HERMES: But did you not say that you are open to persuasion by anyone? If dreams emanate from an unknown source, what difference should that make? If they are persuasive, are you not honour-bound as an Athenian to accept them?
SOCRATES: It seems that I am. But what if a dream were to emanate from a malevolent source?
HERMES: That makes no fundamental difference either. Suppose that the source purports to tell you a fact. Then, if you suspect that the source is malevolent, you will try to understand what evil it is trying to perpetrate by telling you the alleged fact. But then, depending on your explanation, you may well decide to believe it anyway –
SOCRATES: I see. For instance, if an enemy announces that he is planning to kill me, I may well believe him despite his malevolence.
HERMES: Yes. Or you may not. And if your closest friend purports to tell you a fact, you may likewise wonder whether he has been misled by a malevolent third party – or is simply mistaken for any of countless reasons. Thus situations can easily arise in which you disbelieve your closest friend and believe your worst enemy. What matters in all cases is the explanation you create, within your own mind, for the facts, and for the observations and advice in question.
But the case here is simpler. As I said, I reveal no facts. I’m only making arguments.
SOCRATES: I see. I have no need to trust the source if the argument itself is persuasive. And no way of using any source unless I also have a persuasive argument.
Wait a moment – I’ve just realized something. You ‘reveal no facts’. But the god Apollo does reveal facts, hundreds of them every day, through the Oracle. Aha, I understand now. You are not Apollo, but a different god.
HERMES: [Is silent.]
SOCRATES: You’re evidently a god of knowledge . . . but several gods have an interest in knowledge. Athena herself does – but I can tell that you are not she.
HERMES: No you can’t.
SOCRATES: Yes I can. I don’t mean from your appearance. I mean I can infer it from the detached way you speak of Athens. So – I think you are Hermes. God of knowledge, and of messages, and of information flow –
HERMES: A fine thought. But, by the way, what makes you think that Apollo reveals facts through the Oracle?
SOCRATES: Oh!
HERMES: We have agreed that by ‘reveal’ we mean telling the supplicant something that he doesn’t yet know . . .
SOCRATES: Are all its replies just jokes and tricks?
HERMES: [Is silent.]
SOCRATES: As you wish, fleet Hermes. Then let me try to understand your argument about knowledge. I asked where knowledge comes from, and you directed my attention to this very dream. You asked whether it would make any difference to how I regard the knowledge I am learning from you if it turns out not to have been supernaturally inspired after all. And I had to agree that it would not. So am I to conclude that . . . all knowledge originates from the same source as dreams? Which is within ourselves?
HERMES: Of course it does. Do you remember what Xenophanes wrote just after he said that objective knowledge is attainable by humans?
SOCRATES: Yes. The passage continues:
But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor will he know it; neither of the gods,
Nor yet of all things of which I speak.
And even if by chance he were to utter
The perfect truth, he would himself not know it –
So there he’s saying that, although objective knowledge is attainable, justified belief (‘certain truth’) is not.
HERMES: Yes, we’ve covered all that. But your answer is in the next line.
SOCRATES: ‘For all is but a woven web of guesses.’ Guesses!
HERMES: Yes. Conjectures.
SOCRATES: But wait! What about when knowledge does not come from guesswork – as when a god sends me a dream? What about when I simply hear ideas from other people? They may have guessed them, but I then obtain them merely by listening.
HERMES: You do not. In all those cases, you still have to guess in order to acquire the knowledge.
SOCRATES: I do?
HERMES: Of course. Have you yourself not often been misunderstood, even by people trying hard to understand you?
SOCRATES: Yes.
HERMES: Have you, in turn, not often misunderstood what someone means, even when he is trying to tell you as clearly as he can?
SOCRATES: Indeed I have. Not least during this conversation!
HERMES: Well, this is not an attribute of philosophical ideas only, but of all ideas. Remember when you all got lost on your way here from the ship? And why?
SOCRATES: It was because – as we realized with hindsight – we completely misunderstood the directions given to us by the captain.
HERMES: So, when you got the wrong idea of what he meant, despite having listened attentively to every word he said, where did that wrong idea come from? Not from him, presumably . . .
SOCRATES: I see. It must come from within ourselves. It must be a guess. Though, until this moment, it had never even remotely occurred to me that I had been guessing.
HERMES: So why would you expect that anything different happens when you do understand someone correctly?
SOCRATES: I see. When we hear something being said, we guess what it means, without realizing what we are doing. That is beginning to make sense to me.
Except – guesswork isn’t knowledge!
HERMES: Indeed, most guesses are not new knowledge. Although guesswork is the origin of all knowledge, it is also a source of error, and therefore what happens to an idea after it has been guessed is crucial.
SOCRATES: So – let me combine that insight with what I know of criticism. A guess might come from a dream, or it might just be a wild speculation or random combination of ideas, or anything. But then we do not just accept it blindly or because we imagine it is ‘authorized’, or because we want it to be true. Instead we criticize it and try to discover its flaws.
HERMES: Yes. That is what you should do, at any rate.
SOCRATES: Then we try to remedy those flaws by altering the idea, or dropping it in favour of others – and the alterations and other ideas are themselves guesses. And are themselves criticized. Only when we fail in these attempts either to reject or to improve an idea do we provisionally accept it.
HERMES: That can work. Unfortunately, people do not always do what can work.
SOCRATES: Thank you, Hermes. It is exciting to learn of this single process through which all knowledge originates, whether it is our knowledge of a sea captain’s directions to Delphi, or knowledge of right and wrong that we have carefully refined for years, or theorems of arithmetic or geometry – or epistemology revealed to us by a god –
HERMES: It all comes from within, from conjecture and criticism.
SOCRATES: Wait! It comes from within, even if revealed by a god?
HERMES: And is just as fallible as ever. Yes. Your argument covers that case just like any other.
SOCRATES: Marvellous! But now – what about objects that we just experience in the natural world. We reach out and touch an object, and hence experience it out there. Surely that is a different kind of knowledge, a kind which – fallible or not – really does come from without, at least in the sense that our own experience is out there, at the location of the object.*
HERMES: You loved the idea that all those other different kinds of knowledge originate in the same way, and are improved in the same way. Why is ‘direct’ sensory experience an exception? What if it just seems radically different?
SOCRATES: But surely you are now asking me to believe in a sort of all-encompassing conjuring trick, resembling the fanciful notion that the whole of life is really a dream. For it would mean that the sensation of touching an object does not happen where we experience it happening, namely in the hand that touches, but in the mind – which I believe is located somewhere in the brain. So all my sensations of touch are located inside my skull, where in reality nothing can touch w
hile I still live. And whenever I think I am seeing a vast, brilliantly illuminated landscape, all that I am really experiencing is likewise located entirely inside my skull, where in reality it is constantly dark!
HERMES: Is that so absurd? Where do you think all the sights and sounds of this dream are located?
SOCRATES: I accept that they are indeed in my mind. But that is my point: most dreams portray things that are simply not there in the external reality. To portray things that are there is surely impossible without some input that does not come from the mind but from those things themselves.
HERMES: Well reasoned, Socrates. But is that input needed in the source of your dream, or only in your ongoing criticism of it?
SOCRATES: You mean that we first guess what is there, and then – what? – we test our guesses against the input from our senses?
HERMES: Yes.
SOCRATES: I see. And then we hone our guesses, and then fashion the best ones into a sort of waking dream of reality.*
HERMES: Yes. A waking dream that corresponds to reality. But there is more. It is a dream of which you then gain control. You do that by controlling the corresponding aspects of the external reality.
SOCRATES: [Gasps.] It is a wonderfully unified theory, and consistent, as far as I can tell. But am I really to accept that I myself – the thinking being that I call ‘I’ – has no direct knowledge of the physical world at all, but can only receive arcane hints of it through flickers and shadows that happen to impinge on my eyes and other senses? And that what I experience as reality is never more than a waking dream, composed of conjectures originating from within myself?
HERMES: Do you have an alternative explanation?
SOCRATES: No! And the more I contemplate this one, the more delighted I become. (A sensation of which I should beware! Yet I am also persuaded.) Everyone knows that man is the paragon of animals. But if this epistemology you tell me is true, then we are infinitely more marvellous creatures than that. Here we sit, for ever imprisoned in the dark, almost-sealed cave of our skull, guessing. We weave stories of an outside world – worlds, actually: a physical world, a moral world, a world of abstract geometrical shapes, and so on – but we are not satisfied with merely weaving, nor with mere stories. We want true explanations. So we seek explanations that remain robust when we test them against those flickers and shadows, and against each other, and against criteria of logic and reasonableness and everything else we can think of. And when we can change them no more, we have understood some objective truth. And, as if that were not enough, what we understand we then control. It is like magic, only real. We are like gods!
HERMES: Well, sometimes you discover some objective truth, and exert some control as a result. But often, when you think you have achieved any of that, you haven’t.
SOCRATES: Yes, yes. But having discovered some truths, can we not make better guesses and further criticisms and tests, and so understand more and control more, as Xenophanes says?
HERMES: Yes.
SOCRATES: So we are like gods!
HERMES: Somewhat. And yes, to answer your next question, you can indeed become ever more like gods in ever more ways, if you choose to. (Though you will always remain fallible.)
SOCRATES: Why on earth would we not choose to? Oh, I see: Sparta and suchlike . . .
HERMES: Yes. But also because some may argue that fallible gods are not a good thing –
SOCRATES: All right. But, if we choose to, are you saying that there is no upper bound to how much we can eventually understand, and control, and achieve?
HERMES: Funny you should ask that. Generations from now, a book will be written which will provide a compelling –
[At that moment there is a knocking at the door. SOCRATES glances towards the sound, and then back to where HERMES had been, but the god has vanished.]
CHAEREPHON: [through the door] Sorry to wake you, old chap, but I hear that unless we vacate these rooms before the house slaves arrive to clean them, they’re liable to charge us for another day.
SOCRATES: [Emerges, and motions CHAEREPHON’S SLAVE into the room to pack SOCRATES’ modest travelling bag.] Chaerephon – our trip hasn’t been wasted after all! I met Hermes.
CHAEREPHON: What?
SOCRATES: Yes, the god. In a dream, or maybe in person. Or maybe I just dreamed I met him. But it doesn’t matter, because, as he pointed out, it makes no difference.
CHAEREPHON: [Confused.] What? Why not?
SOCRATES: Because I learned a whole new branch of philosophy – and more!
[A group of Socrates’ COMPANIONS is approaching. Sprinting eagerly ahead of the rest is the teenage poet Aristocles, whom his friends call PLATO (‘the Broad’) because of his wrestler’s build.]
PLATO: Socrates! Good morning! Thank you again a thousandfold for letting me come on this pilgrimage! [Launches straight into philosophy without waiting for a reply.] But I was thinking last night: does it really count as a revelation if the Oracle tells us only what we already know? We already knew that there’s no one wiser than you, so I thought: shouldn’t we go back and demand a free question? But then I thought –
CHAEREPHON: Aristocles, Socrates has –
PLATO: No, wait! Don’t tell me the answer. Let me tell you my best guess first. So I thought: yes, we already knew he’s the wisest. And that he’s modest. But we didn’t know quite how modest. So that’s what the god revealed to us! That Socrates is so modest that he’d contradict even a god saying he’s wise.
COMPANIONS: [Laugh.]
PLATO: And another thing: we knew of Socrates’ excellence, but now Apollo has revealed it to the whole world.
CHAEREPHON: [under his breath] Then I wish ‘the whole world’ had chipped in for the fee.
PLATO: What was that? Did I get it right?
[SOCRATES draws breath to answer, but PLATO again continues.]
Oh, and Socrates, may I call you ‘Master’?
SOCRATES: No.
PLATO: Yes, yes, of course. Sorry. It’s just that I’ve been hanging out with some Spartan kids at the gymnasium, and they talk like that all the time. ‘My master says this. My master says that. My master does not permit . . . ’ and so on and so on. It got so that I became a bit envious that I don’t have a master myself, so –
COMPANION NO. 1: Eww, Plato!
PLATO: Yeah, but –
CHAEREPHON: [catching up] Spartan kids? Aristocles, that is most improper. We are at war!
PLATO: Not here in Delphi we’re not. They’d never violate the sacred truce of the Oracle. They’re very devout, you know. Nice kids, despite their funny accents. We spoke a lot about wrestling – in between actual wrestling, that is. We were up all night, wrestling by candlelight. I’ve never done that before. They’re really good! Though they do sometimes cheat as well. [Smiles indulgently in recollection.] But, even so, I wasn’t going to let our city be humiliated. I won a few bouts for Athens, you’ll be glad to know. That was intense! They taught me some great moves. I can’t wait to try them out back home. For some reason none of them are much into poetry, though.
SOCRATES: They don’t honour poets in Sparta. Not living ones, anyway.
PLATO: Oh! Pity. I dashed off a poem in commemoration of our wrestling competition. Or rather, between the lines, it’s really about why Athens is better than Sparta. It’s a mathematical argument . . . Anyway, I’ve just sent a slave over to their compound to recite it to them, but if they don’t honour poets perhaps they won’t appreciate it. Oh well. It goes like this –
CHAEREPHON: Aristocles – last night Socrates was visited by the god Hermes!
PLATO: Wow! Why didn’t you call us, Socrates? That would have trumped even wrestling with Spartans!
SOCRATES: I couldn’t call anyone because it happened in a dream – or something. I’m not even sure that it was really the god. But, as he pointed out to me, it doesn’t matter.
PLATO: Why not? Oh, I guess that, once the experience is over, all that matters is what you learned from it. So
, what did he want? I bet he wanted to poach you away from the cult of Apollo. Don’t do it, Socrates! Apollo is much better. Not that there’s anything wrong with Hermes, but he has no Oracle. And he’s not as cool –
CHAEREPHON: [shocked] Show some respect, Aristocles – to Socrates and to the gods!
SOCRATES: He is showing respect, Chaerephon, in his own way.
PLATO: [mystified] Of course I respect them, Chaerephon. And you know I’d literally worship Socrates if he’d let me. Oh, and I respect you too, old man. Greatly. I beg you to forgive me if I have offended you: I know I get too enthusiastic sometimes. [Pauses briefly.] But, Socrates – what did you ask the god and what did he reply?
SOCRATES: It wasn’t quite like that. He came to reveal to me a new branch of philosophy: epistemology – knowledge about knowledge, which also has implications for morality and other fields. Much of it I already knew, or partially knew in various special cases. But he gave me a god’s-eye overview, which was breathtaking. Interestingly, he mainly did this by asking me questions, and inviting me to think about certain things. It seems an effective technique – I may try it sometime.
PLATO: Tell us everything, Socrates! Start with the most interesting thing he asked, and your reply.
SOCRATES: Well – one thing he asked me to do was to imagine a ‘Spartan Socrates’.
PLATO: A Spartan what? Oh! I see! That must be whom the Oracle meant. How sneaky Apollo is! It’s the Spartan Socrates who’s the wisest man in the world – though only by the breadth of a hair, I’ll bet! But, being Spartan, he’s probably the greatest warrior as well. Awesome! Of course I know you were a great warrior in your day too, Socrates. But still – a Spartan Socrates! So are we going to Sparta to see him right away? Please!
CHAEREPHON: Aristocles – the war!
SOCRATES: Sorry to disappoint you, Aristocles, but it was a purely intellectual exercise. There is no ‘Spartan Socrates’. In fact I know of no Spartan philosophers at all. In a way, that is what much of my conversation with Hermes was about.
PLATO: Please tell us more.
[While saying this, PLATO gestures to his own SLAVE, who, well trained, tosses him a wax-covered writing tablet from a stack that he is carrying. PLATO catches it in one hand and pulls out a stylus.]
The Beginning of Infinity Page 29