| 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.)
For Plato a form exists for each matching type of object in
the cosmos. This curious ancient
belief meant that there exist
forms 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
is 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 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.
CONCLUSION
The unsuccessful Socratic midwifery
of the
Theaetetus failed to deliver a healthy
gnosiology
for a young Theaetetus, 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 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 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 any.
If such a philosopher
claims
that there exists a realm which contains mysterious ‘forms,’ which float around as 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 bring with us from ‘previous lives,’ then I cannot produce evidence to the
contrary – and nobody can.
As a nominalisnt 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.
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.
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 brilliant literary
allegory of Plato as ‘historical man’ exalted in his desire to improve the understanding
of his fellows and establish fitting
ethical
touchstones of what is good and what
is bad,
by testing them against assiduously
crafted,
personally bench-tested epistemological
criteria
with which 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
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Evans Experientialism 
