Theaetetus (177-181)

SOC. Two patterns, my friend, are set up in the world, the divine, which is most blessed, and the godless, which is most wretched. But these men do not see that this is the case, and their silliness and extreme foolishness blind them to the fact that through their unrighteous acts they are made like the one and unlike the other. They therefore pay the penalty for this by living a life that conforms to the pattern they resemble; and if we tell them that, unless they depart from their cleverness, the blessed place that is pure of all things evil will not receive them after death, and here on earth they will always live the life like themselves—evil men associating with evil—when they hear this, they will be so confident in their unscrupulous cleverness that they will think our words the talk of fools.

THEO. Very true, Socrates.

SOC. Yes, my friend, I know. However, there is one thing that has happened to them: whenever they have to carry on a personal argument about the doctrines to which they object, if they are willing to stand their ground for a while like men and do not run away like cowards, then, my friend, they at last become strangely dissatisfied with themselves and their arguments; their brilliant rhetoric withers away, so that they seem no better than children. But this is a digression. Let us turn away from these matters—if we do not, they will come on like an ever-rising flood and bury in silt our original argument—and let us, if you please, proceed.

THEO. To me, Socrates, such digressions are quite as agreeable as the argument; for they are easier for a man of my age to follow. However, if you prefer, let us return to our argument.

SOC. Very well. We were at about the point in our argument where we said that those who declare that only motion is reality, and that whatever seems to each man really is to him to whom it seems, are willing to maintain their position in regard to other matters and to maintain especially in regard to justice that whatever laws a state makes, because they seem to it just, are just to the state that made them, as long as they remain in force; but as regards the good, that nobody has the courage to go on and contend that whatever laws a state passes thinking them advantageous to it are really advantageous as long as they remain in force, unless what he means is merely the name advantageous [*]; and that would be making a joke of our argument. Am I right?

THEO. Certainly.

SOC. Yes; for he must not mean merely the name, but the thing named must be the object of his attention.

THEO. True.

SOC. But the state, in making laws, aims, of course, at advantage, whatever the name it gives it, and makes all its laws as advantageous as possible to itself, to the extent of its belief and ability; or has it in making laws anything else in view?

THEO. Certainly not.

SOC. And does it always hit the mark, or does every state often miss it?

THEO. I should say they do often miss it!

SOC. Continuing, then, and proceeding from this point, every one would more readily agree to this assertion, if the question were asked concerning the whole class to which the advantageous belongs; and that whole class, it would seem, pertains to the future. For when we make laws, we make them with the idea that they will be advantageous in after time; and this is rightly called the future.

THEO. Certainly.

SOC. Come then, on this assumption, let us question Protagoras or someone of those who agree with him. Man is the measure of all things, as your school says, Protagoras, of the white, the heavy, the light, everything of that sort without exception; for he possesses within himself the standard by which to judge them, and when his thoughts about them coincide with his sensations, he thinks what to him is true and really is. Is not that what they say?

THEO. Yes.

SOC. Does he, then, also, Protagoras, we shall say, possess within himself the standard by which to judge of the things which are yet to be, and do those things which he thinks will be actually come to pass for him who thought them? Take, for instance, heat; if some ordinary man thinks he is going to take a fever, that is to say, that this particular heat will be, and some other man, who is a physician, thinks the contrary, whose opinion shall we expect the future to prove right? Or perhaps the opinion of both, and the man will become, not hot or feverish to the physician, but to himself both?

THEO. No, that would be ridiculous.

SOC. But, I imagine, in regard to the sweetness or dryness which will be in a wine, the opinion of the husbandman, not that of the lyre-player, will be valid.

THEO. Of course.

SOC. And again, in a matter of discord or tunefulness in music that has never been played, a gymnastic teacher could not judge better than a musician what will, when performed, seem tuneful even to a gymnastic teacher himself.

THEO. Certainly not.

SOC. Then, too, when a banquet is in preparation the opinion of him who is to be a guest, unless he has training in cookery, is of less value concerning the pleasure that will be derived from the viands than that of the cook. For we need not yet argue about that which already is or has been pleasant to each one but concerning that which will in the future seem and be pleasant to each one, is he himself the best judge for himself, or would you, Protagoras—at least as regards the arguments which will be persuasive in court to each of us—be able to give an opinion beforehand better than anyone whatsoever who has no especial training?

THEO. Certainly, Socrates, in this, at any rate, he used to declare emphatically that he himself excelled everyone.

SOC. Yes, my friend, he certainly did; otherwise nobody would have paid him a high fee for his conversations, if he had not made his pupils believe that neither a prophet nor anyone else could judge better than himself what was in the future to be and seem.

THEO. Very true.

SOC. Both lawmaking, then, and the advantageous are concerned with the future, and everyone would agree that a state in making laws must often fail to attain the greatest advantage?

THEO. Assuredly.

SOC. Then it will be a fair answer if we say to your master that he is obliged to agree that one man is wiser than another, and that such a wise man is a measure, but that I, who am without knowledge, am not in the least obliged to become a measure, as the argument in his behalf just now tried to oblige me to be, whether I would or no.

THEO. In that respect, Socrates, I think that the argument is most clearly proved to be wrong, and it is proved wrong in this also, in that it declares the opinions of others to be valid, whereas it was shown that they do not consider his arguments true at all.

SOC. In many other respects, Theodorus, it could be proved that not every opinion of every person is true, at any rate in matters of that kind; but it is more difficult to prove that opinions are not true in regard to the momentary states of feeling of each person, from which our perceptions and the opinions concerning them arise. But perhaps I am quite wrong; for it may be impossible to prove that they are not true, and those who say that they are manifest and are forms of knowledge may perhaps be right, and Theaetetus here was not far from the mark in saying that perception and knowledge are identical. So we must, as the argument in behalf of Protagoras [*] enjoined upon us, come up closer and examine this doctrine of motion as the fundamental essence, rapping on it to see whether it rings sound or unsound. As you know, a strife has arisen about it, no mean one, either, and waged by not a few combatants.

THEO. Yes, far from mean, and it is spreading far and wide all over Ionia; for the disciples of Heracleitus are supporting this doctrine very vigorously.

SOC. Therefore, my dear Theodorus, we must all the more examine it from the beginning as they themselves present it.

THEO. Certainly we must. For it is no more possible, Socrates, to discuss these doctrines of Heracleitus (or, as you say, of Homer or even earlier sages) with the Ephesians themselves—those, at least, who profess to be familiar with them—than with madmen. For they are, quite in accordance with their text-books, in perpetual motion; but as for keeping to an argument or a question and quietly answering and asking in turn, their power of doing that is less than nothing; or rather the words nothing at all fail to express the absence from these fellows of even the slightest particle of rest. But if you ask one of them a question, he pulls out puzzling little phrases, like arrows from a quiver, and shoots them off; and if you try to get hold of an explanation of what he has said, you will be struck with another phrase of novel and distorted wording, and you never make any progress whatsoever with any of them, nor do they themselves with one another, for that matter, but they take very good care to allow nothing to be settled either in an argument or in their own minds, thinking, I suppose, that this is being stationary; but they wage bitter war against the stationary, and, so far as they can, they banish it altogether.

SOC. Perhaps, Theodorus, you have seen the men when they are fighting, but have not been with them when they are at peace; for they are no friends of yours; but I fancy they utter such peaceful doctrines at leisure to those pupils whom they wish to make like themselves.

THEO. What pupils, my good man? Such people do not become pupils of one another, but they grow up of themselves, each one getting his inspiration from any chance source, and each thinks the other knows nothing. From these people, then, as I was going to say, you would never get an argument either with their will or against it; but we must ourselves take over the question and investigate it as if it were a problem of mathematics.

SOC. Yes, what you say is reasonable. Now as for the problem, have we not heard from the ancients, who concealed their meaning from the multitude by their poetry, that the origin of all things is Oceanus and Tethys, flowing streams, and that nothing is at rest and likewise from the modern, who, since they are wiser, declare their meaning openly, in order that even cobblers may hear and know their wisdom and may cease from the silly belief that some things are at rest and others in motion, and, after learning that everything is in motion, may honor their teachers? But, Theodorus, I almost forgot that others teach the opposite of this,

So that it is motionless, the name of which is the All,

Parmenides, line 98 (ed. Mullach) [*] and all the other doctrines maintained by Melissus and Parmenides and the rest, in opposition to all these they maintain that everything is one and is stationary within itself, having no place in which to move.

SO.What shall we do with all these people, my friend? For, advancing little by little, we have unwittingly fallen between the two parties, and, unless we protect ourselves and escape somehow, we shall pay the penalty, like those in the palaestra, who in playing on the line are caught by both sides and dragged in opposite directions. [*] I think, then, we had better examine first the one party, those whom we originally set out to join, the flowing ones, and if we find their arguments sound, we will help them to pull us over, trying thus to escape the others; but if we find that the partisans of the whole seem to have truer doctrines, we will take refuge with them from those who would move what is motionless. But if we find that neither party has anything reasonable to say, we shall be ridiculous if we think that we, who are of no account, can say anything worth while after having rejected the doctrines of very ancient and very wise men. Therefore, Theodorus, see whether it is desirable to go forward into so great a danger.

THEO. Oh, it would be unendurable, Socrates, not to examine thoroughly the doctrines of both parties.

SOC. Then they must be examined, since you are so urgent. Now I think the starting-point of our examination of the doctrine of motion is this: Exactly what do they mean, after all, when they say that all things are in motion? What I wish to ask is this: Do they mean to say that there is only one kind of motion or, as I believe, two? But it must not be my belief alone; you must share it also, that if anything happens to us we may suffer it in common. Tell me, do you call it motion when a thing changes its place or turns round in the same place?

THEO. Yes.

SOC. Let this, then, be one kind of motion. Now when a thing remains in the same place, but grows old, or becomes black instead of white, or hard instead of soft, or undergoes any other kind of alteration, is it not proper to say that this is another kind of motion?

THEO. I think so.

SOC. Nay, it must be true. So I say that there are these two kinds of motion: alteration, and motion in space.

THEO. And you are right.

SOC. Now that we have made this distinction, let us at once converse with those who say that all things are in motion, and let us ask them, Do you mean that everything moves in both ways, moving in space and undergoing alteration, or one thing in both ways and another in one of the two ways only?

THEO. By Zeus, I cannot tell! But I think they would say that everything moves in both ways.

SOC. Yes; otherwise, my friend, they will find that things in motion are also things at rest, and it will be no more correct to say that all things are in motion than that all things are at rest.

THEO. What you say is very true.