▶︎ 0:01 Well, welcome to our third session on Plato's Theaetetus. We're going to be reading the dialogue through 183c today, and we're almost going to seal the fate of the idea that knowledge is perception. We're almost going to hammer the last nail into the coffin, but not quite. So this has turned out to be a real can of worms that Theaetetus opened up with his simple claim that knowledge is perception.
▶︎ 0:26 Just to review where we've been, Socrates very quickly raised the question, what is knowledge? And Theaetetus's first answer was to say, well, there's astronomy, there's mathematics, of various kinds. There's the crafts like cobbling. But that wasn't really an answer because those were just examples. So his first real answer, according to Socrates, was that knowledge is perception. And then quickly, Socrates links that to the saying of Protagoras, "Man is the measure of all things. Each perceiver is the measure of truth." And then to Heraclitus among others who says, "You can't step in the same river twice. Everything is flowing, everything is changing." And with a little more work, the baby is born, as it were, he's delivered, Theaetetus's first idea, and now they're testing it.
▶︎ 1:28 I did want to go back to the word measure for a moment in the saying that man is the measure of all things. If we say that this glass of water is seven inches tall, is that an objective fact would you say? Is it a fact about the glass itself in other words, without relation to anything else? For it to be seven inches tall, that's a relationship between the cup and a ruler that shows inches, I guess, so it would have to be relational. Right, and that was my point. So we've measured it in terms of an inch, so there's already a relation there to an inch, however you define that, or wherever you look to find out what an inch is. And there's also implicitly at least some relation to the measurer, right? Someone had to look at it and determine that it was seven inches tall.
▶︎ 2:26 So is seven inches objective or not? Well, we feel it's more objective than it's delicious water or something, quote, "subjective" like that. But Protagoras would probably say, well, your so-called objective information about the thing in itself also depends on some relation to you. You've also intervened in some way to get that so-called fact. And we also talked about how in quantum mechanics, actually we now all believe that the measurement actively intervenes and affects what is measured, at least at a certain scale. So there seems to be something fairly deep about Protagoras.
▶︎ 3:08 So combining Protagoras and Heraclitus, Socrates has created this theory of reality, if you will, or being, but he doesn't want to use that word, becoming, a theory of becoming. Everything is in motion, motions are intersecting, and in these intersections, we get these momentary flarings up of an appearance, a phenomenon, a good Greek word that just means something that appears. It appears to someone, it appears to be of something, but there is no thing really independently of the relationship. The perception is all there is, and there is no perceiver independently of that moment of intersection of those two motions. So all this rather bizarre understanding of reality came out of the idea that knowledge is perception.
▶︎ 4:04 We looked at a couple of objections, including a sort of ad hominem objection. If everybody's perceptions are true, then what makes your perceptions, Protagoras, any better than anyone else's? Why are you so wise? And his answer was, well, because I know how to change other people's perceptions to make them better.
▶︎ 4:30 We talked about how that assumes something about better, what's the standard of better? But maybe that's not much of an objection because Protagoras could say, well, better by their standards, by the standards of the person whose perceptions I'm changing. If they think or they feel that their perceptions are more desirable now, then they are for them, and I deserve my high fees because I'm the one who facilitated that, as a therapist or some sort of a political counselor or somebody who might be able to change others' perceptions.
▶︎ 5:03 So today, Theaetetus is going to get a well-deserved rest for a while, and it's going to be Theodorus who's interacting with Socrates because Socrates almost coerces him, or at least he shames him into doing this, saying, look, it's not my job to be defending your dead friend, Protagoras, while you just sit there. Come on. And you're making me pick on a boy, Theaetetus? Come on, you and me. So he finally agrees, making it more personal about Theodorus.
▶︎ 5:38 At 169a, there's another point where Socrates makes it personal. Come with me until we see whether in questions of geometrical proofs it's really you who should be the measure, or whether all men are as sufficient to themselves as you are in astronomy and the other sciences in which you've made your name. This is not just rhetoric, these are supposed to be sciences, astronomy, geometry. How can you agree with Protagoras and say that everybody's perception of these things is valid?
▶︎ 6:18 Theodorus gives in to what Socrates calls his terrible lust for these exercises. He uses the word eros. It's a sort of erotic drive to philosophical argumentation. The first objection, and I'd like to know what you all think of this one, is basically that if everybody is right about everything all the time, then people are right when they disagree with Protagoras. There are some details we could talk about or different cases where you can make this point, but that's the basic idea. Do you think it demolishes Protagoreanism right there?
▶︎ 7:04 Audience: No.
▶︎ 7:07 Okay. How would you stand up?
▶︎ 7:09 Audience: I would say that there are different uses of the word right. So they are advocating correctly their position, and then there's a larger question of whether that position is accurate. It is possible for someone to be, in that sense, right in saying what they believe, and wrong in that what they believe may not match or may not be the best explanation for the set of facts that they're trying to stand up for.
▶︎ 7:41 But is that how Protagoras would defend himself saying that, "Well, they may not be right about the facts"?
▶︎ 7:46 Audience: I think he'd say that they, in the instant that they were bringing it up, they were right.
▶︎ 7:53 Any more thoughts on this? It seems to be.
▶︎ 7:54 Audience: Maybe I'm wrong.
▶︎ 7:56 Oh, no. We're all right all the time. This should give us a lot of confidence as we're discussing Protagoreanism because we're always right. Can't be wrong. But seriously, when you meet a relativist, and you may have met one, sometime around sophomore year of college you meet some relativists, sophomoric relativists. This is an objection that often comes to mind. "Oh, so you say everybody's right all the time? Well, I disagree with you, so you admit that I'm right, right? So you're wrong." Does that just short-circuit the whole relativism position or can the relativist find a way to shrug that off? Maybe as you suggested, but I would love to collect more opinions on this.
▶︎ 8:42 Audience: It's like when you explain things to children or somebody that's just learning. They're like, "Well, I'm right." You don't want to sound rude or condescending, but it's like, "Well, you're right for you." You're right for your stage of development or something, right?
▶︎ 8:55 Yes. Said humbly. So maybe Protagoras' form of rightness is a higher truth somehow, a more sophisticated, not sophomoric, truth? Does he have the right to claim that? That his truth is superior somehow, more true?
▶︎ 9:15 Audience: So if he's saying everyone could be right, and I say, "Well, Protagoras, I think you're wrong, so therefore I'm right, and you're right," but we disagree with each other and it seems like there's a paradox there, he could maybe say, "Well, my perception is more favorable, and that's what makes me wiser," like we were talking about last class, but like.
▶︎ 9:35 Yeah, although he'd probably have to add, "More favorable to me." Everything is relative. To me, to you. I agree that this is not definitive. This is not the final nail in the coffin by any means. It's a natural objection that comes about, but the relativist can always come back and say, "Okay, sure. That's great. Sure, for you. But not for me." And so you cannot pin him down to anything that's gonna stand as absolute, because whenever you think you've got him by the short hairs, he's gonna say, "Okay, for you." It's really rather maddening. I don't know if you have any other comments you want to make about this. Socrates makes this point at some length.
▶︎ 10:21 People disagree directly with Protagoras. People disagree implicitly with him when they say that they trust some experts more than amateurs. Especially in emergencies, he says at 170A, when they're in distress on the battlefield, or in sickness, or in a storm at sea, when they really have some skin in the game and this really matters, then they're not relativists. They're not going to turn to just anybody. They're going to go to a doctor or somebody else that for some reason they think is an expert in this field. So if everybody's right all the time, then they are right not to be relativists. But again, Protagoras could come back and say, "Yeah, they're right for them at that time."
▶︎ 11:08 Now, this point about emergencies leads to a broader discussion. Why do you turn to, if you believe in our modern medicine, why do you turn to an MD rather than a faith healer, if you're ill? Because you want to live. And you want to keep living, into the future. So the broader things that come out have to do with prediction. What's going to work? Is everybody an expert on what's going to work?
▶︎ 11:45 And so if we're allowed, which maybe is a big if, to look beyond the present moment of perception and allow for predictions, the normal human being in real life is going to believe that some people are better predictors than others. And this leads to some large questions about politics, in fact.
▶︎ 12:09 Let's go to 172A. In the Hackett edition it's page 41. "Consider political questions. Some of these are questions of admirable and shameful conduct, of just and unjust, of pious and impious. Here, the theory, relativism, 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. But when it's a question of laying down what is to the interest of the state and what is not, the matter is different."
▶︎ 12:46 The distinction is between what is just or morally good versus what's prudent and what's a smart strategy. Maybe the first is relative. The second one seems to be more objective. This is, I think, a very modern distinction, as well as an ancient one at the time in Athens. This is like the fact value distinction we make, isn't it?
▶︎ 13:16 What do you mean? I realized when I had a kid in third grade that we actually train our schoolchildren to make this distinction, this big metaphysical, philosophical distinction. They're given a list of statements, and they are trained that if a statement contains the word "good" or "better" or "beautiful," they are to mark it as opinion, and if not, it's to be marked as fact. So this is taken to be somehow written in stone. I remember one example, and this was in Ohio, and the statement was, "The Columbus Airport is the best in Ohio." Opinion. That was the correct answer.
▶︎ 14:02 This is modern dogma in many circles. Whenever you express a preference, that's not actual knowledge. That's just a feeling, that's relative. But something like which airport has the most takeoffs and landings in a day, that's fact. Now, are you comfortable with that distinction? Is it really written into the nature of things?
▶︎ 14:29 Audience: In my aesthetics class that I'm in right now, we had an essay due, and my professor projected on the board one of the essays he received, where the student says, "This painting is objectively beautiful." And he highlighted that and said, "I don't ever want to see that again." So yeah, I guess things like beautiful, best, good can't really be objective, and I think that's ...
▶︎ 14:54 According to your professor.
▶︎ 14:55 Audience: Yeah.
▶︎ 14:56 But why should we trust this professor?
▶︎ 14:58 Audience: Well, yeah, I guess, according to Protagoras, we could all be right in our own sense.
▶︎ 15:05 In any case, the distinction seems to come easily. Let's take another current example. In recent history, the US government abducted the president of Venezuela. Now, I think I'm trying to describe it objectively with the word "abducted." Was this fair? Was this just? Was this justified by international law? Et cetera, et cetera.
▶︎ 15:26 Maybe the legal question might be objective, but is it fair? Is it good? That's a value judgment, as we say. There'll be different judgments about whether this was justified or not. Was it in the interest of the US? That seems more objective. Maybe we don't know yet, but potentially it could get us lots of oil and money. That's good, isn't it, for our prosperity?
▶︎ 15:47 This seems to be a very realistic point of view. Realpolitik, perhaps. So Socrates says, "I see, Theodorus, that we're becoming involved in a greater discussion emerging from the lesser one." This is raising all sorts of big questions about justice.
▶︎ 16:02 And Theodorus says, at 172c, "Well, we have plenty of time, haven't we, Socrates?" This is a great word that he uses, by the way. "Scholei," which looks like school, and in fact, it is the root of our word "school." It means leisure, it means free time. And Socrates himself, actually back at 154e, said that we have plenty of leisure. And so Theodorus is picking up on that. But that remark provokes several pages of what Socrates calls a digression.
▶︎ 16:46 And Socrates answers, "Well, we appear to. That remark of yours reminds me of an idea that has often occurred to me before, how natural it is that men who've spent a great part of their lives in philosophical studies make such fools of themselves when they appear as speakers in the law courts." So, this seems to have nothing to do with knowledge. It seems to be a pleasant break in the heavy-duty argumentation.
▶︎ 17:16 Did you notice how Theodorus reacts to this? Does he enjoy it? He loves it. He says things like, "I like listening to this sort of thing." "It's easier for a man of my years to follow." He also says, "If your words convinced everyone as they do me, there would be more peace and less evil on Earth." So there's just a little, perhaps relevant point about Theodorus. He really doesn't like the nitty-gritty of philosophical argument, but he loves flowery speech like this about how wonderful philosophers are.
▶︎ 17:53 Now, the speech, but,
▶︎ 17:56 Audience: couldn't it be called how useless philosophers are?
▶︎ 18:00 Indeed. Yes. Let's get to the content of it. And it's the useless philosopher versus the useful, quote, "lawyer."
▶︎ 18:10 I'll put that in quotes, because in the ancient Athenian legal system, you didn't really have professional lawyers as we do. You had orators who argued cases, or they would help you argue a case. Because, at least in theory, if you were brought to court, and the charges were laid against you, you had to defend yourself. Now, you could get somebody else to write a speech for you. In theory, you couldn't pay them for that, although maybe only in theory. But you had to at least speak those words.
▶︎ 18:41 They also didn't have professional prosecutors. There was no DA. You didn't like what some fellow citizen did? Bring them to court. So they spoke as your own prosecutors. "Hey, you murdered my mother. I'm gonna take you to court." Well, and then you have to defend yourself. This was one way in which ancient Athens was radically democratic.
▶︎ 19:03 Now in some way they were less democratic than we are because only a minority of the people were citizens and they had to be adult male native born Athenians who were not enslaved. Still, it's a fairly large number of men, and if you were part of that group then you would be constantly made to get involved in public affairs. So you would be assigned by lot to be part of various governmental bodies. You'd often be serving on juries of 501 men, and this is not a very big city by our standards, and so you'd often be on jury duty. And this was part of being an active citizen.
▶︎ 19:47 So sooner or later almost everyone would end up in court in one way or another, but some men were always involved in this, the most litigious part of Athenian society. They were the men who were knocking about the law courts their whole lives, and let's just call them the lawyers, because that's a pretty good modern parallel. So let's just list the qualities of the philosopher and the lawyer according to Socrates. What shall I put down?
▶︎ 20:36 Audience: Just.
▶︎ 20:40 Explain a bit more.
▶︎ 20:41 Audience: I think of the philosophers as just being more level-headed. When you see the Justice with her blindfold on it's like, "I'm not really gonna pass judgment here."
▶︎ 20:53 That allegory of Justice is interesting. She's blind because she's not taking into consideration irrelevant factors, let's say race or class or whatever. But she does pass judgment and that's why she has a sword too. One thing that Socrates does say is that the philosopher is concerned with the questions, questions such as what is justice itself. I'm putting these down just as they occur to us.
▶︎ 21:23 The lawyer is concerned with the injustice of this person or that person, in legal terms. So this or that injustice. The philosopher can ask the big questions and the definition questions. It's sort of like a cobbler who knows how to fix shoes versus the philosopher who can ask what is knowledge itself. What else?
▶︎ 21:53 Audience: I'm looking at 175E. He describes the philosopher as living in freedom and leisure.
▶︎ 22:02 Mm-hmm.
▶︎ 22:02 Audience: He says he doesn't know how to make a bed or sweeten a sauce, and so he's not really into the specifics but the man who could sweeten a sauce or make a bed, like the lawyer, maybe couldn't write a song or praise the gods appropriately.
▶︎ 22:19 We're getting a bit beyond lawyers in particular here, but in that later passage he's talking about people who get their hands dirty as it were, with concrete skills and crafts.
▶︎ 22:31 Audience: Oh, I see.
▶︎ 22:35 Good point. And there's a sneering tone there I think, "Sweeten the sauce." This is a lowly occupation, being a chef or something. The philosopher is more noble, maybe that's a good word to sum up what we're saying. He's thinking about higher things, working on a higher realm.
▶︎ 23:00 And falls into a well. He does fall into a well, but maybe that's a badge of honor. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. That's certainly the way he presents it. Yeah. Let's talk about that.
▶︎ 23:13 Absent-minded. This sort of thing happens to me all the time. It's all I can do to try to look respectable for this film. I had to dress myself and everything. I forget things all the time. So this is the well-earned stereotype of the egghead with his head in the clouds, or Einstein with mismatched socks. The nerd that we all know. The original nerd was Thales.
▶︎ 23:43 Thales, historically considered the first philosopher, famous for the statement that all is water. This radical simplification of everything down to its material basis. The story is that he was studying the stars, I guess it was night, he's walking around at night looking up at the sky and kind of risky business and he falls in a well, and a Thracian servant girl laughs hard at him because he was wild to know about what was up in the sky but failed to see what was in front of him and under his feet.
▶︎ 24:16 Yeah, this is an anecdote that's repeated many times throughout the history of philosophy. The same joke applies to all who spend their lives in philosophy. So the philosopher's a nerd.
▶︎ 24:30 The lawyer type is much more practical, but that's not a good thing according to this speech. That means you're focused on tiny little momentary things and how to fix them. Leisure is how this whole thing began, and that's what provoked this whole digression, so let's talk about that a little bit. The philosopher has scholē. He has free time, an expression that would mean a lot in a slaveholding society, because most people are just working to stay alive or they're actually forced to work and they have no free time. Their time belongs to somebody else. So the philosopher is free. His time, at least some of it, belongs to him, and he can do what is intrinsically valuable.
▶︎ 25:20 What about the lawyer? What's the lawyer's relationship to time? He's crunched. In our modern system, we see this happening all the time on legal dramas and so on where the judge is like, "Okay, get to the point, Counselor." And so there's a fixed task, a fixed time in which to do it. You have to be a clock watcher. There's a real cruelty here in some way.
▶︎ 25:55 Audience: In that, like, Theodorus says, "Our arguments are our own like slaves." "Each one must wait about for us." So, taking for granted the ownership of people, the ownership of an argument, is, I feel like quite extraordinary and interesting in the realm of talking about what is justice. And you can really tell that this comes from a slaveholding culture.
▶︎ 26:32 And that's an important point of reference for them. The very interesting remark you quoted there, that's, where is Theodorus? That's 173c. Theodorus at 173c, "Our arguments are logoi." An important word, as we'll see later on. "Are our own like slaves. Each one must wait about for us to be finished whenever we think fit." Whereas the lawyer is a slave to the arguments. I have friends who are lawyers. I would never want to be a lawyer because it does seem like you're really enslaved to the letter of the law and all these tasks that are put upon you, and it's brutal, hard work. Whereas it seems that we philosophers get to talk about whatever we want, as we wish.
▶︎ 27:25 I think the main remaining point is to just spell out all the things that the philosopher is ignorant of, and blissfully so. So he falls into wells and he's a nerd because he doesn't know the way to the marketplace, the agora, doesn't know the way to the courts, doesn't know anything about politics or laws, doesn't know about the family background of people of 173d. He has no more idea whether a fellow citizen is high born or humble or whether he's inherited some taint from his forebearers.
▶︎ 28:01 Audience: But I thought that was a bit of overstatement. Socrates was mentioning earlier on in the dialogue that Theodotus came from a good family and was left inheritance, and so he pays attention to these things.
▶︎ 28:15 Good catch. One of the first things we see in the dialogue is Theodorus says, "I forget who Theodotus' father is," and Socrates says, right away, "Oh, yeah, son of Euphronius of Sunium." Okay, so this is not a self-description exactly. There's something odd going on here. What about these other things? He says, "The philosopher doesn't know the way to the marketplace." That's the agora. As an agoraphobe. Agora means, agoraphobia means you're afraid of public spaces. It was not just the marketplace for buying and selling things, but it was where the people came together to see each other. It was the Times Square of Athens.
▶︎ 28:53 So Socrates is famous for hanging out in the agora. He's not teaching in a school. He's going out in public and interacting with fellow citizens. He certainly wasn't agoraphobic. He says, "The philosopher never goes to parties." Well, in Plato's Symposium, we learn that Socrates can drink everybody under the table. So he does go to parties.
▶︎ 29:18 And here's the, what really clinches the point that there's something strange going on, 173a. "In all these matters, he knows not even that he knows not." He doesn't even realize that he's ignorant. And one more point, and then I'll see what you make of this. At 174b, "The philosopher fails to see his next door neighbor. He not only doesn't notice what he's doing, he scarcely knows whether he's a man or some other kind of creature. The question he asks is, 'What is man?'" What does it mean to be human itself? But he doesn't even look at his own neighbor, his own neighbor human being, and doesn't even realize that he doesn't know his own neighbor. Is this a self-description by Socrates or not?
▶︎ 30:11 Audience: Well, he's going after man as measure. So if the philosopher is already asking what is a man, then you can't say man is measure because you don't even know what a man is.
▶︎ 30:25 Great. I hadn't thought about that. So we should ask, what is a man? It's a good question. Or what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be human? That's the question. Very important question. However we read this, we shouldn't conclude that it's simply a negative portrayal of the philosopher because these are good questions, and who wants to be a lawyer anyway? But it's a bad description of Socrates himself, who again, the
▶︎ 30:57 As I've pointed out, the first thing he says about himself in the whole dialogue is not that he's always asking what does it mean to be human, but he's always asking where are the promising particular humans in Athens. I want to know. So he is aware of his neighbor and his neighbor's parentage and all these concrete things. What's going on here? Well, he's creating a straw man in some way.
▶︎ 31:25 Audience: A straw man figure of the Philosopher?
▶︎ 31:28 Yeah. Why would he do that? Does he want to tear down philosophy?
▶︎ 31:31 Audience: No, I think he wants to tear down Protagoras, I suppose, so he can come back at Protagoras and make a different argument.
▶︎ 31:41 Well, would this be a more accurate portrait of someone other than Socrates who we know?
▶︎ 31:47 Audience: Theodorus.
▶︎ 31:48 Theodorus. Right. Right. I think what's going on here, at least in part, is Socrates' picture of, quote, "the Philosopher" is a picture, a distorted picture, of philosophy and really more of a picture of Theodorus, especially when he says that the Philosopher is always, in 173E, "His mind pursues its winged way throughout the universe in the deeps beneath the earth, doing the geometry of planes and in the heights above the heaven, doing astronomy." Well, these are the things that Theodorus teaches, not Socrates' main focus. So, of course, Theodorus loves this praise of the abstract philosopher because he doesn't realize that it's a satire on him, I think, thus proving Socrates' point, that Theodorus just doesn't, he isn't really self-aware, and he doesn't really get it when people are making fun of him.
▶︎ 32:56 Now, is that all it is, a cruel joke at Theodorus's expense? Is he saying the opposite of what he seemed to say, that the Philosopher is great, the Lawyer is an idiot? Is he really saying we should be lawyers?
▶︎ 33:11 Audience: I'm trying to think whether either of these categories has knowledge.
▶︎ 33:17 Mm-hmm.
▶︎ 33:17 Audience: I think that the Lawyer probably definitely has practical knowledge. I think you could say the Philosopher also has like geometrical maybe in The Clouds knowledge, so maybe he's going for something in the middle?
▶︎ 33:34 Yeah, but that sounds like a promising suggestion to me, if you could combine both forms of understanding. It's good that you mentioned The Clouds, by the way. So this is one of our three sources for Socrates, I'm sorry, Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes who wrote this comedy called The Clouds where Socrates is portrayed actually as a natural philosopher investigating up in the sky and below the earth just as he says here, and having himself carried up in a basket up in the air as if he's inhabiting the clouds. So there's an echo of that here in the way Aristophanes poked fun at Socrates and at all philosophy for being too arrogant and sticking their noses where they don't belong.
▶︎ 34:23 There's also an interesting echo of the Allegory of the Cave, which is a famous passage in The Republic, and I'll just briefly describe it. So in The Republic, Socrates says, imagine these prisoners in a cave. They've been there since birth. They've been shackled, and all they've ever been able to do is stare at the wall of the cave. So that's their reality. That's their entire truth. Behind them, there's a fire burning, and between the fire and the prisoners, there's people walking back and forth carrying some sort of puppets that are casting shadows on the wall of the cave. So to them, the reality is the shadows, which they don't even realize are shadows.
▶︎ 35:08 If you could set somebody free and pull them to his feet and turn him around and push him up towards the fire, first of all, he would be in pain and confused and resentful. Then you'd have to physically drag him out of the cave and bring him out into the outside, and in the light of the sun, which he's never seen before, and he would hate you even more because everything is too bright. But with time, eventually he would adapt. He would learn to see things outdoors, and he would understand that, oh, this is reality. Everything else has just been a derivative imitation.
▶︎ 35:42 This is like rising, he says, from the world of everyday tangible visible objects to the world of the forms, questions like, "What is justice? What is goodness?" Abstract philosophical questions. Initially, it's very painful, and you resent it, but then you realize, oh, these things are actually much more important and real. So there's where we get a caricature of Platonism as being, oh, just look up. Just forget about this junk down here and just look up at the abstractions.
▶︎ 36:11 But the allegory continues by saying if the freed prisoner decided to go back down for some reason into the cave, then he'd have the opposite problem. First, it was too bright, and now it's too dark. Now his eyes aren't used to the dark, and so he'll be stumbling around. He won't be able to make out the shadows anymore, and everybody will say that he's been ruined by whoever did this to him, and they would kill him. They would kill him if they could get their hands on him. A little allusion to the fate of Socrates.
▶︎ 36:43 I think Plato is saying just what you were saying. If you could combine the ability to think abstractly and get wisdom on that level with the ability to, quote, "see in the dark" and deal with particular situations and the nitty-gritty of politics, you would be truly wise. And in fact, he goes on to describe philosopher kings or philosopher rulers who would necessarily have to have both kinds of wisdom. So I think we have a rough idea of what's going on in the Digression. Partly he's poking fun at people like Theodorus, but also maybe suggesting that there's a combination of the abstract and the particular, knowledge, which would be desirable.
▶︎ 37:31 And I think that Socrates or Plato is probably being quite sincere, when, towards the end of the Digression, he criticizes people who take themselves to be very clever, in getting away with injustice. But, at 175C, when somebody asks him to examine justice and injustice themselves, what they are, how they differ from everything else and from each other, well, now his head swims. Disconcerted by the unusual experience, he knows not what to do next. He can only stammer when he speaks. And this causes great entertainment to all men who have not been brought up like slaves.
▶︎ 38:27 Or he makes a similar point at 177B, when it comes to giving and taking in account, giving a logos, giving an argument of the things the unjust man disparages. When he's willing to stand his ground like a man for long enough instead of running away like a coward, then an odd thing happens. In the end, the things he says do not satisfy even himself. We see this, for instance, in book one of the Republic. Socrates is arguing with Thrasymachus, who's a sophist who says, "Might makes right," and injustice is fantastic if you can just get away with it. But he can't ultimately defend that, and he's defeated by Socrates.
▶︎ 39:10 And maybe this means that this fact value distinction, to return to that, is not as obvious as we take it to be. Because it would tend to promote a kind of a Thrasymachean or maybe Machiavellian cynicism. Let's forget about these value judgments about right and wrong, just and unjust. Let's just focus on what works, and often what works is what people consider unjust. But maybe that's a very narrow, and in fact ignorant point of view. The punishment for that, Socrates says, is going to be not a superficial thing like, "Oh, you're gonna get caught and you're gonna be thrown in jail, or you're gonna go to hell." But the punishment is living an unjust life. In itself, it's an unhappy life. Any other thoughts about the digression?
▶︎ 40:03 Audience: In terms of the idea that knowledge can really just be subjective perception, when that gets applied to justice, I think you have a real objection, 'cause Protagoras could say, "This is what I think justice is," and I could say, "Well, I think the most just thing for me to do is to kill you." And then, what's he gonna say to that?
▶︎ 40:23 I don't know. Yeah, what would he say? Couldn't he come back and say, "Well, killing me is just for you. It's not just for me." Right, true. "We're different, and as for me, I'm gonna stick with the way I feel about things." Right. "So I'm gonna run away, or not let you kill me." "But as for the question of whether it's absolutely just, well, there's no such thing."
▶︎ 40:47 I think you will find moral relativists today who are happy with that kind of position. I don't know whether they really believe it, because if you go up and punch them in the stomach, they're probably not gonna feel like, "Oh, well that was just for you, but it was unjust." No, they're gonna get really angry and say, "That's not right." So I think when push comes to shove, we are moral absolutists.
▶︎ 41:10 All right, so they get through the digression and they return to this point about a fact value distinction really, or a distinction between what's good and what's useful. And at 177E, Socrates says, "It's surely this, the useful, that a government aims at when it legislates. A community always makes such laws as are most useful to it. Or do you think legislation may have some other object in view? Oh no, not at all." Well, I think Theodorus needs to do a little more thinking. What else could the possible object of legislation be, other than what's in the interests of the city or in the interest of the government?
▶︎ 41:55 Well, the interest of the politician, the interest of a certain segment of the population, there's always. Yeah, you can always ask, cui bono, who's benefiting? However, isn't there a possible higher goal? Justice itself? Shouldn't we at least try to be creating laws that are just? In theory. In theory, I mean.
▶︎ 42:17 Yeah. If we reject the, or if we question this absolute distinction between what works, which is objective, and what's just, which is just relative, then maybe it is valid to try to create laws that actually are just. And I think most of us want our laws to be just, and if we feel that they're unjust, we resent them. Rightly so.
▶︎ 42:38 Okay. So Socrates develops this argument we've touched on about prediction, about the future. There are all sorts of experts, such as the expert chef, the expert teacher of gymnastic, the expert doctor who can predict what's going to happen in the future better than others. Even Protagoras himself can predict which speech is gonna work better than another speech, because he's an expert rhetorician. Pretty good objection.
▶︎ 43:15 However, Socrates doesn't think he's done. If we look at 179C, he says, "Maybe so long as we keep within the limits of the immediate present experience of the individual, it's more difficult to convict Protagoras of nonsense." Okay, so maybe we should set aside the future. Let's focus on the present moment, which is where Protagoras seems to have his strongest stronghold. The present perception of a particular individual, how could that ever be wrong? Isn't that knowledge? And this brings us to the last
▶︎ 43:55 part of, nearly the last part of the refutation of the idea that knowledge is perception. But we first get an interesting description of the followers of Heraclitus. I don't know whether any of you have ever read Jacques Derrida, who was perhaps a bit less popular now after his death than he was in the '60s through the '80s or '90s, but he was the creator of deconstruction. And I think Socrates' description of the Heracliteans is a bit like the behavior of the deconstructionists.
▶︎ 44:37 "As for abiding by what is said, or sticking to a question, or quietly answering and asking questions in turn, there is less than nothing of that in their capacity. If you ask any of them a question, he will pull out some little enigmatic phrase from his quiver and shoot it off at you; if you try to make him give an account of what he said, you will only get hit by another full of strange turns of language."
▶︎ 44:58 So we still have people like this, whether they're Derrideans or not. Clever masters of evasion, which fits the picture of Heraclitus that we're getting in this dialogue, is someone who says, "Well, everything's always moving around. Everything is relative." You can't pin him down to any thesis. On the other hand, there are the followers of Parmenides. So we had a wonderful depiction here of the big fight going on between Heracliteans and Parmenideans.
▶︎ 45:30 And I'll give you a little digression on Parmenides, since today is the day for digressions. So if Heraclitus, at least as maybe caricatured in this dialogue, is the philosopher who said, "Everything is in flux," Parmenides, the other, the two greatest pre-Socratic philosophers is the one who says, "Nothing is in flux. Everything is a single unchanging thing." So would Parmenides agree that knowledge is perception? Depends on the day. No, no. The truth is eternal. The truth is timeless. Being is timeless. Because perception is changing? Perception shows us the changing world. So if you really deny that there's any change, you have to reject perception.
▶︎ 46:32 And so Parmenides says, "Trust your logic, trust your mind, and forget about what your senses tell you." Now, what does logic tell you? Here's what seems to be the most solid of all statements, "Being is." What is, is. Who can argue with that? And its complimentary statement, "Non-being is not." There is no nothing. Nothing does not exist. Now, our mind has to agree with this. Now, what follows from this? Quite a few interesting things.
▶︎ 47:24 I remember learning in my first-ever philosophy class, we talked about this, that if being is and non-being is like a placeholder for something we can't even fathom that doesn't exist, then being has to be one, because you couldn't divide being except with more being. No, I think that makes sense. So in order to have any differentiation, you have to have something not be something else. Well, there's a form of not being right there. So there can be no differentiation. He compares being to a single well-rounded sphere.
▶︎ 47:59 And can there be change? Well, what is change? Change is when something becomes what it was not before or when it is not something, and then it becomes something that is, and then it perhaps becomes something that is not again. But there is no thing that is not, there's no non-being. Therefore, there is no transition from non-being to being, therefore there is no transition and the senses are absolutely an illusion.
▶︎ 48:32 A famous follower of Parmenides, Zeno is responsible for some wonderful paradoxes, such as that I cannot get to that other side of the room, because first, I would have to get halfway there, and then halfway again, and then halfway again, et cetera. It's an infinite series of finite distances, and I will never be able to get through that. And people still discuss this. Some people think, oh, well, all you need is calculus, but maybe that's a little too simple.
▶︎ 49:07 My favorite paradox by Zeno is the arrow paradox because it's so simple. So take an arrow shooting through the air. Think about it at one instant. Is it moving at that instant? No, there's no time in which it can move. So at no instant is it moving, so it doesn't move. It never moves. So that's Parmenides.
▶︎ 49:38 We get a little promise here that they're gonna discuss Parmenideanism, but then Socrates says, "That's too deep for right now." So you can look elsewhere. There's a wonderful dialogue by Plato called Parmenides where young Socrates meets old Parmenides who totally wipes the floor with him. So if you want to see Socrates finally defeated in an argument, at least when he's young, read that dialogue.
▶︎ 50:06 So we'll instead only look at the Heracliteans, and, again, they're always squirming. They're always squirming their way out of any sort of attempts to come to grips with them. As Theodorus says in 180c, "What we must do is take their doctrine out of their hands and consider it for ourselves as we should a problem in geometry." Whether they like it or not, we're going to take their basic statement, everything flows, everything's in flux, and we're going to treat it as if it were an axiom in math, and we're going to see what follows from that.
▶︎ 50:44 So how does this help? Where does that get us? The axiom is that everything is in motion. Socrates asks in 181c, "Are they referring to one form of motion only, or, as I think, to two?" So we're going to take motion in a broad sense to mean change. How many kinds of change are there? One is motion in the narrow sense, change of place. What other kind of motion could there be, or what other kind of change? How things alter. We've been doing this for a few days, and my beard has grown. Right? So I've changed.
▶︎ 51:24 Audience: Isn't that a change of place of your hair?
▶︎ 51:27 I guess it's a change of, because you could argue it's spatial, but it's still me.
▶︎ 51:31 Audience: It's my perception of it.
▶︎ 51:33 Right. I'm still here sitting at this table.
▶︎ 51:35 Audience: Yeah, you haven't stood up and walked around immediately and in the near past.
▶︎ 51:41 Right. Maybe the room has gotten a little bit warmer over the course of this class. That seems to be an alteration, a change of quality rather than a change of space. Although, again, in modern physics, what does it mean to become warmer? It is a change, it's just motion in space, isn't it? It's molecules moving around faster. So there is a tendency in modern philosophy and science to try to reduce all changes of quality to changes in location, at least among some scientists.
▶︎ 52:16 But by common sense anyway, or at least ancient common sense, there's change of place. There's change of poietes, houness, which Plato coins in this dialogue, and then Cicero imitating this in Latin makes up the word qualitas, quality. So we use this word all the time, quality, qualitative. It literally just means houness, what's-it-like-ness. So a change of color, for instance, change of temperature. So there are at least these two kinds of change.
▶︎ 52:52 Aristotle, by the way, would add another transformation. So let's say when a butterfly dies, or when any animal dies, it's still the same matter there, but it no longer has the same form. It's no longer the same kind of thing, and it becomes a new thing, maybe worms that ate the corpse of the butterfly. But really all we need for this argument is the concept of alteration.
▶︎ 53:23 If everything is undergoing alteration all the time, what does that imply about language? Let's look at 182c. "So all things move and flow," according to you Heracliteans. "They both move and alter. Now if they were only moving through space and not altering, we should presumably be able to say what the moving things flow." He's trying to avoid saying what they are and avoid the word being. But what are they, what do they flow?
▶︎ 53:59 Maybe they're moving around, as a butterfly, let's say. It's still a butterfly even though it's constantly changing its position. But if it's also altering, then would its butterfly-ness stay the same? No, that's a quality. It would no longer be a butterfly. So how do you talk about it?
▶︎ 54:21 I've mentioned that there was, according to Plato, a follower of Heraclitus who just gave up language and just started pointing at events. What can you say? Because as soon as you make a statement about something, you are virtually pinning it down to being a sort of thing that you've just described with a noun or a name.
▶︎ 54:47 183a: "If all things are in motion, every answer on whatever subject is equally correct. Both it is thus and it is not thus, or if you like, becomes." Wouldn't this mean that the statement knowledge is perception would be just as correct or incorrect as the statement knowledge is not perception? If it's perception at one instant, it's not gonna be perception in the next instant. Next, right, because even perception-ness is a quality which is going to be shifting into something else. So this really destroys language and conceptual thought altogether.
▶︎ 55:30 So let's think about whether we've refuted the idea that knowledge is perception. Again, we started off with the statement, knowledge is perception. Socrates said, "Well, that's just what Protagoras said," and really what he means is what Heraclitus said. And if you follow Heraclitus, then any statement, let's say A is B, is no more true than A is not B.
▶︎ 56:33 But now we can come full circle, apply this to our original statement, knowledge is perception. It's no more true than knowledge is not perception. So that's a pretty convoluted, indirect, and clever way of refuting the claim that knowledge is perception. After several steps, you come back round and undercut the original attempts to make any statement about knowledge whatsoever.
▶︎ 57:15 Maybe Socrates could have stopped here and moved on, but he's not satisfied, and I'm happy that he's not satisfied because the next argument that we'll look at tomorrow is less, well, you suspect there's something sophistical about this whole thing. The next one is less sophistical. It's more based on a phenomenology, a description of the actual experience of sense perception, which has been sorely lacking so far. They've said a lot about perception this, perception that, but let's pay attention to perception and how it works.
▶︎ 57:46 And so he's actually going to ask us to look at our experience of seeing, hearing, and so on. And from that, he's going to demonstrate that that cannot possibly be enough to count as knowledge. I think you'll be convinced, and we'll find out tomorrow.