Complete Works

by Plato, Cooper, John M. , Hutchinson, D. S.

  ‘So, if you take my advice, as I said before, you will sit down with us without ill will or hostility, in a kindly spirit. You will genuinely try to find out what our meaning is when we maintain (a) that all things are in motion and (b) that for each person and each city, things are what they seem to them to be. And upon this basis you will inquire whether knowledge and perception are the same thing or different things. But you will not proceed as you did just now. You will not base your argument upon the use and wont of language; you will not follow the practice of most men, who drag [c] words this way and that at their pleasure, so making every imaginable difficulty for one another.’

  Well, Theodorus, here is my contribution to the rescue of your friend—the best I can do, with my resources, and little enough that is. If he were alive himself, he would have come to the rescue of his offspring in a grander style.

  THEODORUS: That must be a joke, Socrates. It was a very spirited rescue.

  SOCRATES: You are kind, my friend. Tell me now, did you notice that Protagoras was complaining of us, in the speech that we have just heard, [d] for addressing our arguments to a small boy and making the child’s nervousness a weapon against his ideas? And how he disparaged our method of arguments as merely an amusing game, and how solemnly he upheld his ‘measure of all things’ and commanded us to be serious when we dealt with his theory?

  THEODORUS: Yes, of course I noticed that, Socrates.

  SOCRATES: Then do you think we should obey his commands?

  THEODORUS: Most certainly I do.

  SOCRATES: Look at the company then. They are all children but you. So if we are to obey Protagoras, it is you and I who have got to be serious [e] about his theory. It is you and I who must question and answer one another. Then he will not have this against us, at any rate, that we turned the criticism of his philosophy into sport with boys.

  THEODORUS: Well, isn’t our Theaetetus better able to follow the investigation of a theory than many an old fellow with a long beard?

  SOCRATES: But not better than you, Theodorus. Do not go on imagining that it is my business to be straining every nerve to defend your dead [169] friend while you do nothing. Come now, my very good Theodorus, come a little way with me. Come with me at any rate until we see whether in questions of geometrical proofs it is really you who should be the measure or whether all men are as sufficient to themselves as you are in astronomy and all the other sciences in which you have made your name.

  THEODORUS: Socrates, it is not easy for a man who has sat down beside you to refuse to talk. That was all nonsense just now when I was pretending that you were going to allow me to keep my coat on, and not use compulsion like the Spartans. So far from that, you seem to me to have leanings [b] towards the methods of Sciron.17 The Spartans tell one either to strip or to go away; but you seem rather to be playing the part of Antaeus.18 You don’t let any comer go till you have stripped him and made him wrestle with you in an argument.

  SOCRATES: That, Theodorus, is an excellent simile to describe what is the matter with me. But I am more of a fiend for exercise than Sciron and Antaeus. I have met with many and many a Heracles and Theseus in my time, mighty men of words; and they have well battered me. But for all [c] that I don’t retire from the field, so terrible a lust has come upon me for these exercises. You must not grudge me this, either; try a fall with me and we shall both be the better.

  THEODORUS: All right. I resign myself; take me with you where you like. In any case, I see, I have got to put up with the fate you spin for me, and submit to your inquisition. But not further than the limits you have laid down; beyond that I shall not be able to offer myself.

  SOCRATES: It will do if you will go with me so far. Now there is one kind of mistake I want you to be specially on your guard against, namely, that [d] we do not unconsciously slip into some childish form of argument. We don’t want to get into disgrace for this again.

  THEODORUS: I will do my best, I promise you.

  SOCRATES: The first thing, then, is to tackle the same point that we were dealing with before. We were making a complaint. Now let us see whether we were right or wrong in holding it to be a defect in this theory that it made every man self-sufficient in wisdom; and whether we were right or wrong when we made Protagoras concede that some men are superior to others in questions of better and worse, these being ‘the wise’. Do you agree?

  THEODORUS: Yes.

  SOCRATES: It would be a different matter if Protagoras were here in person [e] and agreed with us, instead of our having made this concession on his behalf in our attempt to help him. In that case, there would be no need to take this question up again and make sure about it. In the circumstances, however, it might be decided that we had no authority on his behalf, and so it is desirable that we should come to a clearer agreement on this point; for it makes no small difference whether this is so or not.

  THEODORUS: True.

  [170] SOCRATES: Then don’t let us obtain this concession through anybody else. Let us take the shortest way, an appeal to his own statement.

  THEODORUS: How?

  SOCRATES: In this way. He says, does he not, that things are for every man what they seem to him to be?

  THEODORUS: Yes, that is what he says.

  SOCRATES: Well, then, Protagoras, we too are expressing the judgments of a man—I might say, of all men—when we say that there is no one in the world who doesn’t believe that in some matters he is wiser than other men; while in other matters, they are wiser than he. In emergencies—if at no other time—you see this belief. When they are in distress, on the battlefield, or in sickness or in a storm at sea, all men turn to their leaders in each sphere as to gods and look to them for salvation because they are [b] superior in precisely this one thing—knowledge. And wherever human life and work goes on, you find everywhere men seeking teachers and masters, for themselves and for other living creatures and for the direction of all human works. You find also men who believe that they are able to teach and to take the lead. In all these cases, what else can we say but that men do believe in the existence of both wisdom and ignorance among themselves?

  THEODORUS: There can be no other conclusion.

  SOCRATES: And they believe that wisdom is true thinking? While ignorance is a matter of false judgment?

  THEODORUS: Yes, of course.

  SOCRATES: What then, Protagoras, are we to make of your argument? Are we to say that all men, on every occasion, judge what is true? Or that they judge sometimes truly and sometimes falsely? Whichever we say, it comes to the same thing, namely, that men do not always judge what is true; that human judgments are both true and false. For think, Theodorus. Would you, would anyone of the school of Protagoras be prepared to contend that no one ever thinks his neighbor is ignorant or judging falsely?

  THEODORUS: No, that’s not a thing one could believe, Socrates.

  SOCRATES: And yet it is to this that our theory has been driven—this [d] theory that man is the measure of all things.

  THEODORUS: How is that?

  SOCRATES: Well, suppose you come to a decision in your own mind and then express a judgment about something to me. Let us assume with Protagoras that your judgment is true for you. But isn’t it possible that the rest of us may criticize your verdict? Do we always agree that your judgment is true? Or does there rise up against you, every time, a vast army of persons who think the opposite, who hold that your decisions and your thoughts are false?

  THEODORUS: Heaven knows they do, Socrates, in their ‘thousands and [e] tens of thousands’, as Homer says,19 and give me all the trouble that is humanly possible.

  SOCRATES: Then do you want us to say that you are then judging what is true for yourself, but false for the tens of thousands?

  THEODORUS: It looks as if that is what we must say, according to the theory, at any rate.

  SOCRATES: And what of Protagoras himself? Must he not say this, that supposing he himself did not believe that man is the measure, any more than the majority of people (w
ho indeed do not believe it), then this Truth [171] which he wrote is true for no one? On the other hand, suppose he believed it himself, but the majority of men do not agree with him; then you see—to begin with—the more those to whom it does not seem to be the truth outnumber those to whom it does, so much the more it isn’t than it is?

  THEODORUS: That must be so, if it is going to be or not be according to the individual judgment.

  SOCRATES: Secondly, it has this most exquisite feature: Protagoras admits, I presume, that the contrary opinion about his own opinion (namely, that it is false) must be true, seeing he agrees that all men judge what is.

  THEODORUS: Undoubtedly.

  [b] SOCRATES: And in conceding the truth of the opinion of those who think him wrong, he is really admitting the falsity of his own opinion?

  THEODORUS: Yes, inevitably.

  SOCRATES: But for their part the others do not admit that they are wrong?

  THEODORUS: No.

  SOCRATES: But Protagoras again admits this judgment to be true, according to his written doctrine?

  THEODORUS: So it appears.

  SOCRATES: It will be disputed, then, by everyone, beginning with Protagoras—or rather, it will be admitted by him, when he grants to the person [c] who contradicts him that he judges truly—when he does that, even Protagoras himself will be granting that neither a dog nor the ‘man in the street’ is the measure of anything at all which he has not learned. Isn’t that so?

  THEODORUS: It is so.

  SOCRATES: Then since it is disputed by everyone, the Truth of Protagoras is not true for anyone at all, not even for himself?

  THEODORUS: Socrates, we are running my friend too hard.

  SOCRATES: But it is not at all clear, my dear Theodorus, that we are running off the right track. Hence it is likely that Protagoras, being older [d] than we are, really is wiser as well; and if he were to stick up his head from below as far as the neck just here where we are, he would in all likelihood convict me twenty times over of talking nonsense, and show you up too for agreeing with me, before he ducked down to rush off again. But we have got to take ourselves as we are, I suppose, and go on saying the things which seem to us to be. At the moment, then, mustn’t we maintain that any man would admit at least this, that some men are wiser than their fellows and others more ignorant?

  THEODORUS: So it seems to me, at any rate.

  SOCRATES: We may also suggest that the theory would stand firm most successfully in the position which we sketched out for it in our attempt [e] to bring help to Protagoras. I mean the position that most things are for the individual what they seem to him to be; for instance, warm, dry, sweet and all this type of thing. But if the theory is going to admit that there is any sphere in which one man is superior to another, it might perhaps be prepared to grant it in questions of what is good or bad for one’s health. Here it might well be admitted that it is not true that every creature—woman or child or even animal—is competent to recognize what is good for it and to heal its own sickness; that here, if anywhere, one person is better than another. Do you agree?

  THEODORUS: Yes, that seems so to me.

  SOCRATES: Then consider political questions. Some of these are questions [172] of what may or may not fittingly be done, of just and unjust, of pious and impious; and here the theory 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. In such matters neither any individual nor any city can claim superior wisdom. But when it is a question of laying down what is to the interest of the state and what is not, the matter is different. The theory will again admit that here, if anywhere, one counsellor is better than another; here the decision of one city may be more in conformity with the truth than that of another. It would certainly not have the [b] hardihood to affirm that when a city decides that a certain thing is to its own interest, that thing will undoubtedly turn out to be to its interest. It is in those other questions I am talking about—just and unjust, pious and impious—that men are ready to insist that no one of these things has by nature any being of its own; in respect of these, they say, what seems to people collectively to be so is true, at the time when it seems that way and for just as long as it so seems. And even those who are not prepared to go all the way with Protagoras take some such view of wisdom. But I see, Theodorus, that we are becoming involved in a greater discussion [c] emerging from the lesser one.

  THEODORUS: Well, we have plenty of time, haven’t we, Socrates?

  SOCRATES: We appear to … That remark of yours, my friend, reminds me of an idea that has often occurred to me before—how natural it is that men who have spent a great part of their lives in philosophical studies make such fools of themselves when they appear as speakers in the law courts.

  THEODORUS: How do you mean now?

  SOCRATES: Well, look at the man who has been knocking about in law courts and such places ever since he was a boy; and compare him with the man brought up in philosophy, in the life of a student. It is surely like [d] comparing the upbringing of a slave with that of a free man.

  THEODORUS: How is that, now?

  SOCRATES: Because the one man always has what you mentioned just now—plenty of time. When he talks, he talks in peace and quiet, and his time is his own. It is so with us now: here we are beginning on our third new discussion; and he can do the same, if he is like us, and prefers the newcomer to the question in hand. It does not matter to such men whether they talk for a day or a year, if only they may hit upon that which is. But [e] the other—the man of the law courts—is always in a hurry when he is talking; he has to speak with one eye on the clock. Besides, he can’t make his speeches on any subject he likes; he has his adversary standing over him, armed with compulsory powers and with the sworn statement, which is read out point by point as he proceeds, and must be kept to by the speaker. The talk is always about a fellow-slave, and is addressed to a master, who sits there holding some suit or other in his hand. And the struggle is never a matter of indifference; it always directly concerns the speaker, and sometimes life itself is at stake.

  [173] Such conditions make him keen and highly strung, skilled in flattering the master and working his way into favor; but cause his soul to be small and warped. His early servitude prevents him from making a free, straight growth; it forces him into doing crooked things by imposing dangers and alarms upon a soul that is still tender. He cannot meet these by just and honest practice, and so resorts to lies and to the policy of repaying one [b] wrong with another; thus he is constantly being bent and distorted, and in the end grows up to manhood with a mind that has no health in it, having now become—in his own eyes—a man of ability and wisdom.

  There is your practical man, Theodorus. What about our own set? Would you like us to have a review of them, or shall we let them be, and return to the argument? We don’t want to abuse this freedom to change our subject of which we were speaking just now.

  [c] THEODORUS: No, no, Socrates. Let us review the philosophers. What you said just now was quite right; we who move in such circles are not the servants but the masters of our discussions. Our arguments are our own, like slaves; each one must wait about for us, to be finished whenever we think fit. We have no jury, and no audience (as the dramatic poets have), sitting in control over us, ready to criticize and give orders.

  SOCRATES: Very well, then; we must review them, it seems, since you have made up your mind. But let us confine ourselves to the leaders; why bother about the second-rate specimens? To begin with, then, the [d] philosopher grows up without knowing the way to the market-place, or the whereabouts of the law courts or the council chambers or any other place of public assembly. Laws and decrees, published orally or in writing, are things he never sees or hears. The scrambling of political cliques for office; social functions, dinners, parties with flute-girls—such doings never enter his head even in a dream. So with questions of birth—he has no more idea whether a fellow citizen is high-born
or humble, or whether he has inherited some taint from his forebears, male or female, than he has [e] of the number of pints in the sea, as they say. And in all these matters, he knows not even that he knows not; for he does not hold himself aloof from them in order to get a reputation, but because it is in reality only his body that lives and sleeps in the city. His mind, having come to the conclusion that all these things are of little or no account, spurns them and pursues its wingéd way, as Pindar says,20 throughout the universe, ‘in the deeps beneath the earth’ and geometrizing its surfaces, ‘in the heights above the heaven’, astronomizing, and tracking down by every path the entire nature of each whole among the things that are, never [174] condescending to what lies near at hand.

  THEODORUS: What do you mean by that, Socrates?

  SOCRATES: Well, here’s an instance: they say Thales21 was studying the stars, Theodorus, and gazing aloft, when he fell into a well; and a witty and amusing Thracian servant-girl made fun of him because, she said, 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. The same joke applies to all who spend their lives in philosophy. It really is true that the philosopher fails [b] to see his next-door neighbor; he not only doesn’t notice what he is doing; he scarcely knows whether he is a man or some other kind of creature. The question he asks is, What is Man? What actions and passions properly belong to human nature and distinguish it from all other beings? This is what he wants to know and concerns himself to investigate. You see what I mean, Theodorus, don’t you?

  THEODORUS: Yes, and what you say is true.

  SOCRATES: This accounts, my friend, for the behavior of such a man when he comes into contact with his fellows, either privately with individuals [c] or in public life, as I was saying at the beginning. Whenever he is obliged, in a law court or elsewhere, to discuss the things that lie at his feet and before his eyes, he causes entertainment not only to Thracian servant-girls but to all the common herd, by tumbling into wells and every sort of difficulty through his lack of experience. His clumsiness is awful and gets him a reputation for fatuousness. On occasions when personal scandal is the topic of conversation, he never has anything at all of his own to contribute; he knows nothing to the detriment of anyone, never having paid any attention to this subject—a lack of resource which makes him [d] look very comic. And again, when compliments are in order, and self-laudation, his evident amusement—which is by no means a pose but perfectly genuine—is regarded as idiotic. When he hears the praises of a despot or a king being sung, it sounds to his ears as if some stock-breeder were being congratulated—some keeper of pigs or sheep, or cows that are giving him plenty of milk; only he thinks that the rulers have a more difficult and treacherous animal to rear and milk, and that such a man, having no spare time, is bound to become quite as coarse and uncultivated [e] as the stock-farmer; for the castle of the one is as much a prison as the mountain fold of the other. When he hears talk of land—that so-and-so has a property of ten thousand acres or more, and what a vast property that is, it sounds to him like a tiny plot, used as he is to envisage the whole earth. When his companions become lyric on the subject of great families, and exclaim at the noble blood of one who can point to seven wealthy ancestors, he thinks that such praise comes of a dim and limited [175] vision, an inability, through lack of education, to take a steady view of the whole, and to calculate that every single man has countless hosts of ancestors, near and remote, among whom are to be found, in every instance, rich men and beggars, kings and slaves, Greeks and foreigners, by the thousand. When men pride themselves upon a pedigree of twenty-five ancestors, and trace their descent back to Heracles the son of Amphitryon, [b] they seem to him to be taking a curious interest in trifles. As for the twenty-fifth ancestor of Amphitryon, what he may have been is merely a matter of luck, and similarly with the fiftieth before him again. How ridiculous, he thinks, not to be able to work that out, and get rid of the gaping vanity of a silly mind.