On all these occasions, you see, the philosopher is the object of general derision, partly for what men take to be his superior manner, and partly for his constant ignorance and lack of resource in dealing with the obvious.
THEODORUS: What you say exactly describes what does happen, Socrates.
SOCRATES: But consider what happens, my friend, when he in his turn draws someone to a higher level, and induces him to abandon questions [c] of ‘My injustice towards you, or yours towards me’ for an examination of justice and injustice themselves—what they are, and how they differ from everything else and from each other; or again, when he gets him to leave such questions as ‘Whether a king who possesses much gold is happy?’22 for an inquiry into kingship, and into human happiness and misery in general—what these two things are, and what, for a human being, is the proper method by which the one can be obtained and the other avoided. [d] When it is an account of matters like all these that is demanded of our friend with the small, sharp, legal mind, the situation is reversed; his head swims as, suspended at such a height, he gazes down from his place among the clouds; disconcerted by the unusual experience, he knows not what to do next, and can only stammer when he speaks. And that causes great entertainment, not to Thracian servant-girls or any other uneducated persons—they do not see what is going on—but to all men who have not been brought up like slaves.
[e] These are the two types, Theodorus. There is the one who has been brought up in true freedom and leisure, the man you call a philosopher; a man to whom it is no disgrace to appear simple and good-for-nothing when he is confronted with menial tasks, when, for instance, he doesn’t know how to make a bed, or how to sweeten a sauce or a flattering speech. Then you have the other, the man who is keen and smart at doing all these jobs, but does not know how to strike up a song in his turn like a free man, or how to tune the strings of common speech to the fitting praise [176] of the life of gods and of the happy among men.
THEODORUS: Socrates, if your words convinced everyone as they do me, there would be more peace and less evil on earth.
SOCRATES: But it is not possible, Theodorus, that evil should be destroyed—for there must always be something opposed to the good; nor is it possible that it should have its seat in heaven. But it must inevitably haunt human life, and prowl about this earth. That is why a man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven; and escape means becoming [b] as like God as possible; and a man becomes like God when he becomes just and pious, with understanding. But it is not at all an easy matter, my good friend, to persuade men that it is not for the reasons commonly alleged that one should try to escape from wickedness and pursue virtue. It is not in order to avoid a bad reputation and obtain a good one that virtue should be practiced and not vice; that, it seems to me, is only what [c] men call ‘old wives’ talk’.
Let us try to put the truth in this way. In God there is no sort of wrong whatsoever; he is supremely just, and the thing most like him is the man who has become as just as it lies in human nature to be. And it is here that we see whether a man is truly able, or truly a weakling and a nonentity; for it is the realization of this that is genuine wisdom and goodness, while the failure to realize it is manifest folly and wickedness. Everything else that passes for ability and wisdom has a sort of commonness—in those who wield political power a poor cheap show, in the manual workers a matter of mechanical routine. If, therefore, one meets a man who practices [d] injustice and is blasphemous in his talk or in his life, the best thing for him by far is that one should never grant that there is any sort of ability about his unscrupulousness; such men are ready enough to glory in the reproach, and think that it means not that they are mere rubbish, cumbering the ground to no purpose, but that they have the kind of qualities that are necessary for survival in the community. We must therefore tell them the truth—that their very ignorance of their true state fixes them the more firmly therein. For they do not know what is the penalty of injustice, which is the last thing of which a man should be ignorant. It is not what they suppose—scourging and death—things which they may entirely evade in spite of their wrongdoing. It is a penalty from which there is no escape. [e]
THEODORUS: And what is that?
SOCRATES: My friend, there are two patterns set up in reality. One is divine and supremely happy; the other has nothing of God in it, and is the pattern of the deepest unhappiness. This truth the evildoer does not see; blinded by folly and utter lack of understanding, he fails to perceive [177] that the effect of his unjust practices is to make him grow more and more like the one, and less and less like the other. For this he pays the penalty of living the life that corresponds to the pattern he is coming to resemble. And if we tell him that, unless he is delivered from this ‘ability’ of his, when he dies the place that is pure of all evil will not receive him; that he will forever go on living in this world a life after his own likeness—a bad man tied to bad company: he will but think, ‘This is the way fools talk to a clever rascal like me.’
THEODORUS: Oh, yes, Socrates, sure enough.
[b] SOCRATES: I know it, my friend. But there is one accident to which the unjust man is liable. When it comes to giving and taking an account in a private discussion of the things he disparages; when he is willing to stand his ground like a man for long enough, instead of running away like a coward, then, my friend, an odd thing happens. In the end the things he says do not satisfy even himself; that famous eloquence of his somehow dries up, and he is left looking nothing more than a child.
[c] But we had better leave it there; all this is really a digression; and if we go on, a flood of new subjects will pour in and overwhelm our original argument. So, if you don’t mind, we will go back to what we were saying before.
THEODORUS: As a matter of fact, Socrates, I like listening to this kind of talk; it is easier for a man of my years to follow. Still, if you like, let us go back to the argument.
SOCRATES: Well, then, we were at somewhere about this point in the argument, weren’t we? We were speaking of the people who assert a being that is in motion, and who hold that for every individual things always are whatever they seem to him to be; and we said that they were prepared to stand upon their principle in almost every case—not least in questions of what is just and right. Here they are perfectly ready to maintain that [d] whatever any community decides to be just and right, and establishes as such, actually is what is just and right for that community and for as long as it remains so established. On the other hand, when it is a question of what things are good, we no longer find anyone so heroic that he will venture to contend that whatever a community thinks useful, and establishes, really is useful, so long as it is the established order—unless, of course, he means that it is called ‘useful’; but that would be making a game of our argument, wouldn’t it?
THEODORUS: It would indeed.
[e] SOCRATES: Let us suppose, then, that he is not talking about the name ‘useful’ but has in view the thing to which it is applied.
THEODORUS: Agreed.
SOCRATES: It is surely this that a government aims at when it legislates, whatever name it calls it. A community always makes such laws as are most useful to it—so far as the limits of its judgment and capacity permit.—Or do you think legislation may have some other object in view?
[178] THEODORUS: Oh no, not at all.
SOCRATES: And does a community always achieve this object? Or are there always a number of failures?
THEODORUS: It seems to me that there are failures.
SOCRATES: Now we might put this matter in a rather different way and be still more likely to get people generally to agree with our conclusions. I mean, one might put a question about the whole class of things to which ‘what is useful’ belongs. These things are concerned, I take it, with future time; thus when we legislate, we make laws that are going to be useful in the time to come. This kind of thing we may properly call ‘future’.
THEODORUS: Yes, certainly. [b]
SOCRAT
ES: Come then, let’s put a question to Protagoras (or to anyone who professes the same views): ‘Now, Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things” as you people say—of white and heavy and light and all that kind of thing without exception. He has the criterion of these things within himself; so when he thinks that they are as he experiences them, he thinks what is true and what really is for him.’ Isn’t that so?
THEODORUS: It is.
SOCRATES: ‘Then, Protagoras,’ we shall say, ‘what about things that are going to be in the future? Has a man the criterion of these within himself? [c] When he thinks certain things will be, do they actually happen, for him, as he thought they would? Take heat, for example. Suppose the ordinary man thinks he is going to take a fever, and that his temperature will go up to fever point; while another man, this time a doctor, thinks the opposite. Do we hold that the future will confirm either the one judgment or the other? Or are we to say that it will confirm both; that is, that for the doctor the man will not have a temperature or be suffering from fever, while for himself he will?’
THEODORUS: That would be absurd.
SOCRATES: But, when there is a question of the sweetness and dryness of the next vintage, I presume it would always be the grower’s judgment [d] that would carry authority, rather than that of a musician?
THEODORUS: Of course.
SOCRATES: Nor again, in any question of what will be in tune or out of tune, would the judgment of a teacher of gymnastic be superior to that of a musician—even about what is going to seem to be in tune to the gymnastic master himself?
THEODORUS: No, never.
SOCRATES: Or suppose a dinner is being prepared. Even the guest who is going to eat it, if he has no knowledge of cooking, will not be able to pronounce so authoritative a verdict as the professional cook on how nice it is going to be. I say ‘going to be’, because we had better not at this stage [e] press our point as regards what is now pleasant to any individual, or what has been in the past. Our question for the moment is, whether the individual himself is the best judge, for himself, of what is going to seem and be for him in the future. ‘Or,’ we will ask, ‘would not you, Protagoras, predict better than any layman about the persuasive effect that speeches in a law court will have upon any one of us?’
THEODORUS: And in fact, Socrates, this at any rate is a point on which Protagoras used to make strong claims to superiority over other people.
SOCRATES: Of course he did, my dear good fellow. No one would have [179] paid large fees for the privilege of talking with him if he had not been in the habit of persuading his pupils that he was a better judge than any fortune-teller—or anyone else—about what was going to be and seem to be in the future.23
THEODORUS: That’s true enough.
SOCRATES: Legislation also and ‘what is useful’ is concerned with the future; and it would be generally admitted to be inevitable that a city when it legislates often fails to achieve what is the most useful.
THEODORUS: Yes, surely.
SOCRATES: Then we shall be giving your master fair measure if we tell [b] him that he has now got to admit that one man is wiser than another, and that it is such a man who is ‘the measure’; but that I, the man with no special knowledge, have not by any means got to be a measure—a part which the recent speech in his defense was trying to force upon me, whether I liked it or not.
THEODORUS: Now that, Socrates, seems to me to be the chief point on which the theory is convicted of error—though it stands convicted also when it makes other men’s judgments carry authority and these turn out to involve thinking that Protagoras’ statements are completely untrue.
[c] SOCRATES: There is more than one point besides these, Theodorus, on which a conviction might be secured—at least so far as it is a matter of proving that not every man’s judgment is true. But so long as we keep within the limits of that immediate present experience of the individual which gives rise to perceptions and to perceptual judgments, it is more difficult to convict these latter of being untrue—but perhaps I’m talking nonsense. Perhaps it is not possible to convict them at all; perhaps those who profess that they are perfectly evident and are always knowledge may be saying what really is. And it may be that our Theaetetus was not [d] far from the mark with his proposition that knowledge and perception are the same thing. We shall have to come to closer grips with the theory, as the speech on behalf of Protagoras required us to do. We shall have to consider and test this moving Being, and find whether it rings true or sounds as if it had some flaw in it. There is no small fight going on about it, anyway—and no shortage of fighting men.
THEODORUS: No, indeed; but in Ionia it seems to be even growing, and assuming vast dimensions. On the side of this theory, the Heraclitean party is conducting a most vigorous campaign.
SOCRATES: The more reason, then, my dear Theodorus, why we should examine it by going back to its first principle,24 which is the way they [e] present it themselves.
THEODORUS: I quite agree. You know, Socrates, these Heraclitean doctrines (or, as you say, Homeric or still more ancient)—you can’t discuss them in person with any of the people at Ephesus who profess to be adepts, any more than you could with a maniac. They are just like the things they say in their books—always on the move. As for abiding by what is said, or sticking to a question, or quietly answering and asking questions in turn, [180] there is less than nothing of that in their capacity. That’s an exaggeration, no doubt. I mean there isn’t so much as a tiny bit of repose in these people. If you ask any one of them a question, he will pull out some little enigmatic phrase from his quiver and shoot it off at you; and if you try to make him give an account of what he has said, you will only get hit by another, full of strange turns of language. You will never reach any conclusion with any of them, ever; indeed they never reach any conclusion with each other, they are so very careful not to allow anything to be stable, either in an [b] argument or in their own souls. I suppose they think that if they did it would be something that stands still—this being what they are totally at war with, and what they are determined to banish from the universe, if they can.
SOCRATES: I dare say, Theodorus, you have seen these men only on the field of battle, and never been with them in times of peace—as you don’t belong to their set. I expect they keep such matters to be explained at leisure to their pupils whom they want to make like themselves.
THEODORUS: Pupils, my good man? There are no pupils and teachers among these people. They just spring up on their own, one here, one there, [c] wherever they happen to catch their inspiration; and no one of them will credit another with knowing anything. As I was just going to say, you will never get these men to give an account of themselves, willingly or unwillingly. What we must do is to take their doctrine out of their hands and consider it for ourselves, as we should a problem in geometry.
SOCRATES: What you say is very reasonable. This problem now, we have inherited it, have we not, from the ancients? They used poetical forms [d] which concealed from the majority of men their real meaning, namely, that Ocean and Tethys, the origin of all things, are actually flowing streams, and nothing stands still. In more modern times, the problem is presented to us by men who, being more accomplished in these matters, plainly demonstrate their meaning so that even shoemakers may hear and assimilate their wisdom, and give up the silly idea that some things in this world stand still while others move, learn that all things are in motion, and recognize the greatness of their instructors.
But I was almost forgetting, Theodorus, that there are other thinkers [e] who have announced the opposite view; who tell us that ‘Unmoved is the Universe’,25 and other similar statements which we hear from a Melissus26 or a Parmenides as against the whole party of Heracliteans. These philosophers insist that all things are One, and that this One stands still, itself within itself, having no place in which to move.
What are we to do with all these people, my friend? We have been gradually advancing till, without realizing it, we have got ourse
lves in [181] between the two parties; and if we don’t in some way manage to put up a fight and make our escape, we shall pay for it, like the people who play that game on the line in the wrestling schools, and get caught by both parties and pulled in opposite directions.
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