Welcome to our second session on Plato's Theaetetus. Yesterday we read the dialogue through 152c, and today we are going through 168c. In our first reading, we encountered the main characters, Socrates, Theaetetus, and Theodorus, and we learned something about each of them that I think is genuinely relevant. Plato is not only presenting abstract concepts and arguments; he always ties them to concrete human situations and personalities, so the drama and the characters matter.
What kind of person is Socrates? He is a pain in the neck, odd, inquisitive, and deeply concerned with individual personalities, much like Plato himself. In fact, the first thing Socrates says in the dialogue is that he is always trying to find out who is a promising young Athenian, which is why he is known as a good prophet: if he meets someone young, he can more or less tell how they will turn out. He also describes himself as a midwife, like his mother, except that he delivers ideas rather than children. He adds, in a remark that reflects the sexism of his time, that he deals with men rather than women, helping them give birth to thoughts and then testing those thoughts to determine whether they are true or false.
Theaetetus, as we know from the prologue, turned out to be brave, and we can already see that quality emerging. He is perhaps a teenager in this dialogue, yet in the company of two older and supposedly wiser men he shows real gumption. He is also gifted, both intellectually sharp and steady in temperament. Theodorus, by contrast, is a teacher in a much more traditional sense than Socrates. Where Socrates is the midwife who draws ideas out of his interlocutors, Theodorus seems to be the kind of teacher who has the answers and conveys them directly into students' minds. We also learn that Theodorus is not as brave as his own pupil: he is a little skittish about engaging in philosophical argument, pleading that he is too old for it, though of course Socrates himself is seventy, so that excuse carries little weight.
Turning to the philosophical content, the central question, What is knowledge?, emerged naturally from the lives of people who seek and convey knowledge. With some encouragement, Theaetetus finally proposed that a person who knows something perceives it, and therefore knowledge is the same thing as perception. We noted that this is actually a logical leap: it may follow that if you know something you perceive it, but it does not follow that knowledge and perception are identical. Socrates immediately connected this claim to the relativism of Protagoras, the doctrine that man is the measure of all things, which he interprets to mean that each individual perceiver is the measure of reality for that person, leaving no room for asking what reality is like independent of those perceptions.
Audience: I had a question about something you said about Theaetetus. Does this happen in other dialogues? One of the things I really appreciate about him, and maybe part of what you mean by calling him brave, is that he frequently says, "I didn't understand that" or "I don't know." Is that common in the other dialogues?
In the dialogues generally, interlocutors more often respond to Socrates with "Oh yes, quite right," even when he has said something particularly obscure, which may itself be a sign of cowardice, an unwillingness to admit confusion. It is especially fitting that Theaetetus says "I don't know" in a dialogue that is, after all, about the nature of knowledge. And there are moments later in the text where Theaetetus simply tells Socrates that he has been completely lost, which turn out to be some of the most helpful moments in the whole discussion.
Today's reading begins with a transition to new philosophical ideas. Socrates has linked knowledge as perception to Protagoreanism, which seems to make sense, and then he links it to the idea that everything is in flux. He relates this to a number of philosophers and poets, but it will be especially associated with Heraclitus as the dialogue goes on. If you haven't read Heraclitus, please do. We don't have his book, but we have a couple hundred brief quotations, fragments cited by later authors, and almost invariably they are deep, paradoxical, and fascinating.
The way Heraclitus comes up in this dialogue is actually quite narrow, giving you something of 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." Why is that? I could go down to the Hudson today and go back tomorrow. Why can't I step in it twice? The fragment continues: because it is neither the same man nor the same river. There are two reasons: different waters flow through the river, but also different "waters within me," as it were. I'm not the same person. Everything is a river; everything is flowing and changing all the time.
There is a story about a student of Heraclitus who interrupted him and said, "You're wrong, master — you can't step in the same river even once." And somewhere in Plato there is a story about a pupil of Heraclitus who concluded that you can't say anything at all, and so he stopped speaking entirely and would simply point at momentary events.
There is considerable debate in the secondary literature about why Socrates makes this connection between relativism and flux. Is there a natural flow, as it were, from one to the other, or is this a leap? What do they have to do with each other?
Audience: There's something I'm a little confused by. Socrates refers to states of stillness as the opposite of motion. When does that happen?
Never, if you're a Heraclitean. They are, in that sense, rather different ideas. Socrates does offer a small argument for the flux position — he says that when things slow down or stop, that is when they decay. But of course, if you're a strict Heraclitean, things never stop, so it's not entirely clear what the status of that argument is. It also seems a very large assumption to say that stillness is simply a state of decay and that nothing beneficial can come of it.
That assumption is also contrary to what we might expect from Plato, since we expect Plato to be a Platonist. But of course, as I've noted, Plato never directly states his own theory, and when we attribute so-called Platonism to him, we are already making something of a leap. If you are a Platonist, you believe in certain eternal realities called the Forms — the essence of justice, the essence of goodness, the essence of beauty — and these are supposed to be unchanging. Those who do attribute something like that to Plato say he learned from Heraclitus that everything in the perceptible realm is in flux and is ambiguous, while the intelligible realm, knowable only by the mind, is stable. We could read that into this passage: we won't get a theory of the Forms in the Theaetetus, but perhaps we get a theory of the perceptible world.
Audience: One possible connection between relativism and Heraclitianism 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.
Audience: Are they always changing? Do you mean the way we perceive is always changing, or that the perceptions we have are always changing?
Audience: Both. If I were to look outside and see a building right now and understand it in a certain way, and then tomorrow look out and understand it differently, that could be the result of either my mode of perception changing, or what I'm perceiving itself changing, or both.
There is a great deal in that observation. One question is whether understanding is itself a form of perceiving. So far in the dialogue, it seems as though it is — when they use the word perception, they mean how things seem to you, whether in your opinions, your eyesight, or whatever else. A distinction will only be drawn later on. The other issue you raise is whether it is merely my perception that changes or the thing itself. But if you genuinely believe that knowledge is perception, you collapse that distinction entirely — there is no "thing itself" apart from perceptions. There is no building in itself; there is only my perception of a building now, your perception of a building now, which are probably quite different, but that is fine, because they are different realities.
If we pay close attention to our experience of perceiving, it may well be true that perception is always shifting. We assume a certain stability — we look around the room and think nothing is changing. But in fact, our eyes are constantly moving, we are constantly receiving different perceptions, and we impose a sense of stability upon them. That is one plausible transition from Protagorean relativism to Heraclitean flux.
Socrates backs up this position with a few brief arguments. An interesting one appears at 153B–C, where he quietly introduces 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." The question is whether that statement about knowledge is consistent with the idea that knowledge is perception. It seems consistent, because if your eyes are closed, you are not perceiving.
Audience: Are you saying that real perception requires study of a certain kind? When I was in Rome, I walked around with a historian who was able to tell me what everything was, and I almost started crying — I gained such a deeper understanding of everything I was looking at. And I am visiting New York for this film, and even though it is not my first time, I am walking around actively perceiving, which perhaps native New Yorkers do not always do.
That is an interesting line of thought. I have encountered people at museums who look at everything except what is in front of them — they read the label next to the painting, or take a picture of it, anything but actually experience it. The way I was initially inclined to think about it was that perception is easy — the lazy person's philosophy. All you have to do is sit on a couch and perceptions come to you; no study required. But perhaps study really is necessary for genuine perception.
This passage seems to be drawing in other levels of the problem: the learning and study, the structuring element that Socrates will develop later, and also a normative dimension. When Socrates asks whether the soul "becomes a better thing," questions of good and bad, better and worse, enter the discussion — yet what the good actually is is never defined here. According to the Republic, that is the ultimate question: the highest form is the Form of the Good, and Socrates famously confesses he has no idea what it is.
As for how learning and study can be called motions, we can import Plato's student Aristotle for clarification. Aristotle would say that motions are processes directed toward some fulfillment; in that sense, studying in order to gain knowledge is a motion, and its fulfillment is the contemplative state of fully possessing the truth. On that reading, knowing itself would not be a motion — learning would be the motion, and knowledge its completion. Aristotle's god, after all, is simply an activity of knowing the highest thing, which is itself — pure contemplation of contemplation. Perhaps all of that is already implied in this single sentence of Socrates.
Plato develops a theory of perception and reality that combines Protagorean relativism with Heraclitean flux, and this requires us to think about things in a new way — where, in fact, there are no stable things at all. Consider the example he gives, which is a neat parlor trick. He says: take six dice and place four next to them — the six are greater than four. Now increase the number to twelve, and suddenly the six dice are fewer. How can this be? The six dice did not change at all, and yet they changed.
Audience: I find that to be sophism in the extreme. The six dice don't change, so what we're talking about is the other entities, not the six. The other group has become bigger or smaller in number. Isn't it true of the six dice that they are more than four and less than twelve? That's not a truth about the dice themselves — it's a truth about the comparison, about whether the other group is four or twelve.
Why does Plato bring up this apparent sophism? Perhaps he is already trying to show the difference between perception and knowledge. Perception seems like a more passive thing, and though perceptions may be changing, the perceiver isn't necessarily changing. In the case of knowledge, it is the concept being applied that changes — the concept of less than or greater than — which raises the question of how this ties into the relation between the perceived and the perceiver.
Audience: What if we could really explode our concept of reality by refusing to speak of the six dice in themselves, because there is no "in themselves"? There is only relation, only the perception of six — my perception of six right now, or of whatever. But even that hasn't changed.
Here we get into the question of where numbers come from, and whether numbers are even perceived. Plato will later say that numbers cannot be perceived — but we will get to that. It is not entirely clear what he is saying at this point; perhaps he is trying to confuse both us and Theaetetus. The upshot, though, seems to be an effort to dislodge our ordinary concept of being — a word that will recur with increasing frequency, where being means something that exists independently of experience and perception, in and of itself.
Audience: It also seems to be expanding the perceptual window, softening us up into a more flexible view — getting us to flow a little more.
Indeed. Plato emphasizes context at several points in this discussion: the context changes the meaning of the elements within it. The six dice paradox illustrates precisely this — that what something is cannot be separated from the relational field in which it appears.
Let me return briefly to sections 153e and 154a, which I find particularly interesting. Plato is talking about colors, and his view seems very Wittgensteinian — the idea that there is no fixed thing that is red, but only what one sees as red and has learned to call red. This is similar to the observation that the name "Hudson River" does not refer to any fixed thing; there is a flux, and the name is a label of convenience.
The account of color also seems remarkably modern. We would probably find ourselves in agreement, given our contemporary scientific ideas, with what Plato says at 154a: "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." We would now frame this in terms of visible electromagnetic radiation hitting the retina. This is very plausible when it comes to colors and other so-called secondary qualities — properties we tend to regard as subjective.
Audience: What's radical about this is that he's going to extend it to the so-called objective things as well. Even electromagnetic waves don't exist except insofar as they're perceived by someone. That feels very ahead of its time — very quantum, in fact. There is no position or velocity of a subatomic particle until it is measured.
Exactly. And in some ways it makes sense that Plato begins with things that seem elementary — numbers and colors — and starts from the very beginning. He wants to bring us back to everyday, seemingly familiar experiences and get us to rethink them. With that in mind, he goes on to elaborate.
There is some interesting rhetoric around this theory. Socrates presents it as a secret doctrine, a hidden truth. At 155E, for instance, he says: "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." This is already a little odd. If we are saying that knowledge is perception and what you see is what you get, then this secret doctrine takes us to a theory that reality is actually very different from the way it seems to be. One could argue that there is already an incoherence here.
Some later philosophers have taken up Socrates' suggestions in this passage. Whitehead, in the twentieth century, developed what he called process philosophy, focused on events rather than things or objects. On this view, there are no things — there are only motions intersecting and interacting. Picture it this way: there is an active motion and a passive motion reacting to it, but they do not exist independently of each other. They exist only in combination, in interaction, in a momentary event.
A later passage suggests that the passive element is the perceiver, while the active element is what impinges on the perceiver — though Socrates also notes that in different contexts the active will seem passive and the passive will seem active. What happens when you see white? An active motion intersects with you as the passive motion at that moment, and a whiteness comes to be in that momentary event. Then it passes: the whiteness is gone, and so, in a sense, are you, because you are also in flux and have become a different perceiver.
Audience: Is it important which is active and which is passive? Does it come up as an issue later?
I don't think they return to that distinction later. It does relate to our discussion a few minutes ago about whether perception requires attention, study, and activity. Good perception, one might argue, does require activity. But in this discussion, Socrates presents perception as a reaction rather than an action. There is an evolution as the dialogue goes on, with increasing emphasis on the idea that we need to do more and more to attain real knowledge.
Audience: Could a different situation with the same setup — a different person, a different choice — change that active/passive designation?
Perhaps. At 159C–D, Socrates 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." The tongue seems passive, the wine active. Yet at 157A, he had 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." The whole account creates a hazy theory of reality and perception that resists being nailed down to a clear picture — though perhaps that is part of the point. You cannot nail things down.
An interesting comparison might be drawn between the theory Socrates is spinning out here and Buddhist theories of reality. Buddhists use the phrase dependent co-origination to put their view of reality in a nutshell: nothing is independent, nothing has being in itself, no core selfhood — and everything comes into being together with other things. Socrates says at 157b, "We might even have to eliminate the very word being. 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." This is even more fundamental than the problem of using the word know when discussing knowledge: whenever we say something is a certain way, even without explicitly using a form of the verb to be, we are referring to how things are.
Audience: In his argument, he's saying there's a motion that's always going on and nothing is ever fixed. So when we use the word is, we tend to assume something fixed — it's a convenience, a marker. We say "this is a table" and rely on that, but it may not always be a table.
Exactly. The verb to be is usually deployed to bring things to a standstill. It also seems to assume a difference between the way things are and the way things seem — being versus seeming. If being connotes some sort of intrinsic existence in itself, that is another reason to drop it — at least within this argument, to which Socrates is not himself committed.
This is precisely the 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." Socrates responds: "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."
Audience: Do people look at Socrates as being very genuine in this stance, or is it a bit of hyperbole, a bit of joking?
The word usually used is irony — and there are different interpretations of what Socratic irony means exactly. Is it a form of deception, or a kind of polite, self-deprecating attitude? But there is definitely a distinctively Socratic irony, which is exactly this: "Oh, I don't know anything. I'm just getting the answers from you. Please enlighten me." That posture sits in interesting tension with the midwife metaphor, because midwives do know something — they possess a genuine skill.
Audience: Isn't there also the idea that midwives have had that experience themselves — of having given birth?
Socrates has certainly had plenty of experience. He has been around this block many times, and that is entirely consistent with the midwife metaphor. What he is saying is that he has experience: he has tried to have philosophical discussions, he has in fact produced theories of his own in the past — it is just that none of them turned out to be true, none of them held up to scrutiny. He is very experienced in the process of giving birth to ideas and now helping others do the same. What he does not have are the answers to the questions he is asking.
Those who were admirers of Socrates enjoyed this about him, but there were many detractors who found it supremely annoying. In order to appreciate the character of Socrates, we have to see at least why he would be annoying — why some people were genuinely furious. And yet the midwife comparison cuts both ways: a midwife accomplishes something by the end of the process, and so does Socrates — he helps Theaetetus give birth to an idea. When Socrates says "I don't know anything about any of these things," he is not answering the question, but to say he knows nothing is an exaggeration, and more than a little over the top. One might say he doth protest too much.
Perhaps the kind of knowledge Plato really cares about and wants us to develop is Socratic knowledge: knowing how to interact with people, knowing your own limits, and becoming familiar with argumentation and thinking — rather than the kind of knowledge that comes to completion and simply contemplates absolute truth, which is the caricature of Platonism.
The baby is almost born, but not quite. In order to bring it fully into the world, we have to see how the theory that knowledge is perception would deal with some rather obvious objections. These are raised at 157e: the question of dreams, insanity, other diseases, mishearing, misseeing, and other cases of misperception. It seems obvious that in these cases you have perceptions which are not knowledge, because they are simply wrong.
This is where the question of dreams comes up, which has probably occurred to most of us. Descartes is the philosopher most famous for raising it, in the First Meditation: how do I know that I am not dreaming right now — dreaming that I am sitting around a seminar table discussing Plato? Can you give any sure sign that would tell the difference between this experience and a dream? Descartes raises this question about two thousand years after Plato, but apparently it was already an old chestnut when Plato wrote.
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 asleep and awake — and in each period we feel confident that we are experiencing reality, unless we happen to be having a lucid dream. How can we tell which state is which? Socrates then goes further and offers an argument that no matter whether you are asleep, awake, or in any other state of mind, everything you perceive is in fact true. Let us look at that argument and consider whether it is a solid one. It runs from 158e through 160d.
The passage begins with some very abstract claims. Two entirely different things must have different powers — if they had the same powers, they would not be entirely different — and they are unlike each other. At 159A, Plato says, "As a thing comes to be like another thing, it is coming to be the same; as it is growing unlike, it is coming to be a different thing." These claims seem almost true by definition. He then applies them to the powers of the active motions that intersect with passive motions to create perceptions, and makes the argument more concrete.
Suppose Socrates gets sick. He is now unlike healthy Socrates, and strictly speaking he is a different person — a different perceiver. A naturally active factor then comes along: wine, which the Greeks were drinking constantly, and for good reason, since they could not trust the water. They would drink diluted wine mixed with honey and herbs. When Socrates was healthy, the wine tasted sweet; when he falls sick, it tastes bitter. Is that an illusion? One might say he is in an unnatural state and therefore not perceiving the true flavor of the wine. And when he recovers, he might say, "Now I see that was just an illusion — this wine is perfectly good and perfectly sweet."
Plato claims, however, that given the principles already agreed upon, one cannot say that the perception of bitterness was false. The logic is not made fully explicit, but it helps 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 is always a perception of that being which is peculiarly mine. That means I am unerring and never stumble in my thought about what is or what is coming to be. How, then, can I fail to be a knower of the things of which I am a perceiver?" A great deal hinges on this expression peculiarly mine. In what sense is my perception of bitterness when drinking wine totally private to me, and what does that have to do with truth — why would it make the perception true?
Audience: This all relates back to Theaetetus' point about perception. He is pushing the argument to the boundaries of where it can go, while also defending that point of view. There are a couple of pages of reasoning here that back it up. But he is also assuming a "me" somewhere in there, which he has not proved exists.
That is precisely what he wants to say at this point in defending relativism: there is no enduring self. We are rivers, in flux like a flowing stream. The point is that one cannot wake up the next day feeling well, drinking sweet wine, and declare, "I was wrong yesterday." That was not you. You have no right to look back and judge that poor perceiver from yesterday — he was in his own reality. Now you are in your own reality, and in the next moment someone else will occupy your place in a new reality. You can never second-guess yourself. At 160E, Socrates asks, "Shall we say we have here your firstborn child?"
We have now delivered the result of our midwifery. It took quite a bit of work to bring this baby into the world, but it has been delivered in the sense that we have connected it to a complex theory of how perception works and how reality works. We have understood that truth is limited to this particular instant and this particular perceiver — it is an atomic truth that cannot connect to other truths and achieve anything more stable or broad.
Now we perform the rite of running around the hearth, which was a ceremony conducted with a newborn baby to initiate it into the family. According to some sources, this was also the moment at which the father could say, "No, I don't want it — go expose it," effectively choosing infanticide. We may have to do the same with this philosophical baby if it does not hold up. In other words, we are going to test it by raising every objection we can against it.
The first objection is something of an ad hominem.
The argument is directed against Protagoras, who is dead at this point. So who is going to defend him? At 162A, we learn that Protagoras was Theodorus's friend, and Theodorus says: "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." Theodorus is being rather cowardly here, and a bit later Socrates will press him on this directly, saying, in effect: "Don't imagine it falls to me to defend your dead friend — strain every nerve to defend him yourself." This is an important element of the drama.
What, then, is the ad hominem argument against Protagoras, that famous, admired, and successful sophist? It is that, on his view, everyone becomes equally wise — because if all perceptions are true and we all have perceptions, then we are all equally knowledgeable. Socrates presses this further by bringing up the pig and the baboon: on Protagoras's account, he is no wiser than those animals. It is not only human beings who already possess knowledge, but other animals as well, and even the gods. This means that the god Apollo is equally as wise — or equally as ignorant — as Protagoras, as any ordinary person on the street, and as a worm. They all possess the same measure of truth. The question then becomes: who are you, Protagoras, to present yourself as wiser or more knowledgeable than anyone else? It seems like a powerful objection.
Since Theodorus is unwilling to step in for his dead friend, Socrates will now play the role of Protagoras himself. It gets a little complicated, but Socrates proceeds to impersonate him. At 162D he speaks 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." Protagoras, it should be noted, was resolutely agnostic on the question of the gods. The impersonation continues: "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."
The point Protagoras is making in his own defense is this: granted, it may seem shocking that he is no wiser than a cow or a baboon — but so what? That does not actually prove anything. Protagoras will offer a more substantial response a little further on in the dialogue.
Socrates tries some new objections. Consider the case of hearing people speak a foreign language that we have not yet learned. As it happens, someone in this room knows a few words of the Kazakh language, which I do not know. Would you mind saying those words without telling us what they mean?
Audience: қымбат — көмір
How does this apparently disprove Protagoras? We heard those words, but do we know what they mean? Perception, it seems, is not knowledge. But Theaetetus, in one of his more creative moments, has a good answer to that.
Audience: қымбат means "expensive" and көмір means "coal."
Expensive and coal — so this seems to have disproved the thesis that knowledge is perception right there. We heard the words but did not know what they meant, and so perceiving is not knowing. At this point, Theaetetus, in one of his prouder moments, comes up with a fairly strong response. He says that we both hear and know the rise and fall of the voice, but what schoolmasters and interpreters tell us about those sounds we neither perceive by seeing or hearing at the moment, nor do we know.
In other words, when we first heard those Kazakh words, we were not hearing an interpretation, and so we did not know the interpretation — but we did know the sounds. Then, when the meaning was given to us, we heard that and knew that. These are simply different stages of perception and, correspondingly, different stages of knowledge. Well done, Theaetetus. Socrates, however, has a few more tricks up his sleeve.
One cheap shot against the idea that knowledge is perception is simply to close your eyes. We don't forget things the moment we shut our eyes; if we knew something while they were open, we still know it with them closed. Therefore, perception cannot be the whole of knowledge.
Audience: If I were to light a candle in a room that no one else knew about, then leave and completely forget about it, and later stumble across that room to find the candle burned all the way down — how is that possible if no one was there to perceive it? To defend the theory, you would need something like an all-perceiving God, or Aristotle's conception of pure understanding.
That is an interesting example, because we assume there must be some continuity of cause and effect as the candle burns down, and this whole theory explodes every such continuity. Nothing is shared, nothing is ongoing; everything collapses into an atomic moment of truth that then disappears. Incidentally, the modern idealist Berkeley said, "To be is to be perceived" — a position rather close to Protagoras's — but Berkeley had God up his sleeve. He was a bishop, and his solution was reassuringly convenient: material things continue to exist when you are not looking because God is always looking. We will not drag in gods here, however, since Protagoras himself said we shouldn't.
Another cheap shot is to close one eye. This seems to wink at Protagoras and refute him in an instant, because we feel intuitively that you either know something or you don't — you cannot simultaneously know and not know the same thing. And yet it is not true that you either see something or you don't, because by closing one eye you can both see and not see at the same time. These are all clever little maneuvers, but they are cheap shots.
Speaking in the persona of Protagoras, Socrates goes on to say that you do not want to defeat a straw man. Try these objections by all means, but if your interlocutor cannot answer, you must help him to his feet. We are not engaged in mere diatribes here — to use the Greek word — as opposed to genuine dialogues. A diatribe, or controversy in this translation, is an attempt to win a debate by any means necessary, which is what we see in our so-called political debates, where the two sides rarely engage each other at all and simply try to cut each other down as quickly as possible. In a genuine dialogue, you must help the other person when they cannot answer; so we want to help Protagoras, give him his due, and let him make the strongest case he possibly can.
Socrates suggests 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 are having a new experience that is 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.
The most interesting response comes when Socrates returns to the ad hominem argument — that is, "Protagoras, according to you, everyone has knowledge, so why are you any better than anyone else? What makes you wiser?" How could somebody be wiser than others if everyone has perception and everyone has knowledge? At 166d, Protagoras 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."
Is this plausible? Are there people who make a living by improving appearances, improving perceptions, without claiming to make them truer? That is the point. It is not that the person Protagoras is talking to was wrong; it is simply that he or she was having bad perceptions, and Protagoras can shift and manipulate them to make them good. That is a skill worth a great deal.
Audience: It was striking to read, because it maps onto how I've always thought about arts criticism. I break it down into three phases: a perceptual phase where the information comes in, a structuring phase where you make sense of the different pieces of perception, and a third phase where you judge against some value system. Breaking it down that way makes it much easier for people to talk, because they can identify exactly where they diverged in the process.
Yes — and the term value is a modern concept that only became widely used in the nineteenth century, but we can readily apply it here. By what standards are you calling something good or bad, better or worse? Take the art critic. The art critic's job is to present the perception of a work of art as good or bad, pleasing or displeasing, creative or derivative, brilliant or ordinary — and often critics can change our perceptions. If I have been reading about how fantastic Matisse was and I go to see a Matisse painting, I am much more likely to be open to it.
Audience: I have that experience often — someone helps me understand my raw perceptions. And when I reach a very different conclusion from someone else, I can sometimes see that we had the same perceptions and organized them the same way, but it is that last step of differing value systems that separates our conclusions.
Protagoras would probably not want to follow you in saying "we saw the same thing," since for him every perception is private to the perceiver — but the broader point stands. He also argues that several other professions can be understood in these terms. Politicians, for instance: what do they do except make things seem just or seem good to a community? If they succeed, they are good politicians, justly popular and successful — especially in a democracy.
Audience: Spin doctors.
Exactly. Political advisers who know how to give the right spin — who can counsel someone on how to create pleasing and good appearances for the masses — possess a very valuable skill. Protagoras claims as much.
Medicine falls into the same category. If you think of medicine not as affecting some objective state of health in your body, but rather as affecting how you feel — which is how we usually judge our health anyway — then the placebo effect would fit right here. The placebo effect is very good medicine; there is nothing wrong with it. If a physician can make you feel healthy and feel good, that is a great physician.
Audience: I was 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, "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, someone who can improve my perceptions.
Exactly — and give her a lot of money. We don't go to therapists really expecting them to set us on the road to truth, do we? And good therapists don't say, "You've been wrong about everything; that's why you're depressed. The world is not hopeless at all." No. They accept your truth of the moment, and then through whatever means — words, techniques, medication — they help you arrive at a new truth, one that is far more pleasant and beneficial to you. That is why we pay them.
All of these are good examples of people who are considered more skillful and more knowledgeable precisely because they can improve our perceptions. That brings us to the end of our material for today.
Audience: 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 any details you noticed that we haven't discussed?
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, but not yet. I was surprised by that, because when Socrates takes this role on, he seems to play it very enthusiastically. Maybe he himself is one of these manipulators of perceptions, and he's embracing that role.
Yes, and I think he greatly enjoys this. He likes putting himself down — insulting himself, as it were — but doing so in a way that ultimately builds himself up. He enjoys inhabiting other characters and pushing their arguments as far as they can go. He's having fun.
As we've said, this whole discussion of the expert who makes money by changing perceptions for the better does invite the question of what better means. There was one passage in today's reading where Socrates throws in good and beautiful alongside strictly perceptual qualities like white or black, suggesting that these, too, are relative. This creates a higher-order problem: you claim to be making people's perceptions better, but you also maintain that better is relative — so who's to say that you are actually good at anything? And what does good mean at all? This kind of ethical and political relativism leads to very large questions, as we will see in our next reading.