INTRODUCTION

Before contrasting certain elements of the THEAETETUS AND THE REPUBLIC I will first examine Socrates' maieutic methodology (his midwife analogy) and then consider the question of Plato's Forms. The essay will then turn to the main fact-finding focus of this paper, which is to provide a contrastive account of the different approaches to knowledge in the two dialogues by identifying similarities and variations of approach.

THE MAIEUTIC METHOD

Theaetetus seeks to arrive at the truth by way of logical arguments. Plato, the amanuensis turned ghostwriter for the executed Socrates, intends that the context be understood in the light of Socrates' mission to educate his fellow citizens. Socrates' discussion with the brilliant geometrician and mathematician Theaetetus whom he likes and respects, is a joint examination of the subject matter of 'knowledge,' which lacks the cross-examinational extremes of the elenchtic method by good-naturedly getting his conversational partner to re-examine the entailments of his uncritically held beliefs, to see if they were abortive or viable in the sense that a healthy foetus is determined to be viable.

'Socrates himself describes it as the art of delivering the mind of a universal idea (maieutikê technê.) [1] (De Wulf. 1909. p. 15.)

I employ the word 'abortive' deliberately, for the essential qualities or characteristics of Plato's maieutic science of the dialectic carry an allusion to the outcomes of human parturition. Plato believed that the human soul possesses realised knowledge from previous lives, which could be brought out and elucidated via dialectic.

He referred to his role as that of: maieutic psychagogy from the Greek: maieutic: maieûtikos, midwife, and psychagogy: psûchê, soul, and agogê, to transport or lead out of, and referred to his ability to help or bring out (give birth to) new ideas, from a person's soul, or to transmit to a person's psyche an understanding of a higher level of being. Cornford. (Theaet. 148b - e.)

PLATONIC FORMS
See: some Platonic Forms here:
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/platonicclouds.htm

For Plato a "Form" exists as an hilarious über-example  or transcendental template for every imperfectly matching type of object in the cosmos to strive to imitate.  . This ancient and curiously primitive belief insists that there exist a form for human beings, trees, pork pies, water hydrants, boats, apples, colours, beauty, piety, goodness and knowledge. The Form of the Good equals God, and the location where souls come into existence and Forms exist is in a 'Platonic heaven' - a spiritual dimension where the souls of the dead experience a renewed conjugation with the Forms.

Particulars are objects that are involved in a Form, which provides the requisite existential condition for a particular to exist, and compose the potentiality of things. There is an important criticism of the Forms first offered by Plato in his dialogue Parmenides. Cornford. (Parm. 132b-136c.) It is called the Third Man Argument and states that if we take an assemblage of things with a mutual feature such as knowledge and place them under the characteristic  knowledge then knowledge itself can be said to contain the knowledge characteristic, so it can be committed to the archetype set as well. The set must be classified under another form, a second knowledge - for example: KNOWLEDGE SET (B.) which also contains the characteristic of knowledge, so it may be placed in a set as well as KNOWLEDGE SET (C) etc.

Gregory Vlastos, twentieth century Socratic scholar commented:

'Plato explains systematically what Socrates never tried to do at all: 'how' Forms are real - what sort of reality they have.' [2] (Vlastos. 1991.) p. 66)

Vlastos also pointed out that when Aristotle came across dialogues, which asserted the existence of abstractions like 'justice, piety, beauty and the rest, he understands Socrates to be talking about 'universals'

'For that is called 'universal' whose nature it is to belong to a number of things.' [3] (Ibid. 1991) p. 93.)

THE THEAETETUS - THE DIALOGUE

The Theaetetus is aporetic - it is a dialogue that ends in an insoluble contradiction or paradox of meanings, though the development of the dialectic is both fascinating and highly educative epistemologically.

Unlike the parabalistic approach he used in The Cave, and the diagrammatically analytical approach of The Divided Line in The Republic, Socrates initiates a dialectic discussion proper by asking the salient question:

'I cannot make out to my own satisfaction what knowledge is? Can we answer that question?' Cornford. (Theaet. 146.)

Theaetetus offers a list of the sciences and points to the art of the cobbler and other craftsmen claiming that these are knowledge. Predictably Socrates protests that individual examples are insufficient:

'But the question you were asked Theaetetus, was not what are the objects of knowledge…but to find out what the thing itself - knowledge - is? [Ibid. 146e.]

The discussion goes on to evaluate three separate epistemological accounts of knowledge furnished by his interlocutor: (a) Knowledge is perception; (b) Knowledge is true belief, and (c) Knowledge is justified true belief.

They are all eventually ruled out, and no successful replacement is provided. What we do witness in this verbal interplay is the Platonic intromission of the Form as aspatial and atemporal for every corresponding type of object in reality and a rigorous examination of the appropriate domain of sensation and ideation.

(A) KNOWLEDGE IS PERCEPTION.

Theaetetus then introduces his first idea - that

'Knowledge is perception. Now as far as I can see at present, knowledge is perception.' (Ibid. 151e)

Socrates parries this suggestion by employing another allusion to midwifery and claims that it refers to the theories of Protagoras and it should be compared with them in order to see:

'Whether it is a true birth or a mere wind-egg?' (Ibid. 151e.)

The pre-Socratic thinker Protagoras coined the famous dictum:

'Man is the measure of all things,' [4] Protagoras. Fragment 1 (DK80b1)

Protagoras contended that if one man claims: 'it is hot' and the man is not lying, then the statement is true for that person. If a second and third truthful person claims it is mild, or it is cold, then those statements could also be true for them. The dictum matches up with the old adage; 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.'

Socrates rejects Theaetetus' suggested definition of 'perception as knowledge' and concludes that it relegates the contextual definition to a doctrine which rules out a concise explanation of the meaning of the word 'knowledge,' for all criteria of judgment are relative to the individuals and situations involved.

(B) KNOWLEDGE IS TRUE BELIEF.'

Theaetetus then postulates 'Knowledge is true belief,' but Socrates swiftly discounts the idea with the observation that orators and lawyers are skilled in persuading people to believe anything of which they were not even eyewitnesses. True belief in those circumstances therefore is a belief in something, which might prove consistent with fact or might not just by mere luck. (Cornford. Theaet. 201a - d.)

THE DREAM
(c) KNOWLEDGE IS TRUE JUDGMENT ACCOMPANIED BY LOGOS.

Stimulated by Theaetetus' next suggestion that knowledge is true judgment accompanied by Logos (an account) adding that only that which has Logos can be known. Socrates develops his argument by way of 'The Dream' into a convoluted theory of knowledge. He posits two kinds of existents and claims that Complexes being a conceptual whole made up of related simples. Such Complexes presuppose a Logos that analyses and maps them into their simple components. The simples however cannot be known. Thus a knowledge of a Complex means a 'true belief' in accord with an account (logos) that cannot analyse and map to the simplest constituents of entities which are unknowable which means that any object, which is the sum of these parts, cannot be known either. (Ibid. 202e) Socrates uses the example of letters and syllables. The first syllables of Socrates' name comprise of the letters - 'S and O' - but one cannot give a similar Logos [account] of the syllable's elements, since they are mere vocus flatus. Thus no knowledge is possible. Ibid. 203a - 204a)

We are entitled to ask why Socrates claims that these simple elements of perception, the characters of the alphabet and the names belonging to them used are without logos, indescribable and unknowable? Both letters are in my view perfectly knowable as to their history, development, shape, pronunciation, phonetic meaning and a wealth of explanation can be provided about them. By way of illustration, the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, the sibilant apical or laminal alveolar 'S' ( S - sigma) is pronounced 'S' as in sister - but 'Z' as in zoo before beta, gamma, delta, and mu, etc. Much time could be spent talking about these letters, and linguists and schoolteachers certainly do.

As Meyerhoff points out in his: 'Socrates' Dream in the Theaetetus,'

'This relevance, however, is not shown in the statement or in the subsequent criticism of the dream. On the contrary, both exposition and criticism seem to take these characteristics fur granted; or, more precisely, the statement of the 'dream' justifies this basic assumption in language so condensed and oblique that the reasons for it are not easily apparent.

[5] (Meyerhoff 1958. P. 132.)

Thus the definition of knowledge as "true judgment plus Logos" cannot be sustained either. Theaetetus has nothing else to say, and the dialogue ends inconclusively. Theaetetus acknowledges that thanks to Socrates he has already given utterance to more than he had in him. To which Socrates good-naturedly concludes:

'All of which our midwife's skill pronounces to be mere wind eggs and not worth the rearing?' (Ibid. 210b)

THE REPUBLIC

The 'traditional' analysis of knowledge In the Theaetetus was deeply influenced, by Plato's proposal that knowledge is true belief with an account or logos. We now turn to the Republic, where he conducts an epistemological evaluation of his varying levels of knowledge-acquisition - Imagining, Belief, Thinking, and Perfect Intelligence in the service of the attainability of the Good with the personal and public ethical values it entails. He expresses this theory with three approaches and provides us with an account through interconnected metaphors that exploit a similarity between experiences as experienced in the different sense modalities of The Cave and the more cerebral, rationalistic methodology of the Divided Line and his belief in The Forms. In the Republic Socrates links his discussion of knowledge with personal justice in relation to citizenship and how a just person should conduct himself and how knowledge can regulate how the good can prevail in the city states of Greece. For Nietzsche Socrates saw through the noble Athenians…the same kind of degeneration was quietly developing everywhere: old Athens was coming to an end.

'Everywhere the instincts were in anarchy, everywhere one was within sight of excess: monstrum in animo was the common danger.'

[6] (Nietzsche 1895. l-9)

THE DIVIDED LINE

In a famous paragraph Socrates outlines the graphical format of his epistemological device:

'Represent them then, as it were, by a line divided into two unequal sections and cut each section again in the same ratio-the section that is, of the visible and that of the intelligible order-and as an expression of the ratio of their comparative clearness and obscurity you will have, as one of the sections of the visible world, images. By images I mean, first, shadows, and then reflections in water and on surfaces of dense, smooth, and bright texture, and everything of that kind, if you apprehend.'

Cornford. [Rep. 509d]

The levels of knowledge delineated so imaginatively and dramatically in the Cave are thus approached less emotionally and more schematically and diagrammatically in The Divided Line, where imagining, as in the Cave, is at the most inferior level of this developmental scaling ladder of the states of his four stages in the acquisition of knowledge in pursuit of the Good: appearance, belief, thinking, and perfect intelligence.

Not unexpectedly, as in the Cave, the Sun is also employed by Socrates in the Divided Line as a metaphor for The Good:

' The sun, I presume you will say, not only furnishes to visibles the power of visibility, but it also provides for their generation and growth and nurture though it is not itself generation. Of course not. In like manner, then, you are to say that the objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the good; their being known, but their very existence and essence is derived to them from it, the good itself is not essence but still transcends essence in dignity and surpassing power.'

Cornford. (Rep. 509b)

The Forms are designated the highest levels of 'reality' Plato summarises the schemata of the epistemological division for his interlocutor Glaucon thus:

'And now, answering to these four sections, assume these four affections occurring in the soul-intellection or reason for the highest, understanding for second, belief for the third, and for the last, picture thinking or conjecture-and arrange them in a proportion, considering that they participate in clearness and precision in the same degree as their objects partake of truth and reality.

'(Ibid. 511. d.]

'I understand, he said. I concur and arrange them as you bid.'

For Plato then, the 'real world' is not what we see but what we understand or feel in an 'intelligible world' because it is made up of eternal Forms. The thinker believed there are three ways to discover Forms: recollection, dialectic and desire. Recollection is when our souls remember the Forms from prior existence. Dialectic is when people discuss and explore the Forms together. And third is the desire for knowledge.

THE CAVE

In Plato's compelling vignette of the Cave [ibid. 514] we are presented with a vision of manacled captives invested in a dark grotto into which no sunlight ever penetrates, facing a wall and pinioned by their necks in such a manner that they can only look forward at the wall upon which shadows of the shapes of objects or men are paraded on an elevated causeway in front of an unseen fire behind them which projects the shadows upon its surface. For the shackled men the indistinct shapes perceived by the visual senses are appearances that form their version of "true reality.'

The seated prisoners [left] observe the shapes projected by the firelight upon the cave wall

The seated prisoners [left] observe the shapes projected by the firelight upon the cave wall

The allegory of the imprisonment in the murky depths of the Cave indicates that humanity lives in epistemological and sensorial ignorance. Later in the apologue a man is released and the results of his ascent to the shining brightness of the sun compared with his former ignorant fettered existence in the dark below. For Socrates deliverance from the unknowingness of the appearance of merely sensible objects and the ultimate achieval of the individual and public benefits for society necessitates an acknowledgement of the Forms of Knowledge, Justice and the Good provide. Knowledge can only be attained via an ascent to the brightness of the Good, (of which the sun is a metaphor.)

When eventually a man is unshackled and is enabled to turn his head and see the real objects which for so long have been paraded behind him, he is at first be unable to comprehend them as being the embodiments of the indistinct shadows and shapes on the wall. Finally he is freed from below ground and staggers to the surface rubbing his eyes against the bright light of the sun which has:

'The power of elevating the highest principle in the soul to the contemplation of that which is best in existence,' [ibid. 517b.]

Hence will the released prisoner from ignorance gain eventual sight of the upper world of knowledgeable reality.

And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven [516b] and then he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day?'

Thus does Socrates in this cleverly created allegory reveal the point of the allegory, for we are being asked to assume that the ascent and the contemplation is the soul's ascent to the intelligible region

Hence the allegory depicts the need for mankind to aspire to and reach the form of knowledge, without which they will be forever unable to make the correct ethical and political and ethical decisions. All other forms of knowledge will be useless - without the key to life - 'highest form of knowledge' - the form of the Good.

For a completely different interpretation of this rather naive account see my:

PLATO'S CAVE THE BIGGEST CON-TRICK IN PHILOSOPHY?
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/evans_cave.htm

and

PLATO'S CAVE REVISITED
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/evans_cave_revisited.htm


CONCLUSION

The stillborn Socratic midwifery of the Theaetetus failed to deliver a healthy gnosiology for a young Theaetetus, intellectually pregnant, but sadly barren of such a theory of knowledge.

It is however fruitful to compare Socrates' brilliant dialectical approach in The Theaetetus, including his painstaking elenctic unpicking of every proposition put forward by his interlocutor, with the more successful and less wordy allegorical approach of The Cave and the equally successful analysis of knowledge into its elemental parts or basic principles in The Divided Line.

The most obvious difference is that the quest for the meaning of knowledge in The Republic works, as far as his socio-political particular message goes, while The Theaetetus, in spite of being an intriguing historical document - does not - for it ends in aporia.

Thomas Aquinas said of Plato in his great Summa Theologiae:

'Plato held that the forms of corporeal matter are derived from, and formed by, forms immaterially subsisting, by a kind of participation. Thus he held that there exists an immaterial man, and an immaterial horse, and so forth.'

He further reminds us:

'Thus Aristotle rejects the opinion of Plato, who held that ideas existed of themselves, and not in the intellect’

And adds that: 'This opinion appears to be unreasonable in affirming separate ideas of natural things as subsisting of themselves.' [7] (Thom. Aquinas. I, q. 84, a. 1. c.)

Socrates' theory of knowledge is so 'Form-Dependant' and is utterly predicated upon Plato's theory of forms. There much opposition to these curious ideas of the existence of forms, and the concept is very much out of favour with most modern philosophers.

MY OWN VIEW?
As an eliminative determinist I am totally out of sympathy with all of Plato's and Socrates‘ transcendentalist ideas, abstract verbiage and reified nomenclature. If asked to provide ‘evidence’ for exactly why I have no disproof to back up this rejection, then the answer is – I cannot provide proof that Forms. angels or cheribims exist, or little green men with three heads exist on the yet undiscovered planet Urg .

If such a philosopher claims that there exists a realm which contains mysterious ‘Forms,’ which float around as perfect templates for worldly objects, or reificational definitional models of human activity, or existential modalities, such as ‘beauty’ or ‘piety’ or ‘knowledge,’ or we have regurgitative ‘know how’ that we carry over with us from ‘previous lives,’ then I cannot produce evidence to the contrary – and nobody can.

As a nominalist and eliminativist for me ‘ Knowledge’ does not exist – only ‘knowing humans’ can be found in the world - If anyone can prove otherwise – let them try.There is a Nobel Prize up for grabs if they can.

From a modern ontological, mereological and scientific point of view Plato's notions of ‘complexes’ and ‘simples’ are without foundation, though approached as social documents, or as a History of Philosophy, ‘The Theaetetus’ and ‘The Republic’ are very interesting and worth reading, if only to provide historical insights into primitive ways of thinking and how Plato and company damaged the progress of philosophy with silly transcendentalistic nonsense.

Kant accuses Plato of creating these "perceptions" out of thin air, mere subjective feeling. Plato's effort involves, claims Kant, a "mystical illumination," which brands him as having fallen into Schwarmerei (the enthusiasm of visionary charlatans) that is "the death of all philosophy." Thus for Kant, Plato is the charlatan par excellence--nothing more. [8] Livergood. 2006]

As a historiography The Cave continues to work for me as a fascinating insight into Plato as  an ontologically attenuated ‘historical man.’  But nobody can question his genuine desire to improve the understanding of his fellows and establish fitting ethical touchstones of what is good and what is bad, to improve their own extraordinarily fecund and innovative society.

In these dark days of international ignorance of 'the other' and as the heirs of the phenomenological inheritance, which Socrates, Plato and the like have handed down to us, we too continue our torturously slow moral progress from the darkness of the Cave towards the sunlight of knowledge.

We are tardy in our scaling of the upward inclines of knowledge. Unchained, we struggle slowly towards the surface brightness and a new world of understanding and justice under the bright sun - but instead discover a world of charred cities illuminated by the incandescent light of burning tower blocks. Is our climb in vain - have we left it too late?

REFERENCES

Note: All textual references to The Theaetetus, The Republic and The Parmenides used in this essay are Stephanus page numbers and refer to: Plato. 'Plato - The Collected Dialogues.' translator. F. M. Cornford. Hamilton. E.-Cairns. H. ed. 2005. Bollington Series. LXXI. Princeton University Press.

[1] De Wulf. Maurice. 'History of Medieval Philosophy.' p. 15. Longmans, Green, and Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London 1909.

[2] Vlastos. Gregory. 'Socrates. Ironist and Moral Philosopher.' 1991) p. 93. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.

[3] Ibid 1991) p. 93.

[4] Protagoras. 'Perseus Encyclopedia.' http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext? doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0004%3Aid%3Dprotagoras-of-abdera. Accessed: 7 November 2006.

[5] Meyerhoff, H.: 'Socrates' dream in the Theaetetus,' in: Classical Quarterly 8 (1958), p. 132.

[6] Nietzsche. F. 'The Problem of Socrates.' l. 9. from: 'Die Götzen-Dämmerung' [1895] Twilight of the Idols http://www.handprint.com/SC/NIE/GotDamer.html accessed 30.10.20

[7] Aquinas. Thomas. http://www2.nd.edu/Departments//Maritain/etext/homp015.htm [accessed 31 October. 2006.]

[8] Livergood. Norman D. Plato's Contemporary Relevance. 2006. http://www.hermes-press.com/plato_index.htm Accessed 28.11.2006