prove this doctrine by experiment. By questioning a slave who has never been taught geometry, he elicits from him, after several wrong attempts, the solution of a not very easy problem of construction. He claims that he has not ' taught ' the slave the true belief he now has, any more than the false beliefs he produced at first. At the outset the slave had not knowledge; but these beliefs were in him, including the true belief which he did not know. They have been ' stirred up in him, as it were in a dream ', and if he were questioned again and again in various ways, he would end by having knowledge in place of true belief—knowledge which he would have recovered out of his own soul. This knowledge must have been acquired before birth. ' If, then, the truth of things is always in our soul, the soul must be immortal; hence you may confidently set about seeking for and recovering the memory of what you do not know, that is to say, do not remember.' Socrates adds that, in some respects, he could not defend the whole account; but he is convinced of the practical conclusion, that we shall be the better for believing that we can discover truth we do not know. Owing to Plato's dramatic method, we cannot fix the extent of Socrates' reservation. It might mean that the historic Socrates did not hold this theory, or, more probably, that the details of reincarnation, purgatory, and so forth, as described by Pindar and others, are ' mythical ': as such Plato always represents them elsewhere. But the reservation does not extend to the hypothetical conclusion which Socrates and Meno have both accepted: If the truth of things is always in the soul, then the soul is immortal.

Some modern critics, wishing perhaps to transform Plato's theory into something that we can accept, reduce the doctrine of Anamnesis to a form in which it ceases to have any connection with the pre-existence of the soul. But Plato unquestionably believed in immortality; and in the Phaedo, where Recollection is reaffirmed, it is the one proof of pre-existence which is accepted as satisfactory by all parties to the conversation.

The doctrine of Recollection marks a complete break with current beliefs both about the nature of the soul and about the sources of knowledge. The soul was popularly regarded as a mere shadow or eidolon, an unsubstantial wraith, that might well be dissipated when detached from the body. And if common sense could be said to have any view of the common characters called Forms in the Socratic dialogues, it would be the empiricist view that they are present in sensible things, and that our knowledge of them is conveyed through the senses perhaps by images, like the Atomists eidola, thrown off by material bodies. Among the philosophic theories which Socrates, in the Phaedo, says he had found unsatisfying is the doctrine ' that it is the brain that gives us perceptions of hearing, sight, and smell, and out of these arise memory and belief, and from these again, when they have settled down into quiescence, comes knowledge '. Plato's break with all theories deriving knowledge by abstraction from sensible objects carried with it an equally firm repudiation of popular notions of the soul as either a flimsy double of the body or a resultant, supervening on the mixture of bodily elements. In other words, the ' separation ' of the Platonic Forms from any dependence on material things went with the separation of the soul which knows them from any dependence on the physical organism. The Phaedo is designed to plead for both conclusions concurrently. It is not claimed that either doctrine is proved; but it is claimed that if the Forms exist and can be known, then the soul is immortal. Plato himself believed both; and his Socrates, unlike the Socrates of the earlier dialogues, now uses every resource of eloquence to convince his hearers of what he believes but does not know.

In his opening discourse it is assumed from the outset that the soul can exist without the body; for ' to be dead ' is defined as meaning ' that the body has come to be separate by itself apart from the soul, and the soul separate by itself apart from the body '. ¹ So much might be said of the wraith or shadow-soul of popular belief; but the properties which Socrates goes on to ascribe to the separable soul are very different. The contrast is not between mind and matter, or even between soul and body as commonly understood. The psyche here is what was later called by Plato and Aristotle the Reason or the spirit, in opposition to the flesh.² To the flesh belong the senses, and the bodily appetites and pleasures. The spirit's proper function is thought or reflection, which lays hold upon unseen reality and is best carried on when the spirit withdraws from the flesh to think by itself, untroubled by the senses. The pursuit of wisdom is a ' loosing and separation of the soul from the body '—a rehearsal of that separation called death (67D).

The effect of this introductory discourse is to establish in the reader's mind, before the argument begins, the idea of a complete detachment of the thinking self from the body and its senses and passions. This idea, though unfamiliar, would be easier for Plato's public to grasp than that detachment of Forms from sensible things which it is his other purpose to announce clearly for the first time. If the reader will forget all that he has learnt about the Forms from later writings and put himself in the situation of Plato's readers who knew only the earlier dialogues, he will find that he is being led, step by step, to recognise the separate existence of the Forms.

The Forms are first mentioned as the objects of the soul's reflection, when withdrawn from the senses. All that is pointed out here (65D) is that those entities which were the familiar topics of Socrates' conversation are perceived by thought, not by the senses. When Socrates and his friends considered, What is Justice?, they were trying to define the Just ' by itself ' and to discover ' what it is ' or its ' being ' Any reader of the earlier dialogues might agree that Justice, not being a thing that can be seen or touched, will be known by pure thought when the soul is ' set free from eyes and ears and the body as a whole '.

There follows a long and elaborate defence of Anamnesis, addressed to the more difficult task of convincing the reader, on the one hand, that the soul has pre-existed, and on the other, that his own vague notions of how we first become acquainted with a thing like ' Justice itself ' are radically wrong. We not only cannot perceive it; we cannot extract it from any sense-impressions. This might be argued more easily in the case of the moral Forms, which are obviously not sensible; but Plato is no less concerned with the mathematical Forms. He undertakes to prove that we cannot derive our knowledge of Equality from the perception of equal things. The same two sticks sometimes appear equal to one person and unequal to another; but no one ever thinks that ' equals ' are unequal or that Equality is Inequality. The sight of nearly equal things causes us to think of Equality, and we judge that they fall short of that ideal standard. It is argued that we must have obtained knowledge of true Equality before we began to use our senses, that is to say, before our birth; and this carries with it the pre-existence of the soul. Whether the argument seems sound to the modern reader or not, Anamnesis is accepted by all parties and later reaffirmed (92A); nor is any doubt ever cast upon it in Plato's other works. The upshot is that the Forms have an existence separate from things as surely as the spirit has an existence separate from the body.

The next argument is to urge that the soul not only has preexisted, but is by nature indestructible. It is not composed or put together out of parts into which it might be dissolved. It is reasonable, we are told, to identify incomposite things with things that never undergo any sort of change. Now the reader who has grasped the distinction between ideal Equality and the nearly equal things of sense, will agree that Forms must always be what they are and can suffer no kind of change. The many things that bear the same names as the Forms are perpetually changing in all respects; and these are the things we see and touch, whereas the Forms are unseen. It is thus laid down that there are two orders of things: the unseen, exempt from all change, and the seen, which change perpetually. Finally it is argued as probable that the soul, which is unseen, most resembles the divine, immortal, intelligible, simple, and indissoluble; while the body most resembles the human, mortal, unintelligible, complex, and dissoluble. The separation of the two worlds or orders of being is here very sharply marked. No relation between them is described; no transition from sense to thought is suggested. Even the fact that sensible experience may be the occasion of Recollection is lost sight of. Socrates recurs to the language of his opening discourse. When the soul uses any of the senses, it is dragged down into the world of change and becomes dizzy and confused. Only when thinking by itself can it escape into that other region of pure, eternal, and unchanging being.

Thus, by a series of steps, the reader acquainted with the earlier dialogues is led to see that the moral terms which Socrates was always discussing belong to a distinct order of realities, and that knowledge of them cannot be extracted from impressions of sense. Throughout, the separation of the Forms is intertwined with and illustrated by the separation of the divine spirit from all dependence on the mortal body. The conclusion is that the two doctrines stand or fall together.¹

The separate reality of the Forms created a problem which is courageously faced, though not solved, in the later group to which our dialogues belong. How are those separate Forms related to the things we touch and see in this world of becoming? The Phaedo itself (100C–D) had indicated that to speak of a thing as ' partaking of ' a Form is to use a metaphor that leaves it obscure how an eternal and unchanging Form or its character can be ' present in ' or ' shared by ' transient individual things in time and space. In the Parmenides Socrates is represented as putting forward the theory of separate Forms to dispose of Zeno's paradoxical antinomies, and as confronted with this very difficulty of participation by Zeno's master, Parmenides. It is significant that the great founder of the Eleatic school should dominate the discussion here, and that a Stranger from Elea should take the lead in the Sophist and the Statesman. Parmenides had been the first to raise the problem which the theory of Forms was intended to solve. This problem had two aspects. In Parmenides' poem it is presented chiefly as the problem that arises when a world of real being is distinguished from a world of ' seeming ' or appearance, which is somehow false and unreal, or, as Parmenides himself declared, totally false and unreal. This aspect we shall encounter, as the problem of eidola, stated, but not solved, in the Sophist. Parmenides had also drawn the corresponding distinction between the senses, which profess to reveal appearances, and rational thought apprehending true reality. The Theaetetus will formulate and examine the claim of the senses to yield knowledge. The discussion moves in the world of appearance and proves that, if we try to leave out of account the world of true being, we cannot extract knowledge from sensible experience.

The theory of Forms, as stated in the Phaedo, was meant to deal with both aspects of the problem bequeathed by Parmenides. The eternal and intelligible Forms were to provide rational thought with objects of knowledge. The transient existence or ' becoming ' of sensible things in the world of appearance was to be grounded in the world of true being by some kind of participation; they were thus to be endowed with an ambiguous half-reality, not left, as in Parmenides' uncompromising system, totally unsupported. But our series of dialogues opens with a trenchant criticism of Plato's own theory as giving no intelligible account of the derivation of appearances from reality. The discussion starts from Zeno's counter-attack on the critics of Parmenides. Zeno had put forward a series of arguments, reducing (as he thought) to absurdity their defence of the common-sense belief in the existence of a plurality of real things. His first argument is quoted: ' If there are many things, then they must be both like and unlike.' From both horns of the dilemma Zeno deduced what he regarded as impossible consequences. Socrates replies that no impossibilities result, if you recognise ' a Form, Likeness, just by itself ', and another contrary Form, Unlikeness. That things which are simply '