▶︎ 0:00 Welcome to our second session on Plato's Theaetetus. Yesterday we read the dialogue through 152c, and today we're going through 168c. In our first reading, we encountered the main characters, Socrates, Theaetetus, and Theodorus, and we learned a little bit about them, which I think is relevant. I think Plato is not only giving us these abstract concepts and arguments, but he's always tying it into concrete human situations and personalities, so the drama and the personalities matter.
▶︎ 0:32 So what kind of person is Socrates? Well, we know he's a pain in the neck. He's odd. He's inquisitive. He is concerned with individual personalities, just like Plato himself, in my view. In fact, the first thing he says in the dialogue is, "What I'm always trying to find out is who is a promising young Athenian?" and this is why he's known as a good prophet. If somebody lives, he knows more or less how they'll turn out. He's also described as a midwife. He compares himself to his mother, a midwife, except he's delivering ideas, and, in a sexist remark, he says, "I don't deal with women. I deal with men. I help them give birth to thoughts, and then I have to test those thoughts to see whether they're true or false."
▶︎ 1:21 Theaetetus, we know from the prologue, turned out to be brave, and we see him starting to be rather bold. He's maybe a teenager in this dialogue, but in the company of two older, supposedly wise men, he shows some gumption, he shows some guts, and he does some brave things. And he's gifted. He's a gifted student. He's both smart, and he's steady.
▶︎ 1:44 Theodorus, we're starting to learn what he's like too. He's a teacher in a much more traditional sense than Socrates. Socrates is this midwife teacher. Theodorus perhaps is one of these teachers who has the answers and is conveying them and putting them into the students' minds, rather than getting something out of the students' minds. And we also learn that Theodorus is not actually as brave as his pupil, Theaetetus. He's a little skittish when it comes to engaging in philosophical argument, so he says, "I'm too old for this stuff." Of course, Socrates himself is 70 years old, so it's an excuse.
▶︎ 2:23 In terms of the philosophical content, if you want to make that distinction, the question, "What is knowledge?" came up. We saw that it's based on real life because these people are seekers of knowledge, conveyers of knowledge, and with some encouragement, Theaetetus finally said, "Well, it seems to me that a man who knows perceives what he knows, and so knowledge is the same thing as perception." We also saw that that's bad logic. If you know it, then you perceive it. Well, maybe, but it doesn't follow that knowledge is the same thing as perception. And Socrates immediately linked that to the relativism of Protagoras. "Man is the measure of all things," which he takes to mean that each individual perceiver is the measure of reality for that person, and there is no question then of what reality in itself is like, aside from those perceptions.
▶︎ 3:20 Did you all have any thoughts or questions you wanted to bring up at this point about yesterday's reading? Yeah?
▶︎ 3:26 Audience: I had a question about something you just said about Theaetetus, which, does this happen in other dialogues? One of the things I really appreciate about him, and maybe one of the things you meant by he's brave, is he frequently says, "I didn't understand that. I don't know." Is that common in this form and the other dialogues, or...
▶︎ 3:42 You know, I think people, speaking to Socrates in the dialogues, more often they say, "Oh, yes, quite right," especially when Socrates said something particularly obscure. So maybe that is a sign of cowardice. They're not willing... But it might make sense in this dialogue to say, "I don't know," since we're talking about knowledge. Yeah, and there are some moments when Theaetetus is just gonna say, "You've totally lost me, and I have no idea what you're doing," which are very helpful moments. Yes. Yeah. Okay, today's reading begins with
▶︎ 4:10 A transition to new philosophical ideas. So he's linked knowledge as perception to Protagoreanism, which seems to make sense, and then he links it to this idea that everything is in flux. And he relates this to a number of philosophers and poets, but it's going to be especially associated with Heraclitus as the dialog goes on.
▶︎ 4:38 Now, Heraclitus, if you haven't read Heraclitus, please do. We don't have his book, but we have a couple hundred brief quotations, fragments, quoted by later authors, and almost inevitably, they're quite deep and paradoxical and fascinating. The way Heraclitus comes up in this dialog is actually in a very narrow way that gives you a caricature of him, but there is something to it. Heraclitus's most famous fragment is, "You can't step in the same river twice."
▶︎ 5:10 Now, why is that? I could go down to the Hudson today, and I could go back tomorrow. Why can't I step in it twice? I think the quote ends because it's neither the same man nor the same river. There are versions of it which make that a little more explicit, but there's two reasons. Different waters, but also different, quote, "waters within me." I'm not the same guy. So everything is a river. Everything is flowing. Everything is changing all the time.
▶︎ 5:42 Wasn't there someone, I forget who wrote it, said that a student of Heraclitus interrupted him and said, "You're wrong, master. You can't step in the same river even once"? That's good. And somewhere in Plato, there's a story about a pupil of Heraclitus who realized that you can't even say anything at all, and so he stopped speaking and just would point at momentary events.
▶︎ 6:09 There's a lot of debate in the secondary literature that, why is Socrates making this connection between relativism and flux? What do you all think? Is there a natural flow as it were from one to the other, or is this kind of a leap? What do they have to do with each other?
▶︎ 6:29 Audience: Well, there's something I'm a little confused by. Socrates refers to states of stillness, and something as opposite to motion. So when does that happen?
▶︎ 6:40 Never, if you're a Heraclitean.
▶︎ 6:43 Audience: Right. So they are kind of different ideas.
▶︎ 6:45 Well, it's interesting that he, providing a little argument for this point of view, he says, "When things slow down or stop, that's when they decay." But of course, if you're a strict Heraclitean, they never stop. And so it's not quite clear what the status of that argument is.
▶︎ 7:02 Audience: And that seems a very big statement also to say, to assume that it's just a static state of decay, or that nothing can come of that that's beneficial.
▶︎ 7:11 It is. It's also contrary to what we expect in Plato because we expect Plato to be a Platonist. But of course, as I've said, Plato never directly states his theory. And so when we attribute so-called Platonism to him, we're already making a bit of a leap. But if you're a Platonist, you believe in certain eternal realities called the forms, let's say, the essence of justice, or the essence of goodness, or the essence of beauty, and these are supposed to be unchanging.
▶︎ 7:41 The people who do attribute something like that to Plato though, they say that he learned from Heraclitus in that all exists in the intelligible realm that we can know only with our minds, but in the realm of perception, everything's in flux and everything is ambiguous. So I guess we could read that into this passage. We're not gonna get a theory of the forms in Theaetetus, but maybe we get a theory of the perceptible world.
▶︎ 8:07 Audience: One possible connection between relativism and Heracliteanism would be if you believe that perceptions are always changing. If that's the case, and perceptions are reality and truth, then reality is always changing.
▶︎ 8:22 Are they always changing? You mean like the way we perceive is always changing or that the perceptions we have are always changing?
▶︎ 8:30 Audience: Both.
▶︎ 8:32 What do you mean by the way we perceive?
▶︎ 8:34 Audience: If I were to look outside and see a building right now and understand that building in a certain way, and maybe tomorrow I look out and understand that building in a different way, that could be the result of either my mode of perception changing or what I'm perceiving itself changing, or I guess both.
▶︎ 8:57 There's a lot there that you've touched on. So one is whether understanding is itself a kind of perceiving. And so far, it seems like it is. When they use the word perception, they mean how things seem to you, whether it's in your opinions, in your eyesight, or whatever. And they'll only make a distinction later on.
▶︎ 9:18 The other issue that you bring up is, is it just my perception or is it the thing itself? But if you really believe knowledge is perception, then you collapse the distinction. There is no thing itself apart from perceptions.
▶︎ 9:32 Audience: Right.
▶︎ 9:33 So there is no building in itself. There's only my perception of a building now, your perception of a building now, which were probably completely different, but that's fine, they're different realities. And if we pay attention to our experience of perceiving that reality, maybe it's true that it is always shifting. We assume a certain stability, we look around the room and, "Oh, nothing's changing." Well, actually your eyes are constantly moving around, you're actually constantly getting different perceptions and you sort of impose this stability on them. So that's one possible transition to Heracliteanism.
▶︎ 10:11 Then Socrates, as you were saying, backs it up with a few little arguments. An interesting one is in 153B and C where he sneaks in a claim about knowledge. "Isn't it by learning and study, which are motions that the soul gains knowledge and is preserved and becomes a better thing? Whereas in a state of rest, that is when it will not study or learn, it not only fails to acquire knowledge, but forgets what it has already learned." Now, is that statement about knowledge consistent with the idea that knowledge is perception? I think so, because if your eyes are closed, you're not perceiving.
▶︎ 10:49 Audience: I've met people that go to the museum and they just look at everything except what's in front of them. Or read the label next to the painting, or take a picture of the painting. Anything but actually experience it.
▶︎ 11:01 So are you saying that real perception takes study of a certain kind?
▶︎ 11:05 Audience: Yes. For instance, when I was in Rome, I walked around with a historian and he was able to tell me what everything was, and I almost started crying. And I just got such a deeper understanding of everything I was looking at.
▶︎ 11:18 That's interesting.
▶︎ 11:19 Audience: And I'm just visiting New York for this film, and it's not my first time, but still, I'm walking around a lot and actively perceiving, which maybe native New Yorkers don't always do.
▶︎ 11:32 So that's an interesting line of thought, because the way I was going to think about it was, it's easy to perceive. That's the lazy man's philosophy. All you have to do is sit on a couch, you're getting perceptions. You don't need study. But maybe you do.
▶︎ 11:46 Audience: It seems to be bringing in other levels of things, the learning and study, the structuring part of it that he's going to get into later. And then it also brings in this judgment part of it, which is when he says, "Does it become a better thing?"
▶︎ 12:01 Questions of good and bad, better and worse, come in at various points, but what good is is never defined. According to the Republic, that's the ultimate question, the ultimate form is the form of the good. And Socrates says, "And I have no idea what it is." So, apparently he's not going to tell us.
▶︎ 12:21 And how are learning and study motions? Well, if I can import Plato's student Aristotle, Aristotle would say that motions are heading towards some sort of fulfillment, and in that sense, studying to gain knowledge would be a motion, and the fulfillment would be just a contemplation of the truth, a full state of knowledge.
▶︎ 12:48 Audience: So, then, in the full state of knowledge, you wouldn't be in motion.
▶︎ 12:52 No, in fact.
▶︎ 12:52 Audience: So knowing would not be a motion, learning would be a motion? Is that what you're saying?
▶︎ 12:58 That's what I'm saying. I'm not sure Plato is saying that. But for Aristotle, his god is just an activity of knowing the best thing in the world, which is itself. So it's just contemplation of contemplation. So maybe all of that is implied just in that one sentence.
▶︎ 13:18 He develops, then, this theory of perception and reality that combines a Protagorean relativism with Heraclitean flux. And this requires us to think about things in a new way, where, in fact, they're not things. Let me cut to an example he gives which is a neat parlor trick. He says, "We have six dice." And you put four next to them. Greater than four. Now, let's increase the number of these dice to 12, and now, presto magico, the six dice are fewer.
▶︎ 14:12 Now, how can this possibly be? This is mind-blowing because the six dice did not change at all, and yet they changed. Maybe a silly thing, but what is the explanation? Is this a paradox?
▶︎ 14:32 Well, I found that to be sophism in the extreme. Because, of course, as he says, the six dice don't change, so what we're talking about here is the other entities, not the six. The other thing has become bigger or smaller in number. Is it not true, though, of the six dice, that they are more than four and less than 12? Yes. Isn't that a truth about the dice? It's not a truth about the dice. It's a truth about the comparison between whether the other dice are four or 12.
▶︎ 15:08 So why is he bringing up this sophism? Maybe already he's trying to show the difference between perception and knowledge. Because it seems like perception is a more passive thing, and though perceptions may be changing, the perceiver isn't necessarily changing. But in the case of knowledge, it's really, like you're saying, the concept that's applied that's changing. It's the concept of less than or greater than that's changing, so I'm confused where he's going with this.
▶︎ 15:36 I think this ties in somehow to the relation between perceived and perceiver. What if we could really explode our concept of reality by not talking, as you did, about the six dice themselves, because there is no themselves. There's only things than, there's only relation. There's only perception of six, is what you're saying? There's my perception of six right now. Or of whatever. But that still hasn't changed.
▶︎ 16:03 Well, here we get into the question of where numbers come from, and are numbers even perceived? And later on he'll say no, you can't perceive numbers. But we'll get to that later. So it's not quite clear what he's saying, but maybe he's trying to confuse us and Theaetetus.
▶︎ 16:20 But I think the upshot of it is to throw out our regular concept of being, this word "being" is going to come up more and more frequently, where being means something that is independent of experience and perception. And somehow exists in itself by itself. Also maybe expanding the perceptual window, soften us up into a more flexible view. Get us to flow a little more. He does emphasize context at several points in this discussion. The context changes the meaning of the elements in that context. And so that seems to be part of this as well.
▶︎ 17:03 Audience: Can I roll back for a sec?
▶︎ 17:05 Yeah.
▶︎ 17:05 Audience: Just to 153-e and 154-a, which is just interesting to me that he's talking about colors. And it does seem very Wittgensteinian, the idea that there is no red, there's only what you see as red and have learned to call red. So there may not be a fixed thing that's red.
▶︎ 17:29 Right, just as the name Hudson River doesn't actually refer to any thing. There's a flux.
▶︎ 17:35 Audience: Yeah. And it's a label of convenience.
▶︎ 17:38 Right. The idea about color also seems very modern in a way in that we would probably agree, with our modern scientific ideas, with what he says at 154-a. "What we naturally call a particular color is neither that which impinges nor that which is impinged upon, but something which has come into being between the two and which is private to the individual percipient." So now we would think of this as visible electromagnetic radiation hitting the retina or something like that. And so this is very plausible when it comes to colors or other so-called secondary qualities. Things that we assume are subjective. But what's radical about this is that he's going to extend it to the so-called objective things, too. Oh, well, your electromagnetic waves, they don't exist either except insofar as they're perceived by someone.
▶︎ 18:34 Audience: That feels very ahead of its time.
▶︎ 18:37 Yeah. Yes. And I pointed out yesterday, there's something.
▶︎ 18:40 Audience: Very quantum.
▶︎ 18:41 Very quantum, exactly. Yeah. There is no position and velocity of a subatomic particle until it gets measured and so on.
▶︎ 18:49 Audience: But in some ways it does make sense that he starts with things that are very childlike, numbers and colors, and kind of just starts from the very beginning. Like, when we consider all that.
▶︎ 18:59 Yeah, I think he wants to bring us back to everyday experiences, seemingly familiar experiences, and get us to re-think them.
▶︎ 19:10 He goes on to elaborate a bit on this theory, and there's some interesting rhetoric around it. He says he's initiating us into a secret doctrine. Here's the secret truth. For instance, at 155E, "Have a look around. See that none of the uninitiated are listening to us. I mean, the people who think that nothing exists but what they can grasp with both hands, people who refuse to admit that actions, and processes, and the invisible world in general have any place in reality." Again, a little bit odd. If we're saying that knowledge is perception, and what you see is what you get, then this takes us to a theory that reality is actually very different from the way it seems to be.
▶︎ 20:00 You could say that there's already an incoherence here. That, by the way, some other philosophers have taken up Socrates' suggestions here, but then much later. For instance, Whitehead in the 20th century developed what he called a process philosophy that's focused on events rather than things or object. There are no things. There are only motions, intersecting, interacting.
▶︎ 20:31 You can picture it this way. There's an active motion and a passive motion reacting to it. But they don't exist independently of each other. They exist only in combination, in interactions, in this momentary event. Now, which is which? A later passage suggests that the passive is the perceiver. The active is what impinges on the perceiver. Although he also says that in different contexts, the active will seem to be passive, the passive will seem to be active. It's quite confusing.
▶︎ 21:10 So what happens when you see white? Well, there's an active motion intersecting with you as the passive motion at that moment, and there's a whiteness of a thing that comes to be in that momentary event. And then it passes, the whiteness is gone, and so are you because you are also in flux and you've become a different perceiver.
▶︎ 21:33 Audience: Is it important, which is active and passive? Does it come up as an issue later?
▶︎ 21:40 I don't think they return to that later.
▶︎ 21:43 Audience: Otherwise, I was gonna ask you to explain it a little more in detail so I could follow.
▶︎ 21:47 Well, it relates to our discussion a few minutes ago about whether perception takes attention, and study, and activity. I think good perception does. But in general, in this discussion, he's presenting it as a reaction rather than an action. And there's an evolution as we'll see as the dialogue goes on where he's emphasizing that we need to do more and more to get real knowledge.
▶︎ 22:15 Audience: So, it could be a different situation with the same setup, a different person, a different choice could change that active/passive kind of designation?
▶︎ 22:27 Maybe so. It's at 159C and D where he makes it clear that the perceiver is passive. On the passive side, the perception makes the tongue percipient, while on the side of the wine, sweetness moving about it makes it both be and appear sweet to the healthy tongue. So it seems like he's saying the tongue is passive, the wine is active. But at 157A, a bit earlier, he said, "Even in the case of the active and passive motions, it is impossible, as they say, for thought taking them singly to pin them down to being anything. What in conjunction with one thing is active reveals itself as passive when it falls in with something else."
▶︎ 23:16 It all creates, for me, a kind of hazy theory of reality and perception without letting me really nail it down to a clear picture, but maybe that's part of the point. You can't nail things down.
▶︎ 23:33 Audience: Do you think there'd be any implications to both things being active? I don't know. Is that possible? Would it?
▶︎ 23:39 We talked about this yesterday with the quantum example that in a lot of ways, perception can be active. I think that's a major moral people have drawn from quantum mechanics, that observation is not simply letting things happen. It isn't. It's a form of intervention. Another interesting comparison might be between this theory Socrates is spinning out and Buddhist theories of reality. There's this phrase, dependent co-origination, that Buddhists use to put their view of reality, if you will, in a nutshell. So nothing is independent. Nothing has this being in itself, this selfhood, this core, and everything is coming into being together with other things. It's co-origination.
▶︎ 24:29 "We might even have to eliminate the very word being," Socrates says at 157b. "The verb 'to be' must be totally abolished. Though indeed we've been led by habit and ignorance into using it ourselves more than once." I've pointed out how this whole discussion, you can't help using the word know when you're talking about knowledge, and maybe this is even more fundamental. Whenever you say something is a certain way, or even if you don't explicitly use a form of the word be, you're referring to how things are all the time. Why would we want to abolish the verb be?
▶︎ 25:09 Audience: Well, in his argument, he's saying there's this motion that's always going on and nothing exactly is fixed. So when we use the word is, we at least tend to assume that it's something fixed. We want to.
▶︎ 25:25 Right.
▶︎ 25:25 Audience: It's a marker, for lack of a better way of referring to it. It's a convenience that we have to say that the table is. This is a table. We rely on it, but it may not always be a table.
▶︎ 25:43 Right. So the being, at least, is usually used as trying to bring things to a standstill.
▶︎ 25:49 Audience: And it also seems to assume that there is a difference between the way things are and the way things seem, right? Being versus seeming.
▶︎ 25:56 So if being connotes some sort of intrinsic existence in itself of things, that's another reason to drop it. In this argument.
▶︎ 26:05 Audience: In this argument. Yeah.
▶︎ 26:06 Which of course Socrates is not committed to, right?
▶︎ 26:08 Audience: No.
▶︎ 26:09 This is one point where Theaetetus says at 157c, "I can't even see what you're getting at. Whether the things you're saying are what you think yourself or whether you're just trying me out." So thank you Theaetetus for that remark. And Socrates says, "Oh, you're forgetting, I don't know anything about this kind of thing myself. I don't claim any of it as my own. I'm just chanting incantations over you, offering you little tidbits from each of the wise. Here, try this little morsel from Protagoras. How do you like it? Until I succeed in assisting you to bring your own belief forth into the light."
▶︎ 26:40 Audience: Do people look at Socrates as being very genuine in this stance? Or is this a bit of hyperbole, a bit of joking? Is it...
▶︎ 26:49 Well, the word usually used is irony. And there are different interpretations of what irony means exactly. Is it a sort of deception or is it a kind of polite, self-deprecating attitude? But there's definitely a distinctively Socratic irony, which is exactly this. He says, "Oh, me, I don't know. Me, I don't know anything. I'm just getting the answers from you. Please enlighten me."
▶︎ 27:16 Audience: It's so different than the midwife proposal, which makes a lot of sense. And midwives know something. They know a skill. They have this ability, this skill.
▶︎ 27:26 Audience: Isn't it also this idea that they have that experience themselves of having been?
▶︎ 27:32 He has plenty of experience. He's been around this block many times, I think. And so I think this is consistent with the midwife metaphor because what he's saying there is he has experience. In other words, he's tried to have philosophical discussions. He's in fact produced theories of his own in the past. It's just that none of them turned out to be true. None of them held up to scrutiny. So he's very experienced in this process of giving birth and now helping others give birth. But what he doesn't have is the answers to the questions he's asking.
▶︎ 28:05 Audience: Interesting.
▶︎ 28:07 And those who were fans of Socrates enjoyed this about him. There were many detractors as well who found this supremely annoying.
▶︎ 28:16 Audience: I go back and forth.
▶︎ 28:18 No, I think in order to appreciate the character of Socrates, we have to see at least why he would be annoying to many people, and why some people really were furious.
▶︎ 28:27 Audience: But I do see, it's so different from the midwife because the midwife accomplishes something by the end of it.
▶︎ 28:33 But Socrates accomplishes something too, right? He helps Theaetetus give birth to an idea.
▶︎ 28:38 Audience: Exactly. And that's my point, is why, when he says, "I don't know anything about any of these things." Okay, you don't answer the question, but to say you don't know anything, it's exaggerating and it's...
▶︎ 28:48 Agreed.
▶︎ 28:48 Audience: A little over the top sometimes.
▶︎ 28:51 Right. Methinks he does protest too much, right? And maybe the kind of knowledge that Plato really cares more about and wants us to develop is Socratic knowledge of how to interact with people and how to know your limits and get familiar with argumentation and thinking rather than the kind of knowledge that comes to completion and just contemplates the absolute truth, which is the caricature of Platonism.
▶︎ 29:21 The baby is almost born, it's not quite born. But in order to get it born, we have to see how it would deal with some rather obvious objections to the idea that knowledge is perception. These are at 157e. "The question of dreams and of insanity and other diseases and mishearing and seeing and other cases of misperception." It seems obvious that there you have perceptions which are not knowledge because they're simply wrong.
▶︎ 29:54 So here's where a question of dreams comes up, which probably has occurred to most of us. But Descartes is the philosopher who's most famous for bringing it up in the First Meditation. How do I know that I'm not having a dream right now of sitting around a seminar table and discussing Plato? Can you give me any sure sign that would tell the difference between this and a dream? So, Descartes is the philosopher who's most famous for discussing this about 2,000 years after Plato. But apparently this was already an old chestnut when Plato wrote this.
▶︎ 30:30 And where Socrates goes with it is first to try to reduce our confidence about what is dream and what is reality. We spend roughly equal periods, I guess they took very long naps in ancient Greece, asleep and awake. And in each period you feel confident that you're experiencing reality unless you're having a lucid dream or something. How can we tell which is which?
▶︎ 30:58 And then he's going to go farther and give an argument that no matter whether you're asleep, awake, or in any other state of mind, everything you perceive is in fact true. So, let's look at that and see whether you think it's a solid argument. It runs from 158e through 160d. So, it begins with some very abstract claims.
▶︎ 31:31 Two entirely different things must have different powers. If they had the same powers they wouldn't be entirely different. And they're unlike each other. In 159A he says, "As a thing comes to be like the other thing, it's coming to be the same. As it's growing unlike, it's coming to be a different thing." So far these things seem almost true by definition.
▶︎ 31:57 Now he's going to apply these to the powers of these active motions that intersect with past motions to create perceptions. And he makes it more concrete. Let's say Socrates gets sick. He's now unlike Socrates well. And strictly speaking he's different, he's a different person, he's a different perceiver. Then a naturally active factor comes along, if you will. Let's say wine, which the Greeks were drinking all the time, of course. Which was a very good idea because they couldn't trust the water, so you had to mix in wine. They would drink diluted wine with maybe honey and herbs and so on.
▶︎ 32:39 So, when Socrates was healthy, the wine tasted sweet, let's say. When he gets sick, the wine tastes bitter. Is that an illusion? He's in an unnatural state, could we say that? And so he's not really getting the true flavor of the wine. And then he gets well again, he says, "Now I see that that was just an illusion. This wine is perfectly good. It's perfectly sweet." Well, he claims that in this situation, given the principles that we've agreed on, you cannot actually say that the perception of bitter was false.
▶︎ 33:14 Now, why can't you? I think the logic there is not quite explicit. But it might help to look at the conclusion at 160C. "That which acts on me is for me and not for anyone else. So my perception is true for me because it's always a perception of that being which is peculiarly mine. And that means I'm unerring and never stumble in my thought about what is or what's coming to be. So, how can I fail to be a knower of the things of which I am a perceiver?"
▶︎ 33:49 So, I think a lot hinges on this "peculiarly mine" expression. In what sense is my perception of bitterness when I'm drinking wine totally private to me, and especially mine and my own? And what does that have to do with truth? Why would that make it true? Well, this all relates back to Theaetetus' point about perception. He's pushing the argument to the boundaries of where the argument can go. But also defending that point of view. Apparently there's a couple of pages of reasoning here that backs that up.
▶︎ 34:30 But he's assuming also a "me" somewhere in there, which he hasn't proved that that exists. And I think that is what he wants to say at this point, defending relativism. There is no enduring self. Again, we're rivers, just like a watery river.
▶︎ 34:54 So, I think the point is that I can't wake up the next day feeling great, drinking my sweet wine and say, "Oh, I was wrong." Well, no, that wasn't you. You weren't wrong. That wasn't even you. You don't have the right to look back and judge this poor perceiver from yesterday. He was in his own reality. Now you are in your own reality. Now somebody else will be in your place having a new reality in the next moment. So you can never second-guess yourself. Maybe that's the point.
▶︎ 35:28 At this point, at 160E, Socrates says, "Shall we say we have here your firstborn child? The result of my midwifery." It took quite a bit of work to deliver that baby, but now it's delivered in the sense that we've connected it to this complex theory of how perception works, how reality works. And we've understood that truth is limited to this particular instant and this particular perceiver, it's a sort of atomic truth that cannot connect to other truths and achieve anything more stable or broad.
▶︎ 36:03 Now we do the rite of running around the hearth, which is some sort of rite you did with a newborn baby to initiate it into the family. Some sources say that at this point the father had the chance of saying, "No, I don't want it. Go expose it." "Go commit infanticide." I don't know how often that happened, but I would probably not never. And so we might have to get rid of this baby if it doesn't work out. We're going to test it, in other words, by coming up with objections to it, all the objections that we can. The first objection is ad hominem.
▶︎ 36:38 Against Protagoras, who is dead at this point, right? He's, it's the late Protagoras. And so who's going to defend him? Well, turns out that, in 162A, it turns out that Protagoras was Theodorus's friend. "I could not consent to have him refuted through my admissions, and yet I should not be prepared to resist you against my own judgment. So take on Theaetetus again." So here's Theodorus being rather cowardly, and a bit later Socrates is really going to press him on this and say, "Don't imagine it's on me to defend your dead friend, strain every nerve to defend your dead friend while you do nothing." So that's an important bit of the drama.
▶︎ 37:22 So what's the ad hominem argument against Protagoras, who was this famous, admired, and successful sophist? Well, it's that everyone becomes a savant at that point, because if all perceptions are true and we all have perceptions, then we're all equally smart. And in particular, he brings up the pig and the baboon, they're not smarter than the pig or a baboon.
▶︎ 37:53 Yeah. So it's not only people who all already have knowledge, but other animals too. They have perceptions, and even gods, they have perceptions. So we're saying that the god Apollo is equally as wise as Protagoras and some Joe Schmo on the street.
▶︎ 38:09 Audience: Well, and equally...
▶︎ 38:10 And a worm.
▶︎ 38:11 Audience: Equally as ignorant.
▶︎ 38:12 Right, and they all have the same amount of truth. And so, so who are you, Protagoras, to present yourself as any wiser or more knowledgeable than anyone else? Seems like a strong objection.
▶︎ 38:30 Since Theodorus isn't willing to step in for his dead friend, Socrates is going to now be playing Protagoras. It gets a little bit confusing, but he's going to have to impersonate Protagoras. So at 162D he says, as Protagoras, "My good people, young and old, you sit here orating. You drag in gods, whose existence or non-existence I exclude from all discussion written or spoken." So Protagoras was resolutely agnostic.
▶︎ 38:57 "You keep on saying whatever is likely to be acceptable to the mob, telling them that it would be a shocking thing if no man were wiser than any cow in a field, but of proof or necessity, not a word. You just rely on plausibility." Well, so big deal, it's shocking that I'm no wiser than a cow or a baboon. Well, so what? That doesn't prove anything. He'll have a more substantial response a little bit later on.
▶︎ 39:23 Socrates tries some new objections. "There's the case of hearing people speaking a foreign language which we have not yet learned." Now, I happen to know that in this room there is someone who knows a few words of the Kazakh language, which I do not know. Would you mind just saying those words without telling us what they mean? How does this apparently disprove Protagoras right here? We heard them. Do we know what they mean? So perception is not knowledge.
▶︎ 39:58 Well, Theaetetus, in one of his more creative moments here, has a good answer to that. So what do those words mean? So those words means expensive and means coal. Expensive and coal. Thanks very much.
▶︎ 40:17 This seems to have disproved knowledge is perception right there. We heard the words, but we did not know what they meant, so perceiving is not knowing. At this point, Theaetetus, in one of his prouder moments, comes up with a pretty good response. He says, "Well, we both hear and know the rise and fall of the voice, but what schoolmasters and interpreters tell us about them, we don't perceive by seeing or hearing at the moment, and we don't know either."
▶︎ 40:46 In other words, when we first heard those Kazakh words, we weren't hearing your interpretation and so we didn't know the interpretation, but we did know the sounds. And then when you gave us their meaning, we heard that and we knew that. It's just different stages of perception, different stages of knowledge. Good job, Theaetetus. Well, there's some other little tricks Socrates has.
▶︎ 41:11 You can simply close your eyes and apparently disprove the idea that knowledge is perception. We don't forget things just when we close our eyes. If we knew them before when we had our eyes open, we still know them with our eyes closed. Therefore, perception isn't knowledge. What do you think?
▶︎ 41:29 Audience: If I were to light a candle in a room that no one else knew about, and then I left this room, completely forgot about it, and by chance stumbled across this room later, and the candle was burned all the way down, how is this possible if no one was there to perceive it? In order to defend this, you have to have an idea of an all-perceiving god or Aristotle's understanding.
▶︎ 41:56 That's an interesting example, because we assume there has to be some continuity of cause and effect as the candle burns down, and this whole theory is exploding all continuities. Nothing is shared, nothing is ongoing. Everything becomes an atomic moment of truth that then disappears. So, I agree. By the way, Berkeley, a modern idealist, said, "To be is to be perceived." Seems rather close, but then he had God up his sleeve. He was a bishop, by the way.
▶︎ 42:26 So, don't worry, material things exist when you're not looking because God is looking. It's very convenient. But we're not going to drag in gods here because Protagoras said we shouldn't. Another little cheap shot, perhaps, is close one eye. And this seems to just wink and disprove Protagoras, it seems, because we feel intuitively that you don't know and not know at the same time. You either know something or you don't. And yet, it's not true that you either see something or you don't, because you can both see and not see by closing one eye.
▶︎ 43:06 Now, these are all clever little things that we might think about, but they're cheap shots and, in the persona of Protagoras, Socrates goes on to say, "You don't want to defeat a straw man. Sure, try these objections, but then if your interlocutor doesn't have an answer, you have to help him to his feet." We're not engaged in mere diatribes here, to use the Greek word. Diatribes versus dialogues. So a diatribe or a controversy, in this translation, is when you're just trying to win a debate by any means necessary.
▶︎ 43:45 This is what we see in our so-called political debates, if the two sides even really engage each other at all. It's just to try to cut each other down as quickly as possible. A genuine dialogue, you have to help out the other person when they can't answer, and so we want to help out Protagoras and give him his due and let him make as strong a case as he possibly can. So, Socrates suggests,
▶︎ 44:12 Various possible answers. For instance, at 166b, "Do you expect someone to grant you that a man has a present memory of things he experienced in the past, this being an experience rather like the original one unless he is still experiencing them? That is very far from being true." So, no, you don't have a memory of what you did in the past. You're having a new experience of that's qualitatively different. "Do you suppose he will hesitate to admit that it's possible for the same man to know and not know the same thing?" Well, sure. Why not?
▶︎ 44:49 I think the most interesting response is when he returns to the ad hominem argument, which again was, "Protagoras, according to you, everyone's got knowledge, so why are you any better than anyone else?" What makes you wiser than anyone else? And so, what's Protagoras' view of wisdom? How could somebody be wiser than others if everyone has perception and everyone has knowledge?
▶︎ 45:18 At 166d, he says, "The man whom I call wise is the man who can change the appearances for the better," "the man who, in any case where bad things both appear and are for one of us, works to change and makes good things appear and be for him." Do you find this to be plausible? Are there people like this who make a living by improving the appearances, improving the perceptions without claiming to make them truer? That's the point. It's not that the person Protagoras is talking to was wrong. It's just that he or she was having negative perceptions, bad perceptions, and he can shift them around, manipulate them, and make them good. So he should make a lot of gold for that.
▶︎ 46:02 Audience: I don't know about gold, but this process is shaping up. It was kinda stunning to read it, because it's always how I've thought about, let's say, arts criticism, when you have people talking in these ways that they don't seem to be communicating. I've always had to break it down to three phases. One I thought of is a perceptual phase where the information comes in. Another part is structuring it to make sense of the different pieces of perception, and then the third part was sort of judging it against some sort of value system. And that when you break it down that way, it's much easier for people to talk because they can point to where they've differed in this process.
▶︎ 46:41 Yeah, and this term value is a modern concept that really only became popular in the 19th century, but we can readily apply it to this. In other words, by what standards are you calling something good or bad or better or worse? And you pointed that out earlier. So yeah. Take the art critic. The art critic makes the big bucks that art critics make. Probably not, but their job is to present the perception of a work of art as good or bad, whatever that may mean. Pleasing or displeasing, or creative or derivative or brilliant or ordinary, and often they can change our perceptions. If I've been reading about how fantastic Matisse was and I go see a Matisse painting, I'm much more likely to be open to it. Or even different, if I come to a completely different conclusion.
▶︎ 47:38 Audience: But you're very right. I have that experience a lot where I take somebody who helps me understand my raw perceptions. But also, if we have I come to a very different conclusion than somebody else, I can see we had the same perceptions. We organized the same way. Oh, but it's that last step of value systems that separates our conclusions.
▶︎ 47:58 Now, Protagoras would probably not want to follow you though in saying, "We saw the same thing," because every perception is private to the perceiver, but I think we're on the same wavelength here. He says that several professions can be understood in these terms. Politicians.
▶︎ 48:16 Audience: Politicians, yes.
▶︎ 48:18 Because what do they do except make things seem just or seem good to a community? And if they succeed, then they're good politicians. And they're justly popular and successful, especially in a democracy. Or think of political advisers. Somebody can make a lot of money.
▶︎ 48:36 Audience: Spin doctor.
▶︎ 48:37 Yeah, yeah.
▶︎ 48:38 Audience: Give it the right spin.
▶︎ 48:40 Give somebody advice on how to create pleasing and good appearances to the masses. That's a very valuable skill. He claims
▶︎ 48:50 Medicine falls into the same category. I guess if you think of medicine not as affecting some sort of health in itself of your body, but how you feel, which is how we usually judge our health.
▶︎ 49:04 Audience: Or the placebo effect would be something that would fit right here.
▶︎ 49:08 Yes. Placebo effect is very good medicine. Nothing wrong with it. If he can make you feel healthy and feel good, fine. Great physician.
▶︎ 49:17 Audience: I was kinda thinking about a counselor or a therapist, or even a good friend. If I got dumped or something, and I came to Miriam and said, "You know, this is so awful," and Miriam said, "Let's change your perception so you can learn something from this," I would be inclined to say that's a wise friend or someone who can improve my perceptions.
▶︎ 49:39 Right. Anytime, buddy. Give her a lot of money. Pay up. There you go. This is why we don't go to therapists really expecting them to set us on the road to truth, do we? And I don't think good therapists say, "Oh, no. You've been wrong about everything, that's why you're depressed. See, the world is not hopeless at all. There are all these great..." No.
▶︎ 50:02 They accept your truth of the moment, and then through whatever manipulations, words, drugs, whatever, they get you to have a new truth, which is much more pleasant and beneficial to you. And that's why we pay them. So I think those are all good examples of people who in fact are considered more skillful, more knowledgeable in that sense, because they can improve our perceptions. That brings us to the end of our material for today.
▶︎ 50:33 Any thoughts so far on how this dialogue is developing, whether you see it as coherent, whether you think it's going in a certain direction? Or details that you noticed that we haven't discussed?
▶︎ 50:49 Audience: I was interested at the end there, when you were going through the examples of changing your perceptions, how it started from a quite cynical place. We got through some better places yet. But it seems, I was surprised by that just because when Socrates does take this role on, because he seems to play this role very enthusiastically. Maybe he himself is one of these manipulators of perceptions, and he's embracing that role.
▶︎ 51:13 Yeah, and I think he greatly enjoys this. He likes putting himself down.
▶︎ 51:16 Audience: Insulting himself.
▶︎ 51:17 Well, but fakely putting himself down.
▶︎ 51:19 Audience: Yeah, exactly. In order to build himself up in some way.
▶︎ 51:21 Yeah.
▶︎ 51:22 Audience: And in some ways showing how easy it is.
▶︎ 51:25 Right. He enjoys inhabiting other characters and pushing their arguments to as far as they can go, and he's having fun.
▶︎ 51:35 I think as we've said, this whole discussion of the expert who makes money by changing perceptions for the better, it does invite the question of what does better mean. And there was one passage in today's reading where he throws in good and beautiful along with strictly perceptual things like white or black. Oh, these things are relative too, which maybe creates a higher order problem, right? You claim that you're making people's perceptions better, but you also say that better is relative, so who's to say
▶︎ 52:08 Audience: Exactly.
▶︎ 52:09 that you're actually, quote, "good" at anything? And what does good mean at all? So this kind of ethical and political relativism leads to very big questions as we'll see in our next reading.