Thoughts on Theaetetus

 

              My mind is blown right now from reading Theaetetus. This is without a doubt the most difficult dialogue that I’ve tackled yet, and it’s up there with the most difficult readings I’ve ever done in my life. Even Plato himself (Socrates) said that epistemology is one of the hardest questions (148d). I’m not entirely certain I’ve understood it. I will have to come back to it once I’ve read the Enneads of Plotinus, Lloyd Gerson’s Platonic trilogy, and some commentaries. I guess one of the biggest debates within the Platonic corpus in general, and Theaetetus in particular is unitarian vs. revisionist views. I must say that after first reading Lloyd Gerson’s books, I am a committed unitarian unless I learn more that changes my mind, which I find unlikely. It seems revisionism is now the majority view, but never was until the 19^th and 20^th centuries due to the historical critical method invented by the German idealist protestants. I have no problem with the historical critical method as a contributor, but the problem is the reduction of everything to its method and rejection of all the earlier testimony.

              Right off the bat the dialogue catches your interest because Plato tells us why he wrote dialogues rather than stories. As soon as the young mathematician Theaetetus is introduced to Socrates, they kick off the discussion about what knowledge is. Theaetetus first gives a nonsensical, circular answer – that knowledge is math and science, but Socrates tell him this is like telling someone that potter’s clay is what clay is when they ask you what it is. You need to give a definition like clay is water plus dirt. After this initial bad start, Socrates claims to have no knowledge himself and he is only the midwife of knowledge just like his mother was a real midwife. He goes on at length explaining the analogy and it is all quite good, except that it gets a bit grotesque when he mentions the function of a midwife in regard to stillbirths and miscarriages and the analogy gets a bit thinly stretched. This was the ancient world, and as such, the cultural milieu was far different.

              With Theaetetus’ confidence up now that Socrates has assured him that he will aid him in “birthing truth” they embark on the discussion. They examine 3 explanations for knowledge. First up, is knowledge perception like Protagoras says? This covered similar ground to what I’d seen before, that the problem with Protagoras and relativists like Empedocles, Heraclitus, etc. in general is that they focus too much on the state of becoming just as Parmenides focused too much on the state of being. Plato boldly goes against what seems to be the predominant notions of his time. He ends up proving that this definition of knowledge is impossible for 2 reasons. First, if everything constantly changes and so is never stable, then as soon as you grasped the nature of some object, it will have already changed making it impossible for us to know anything. Secondly, knowledge seems to be related more to our reflection on sense data rather than the raw data itself and since perception is just the sum total of this raw data it would mean that perception is not knowledge. Along the way he also devastatingly critiques other logical consequences of Protagoras’ relativism like the fact that it implies we are all as wise as the gods and that relativist who teach philosophy must be charlatans wasting people’s time because how can you teach someone their own personal truth if everything they perceive is already automatically true? Wouldn’t this mean no one is ignorant of anything? I think a lot of the modern day relativists could use a readthrough of Theaetetus.

              Plato then tackles another long-lived chimera that comes from Parmenides, that there is no such thing as falsehood. It seems hard to believe in falsehood if we take knowledge to be infallible, which it must be if it is to be differentiated from mere belief. That being the case, it does seem hard to see how someone with knowledge can possibly make a mistake. Socrates comes up with various models, but they all turn out to have problems even though they lessen with each successive attempt. The aviary model with the distinction between having and possessing knowledge was almost perfect, except for problem of identifying how someone would fail to recognize something they know. Socrates then moves on to briefly debunk the account of knowledge as true belief. There’s no way, in principle, you could differentiate this with a lucky mistake.

              He then asks, “What if you add to true belief a logos (account)?” Seems clever enough, except it must inevitably always reduce into brute facts. When we break an account down even all the way to syllables and letters in the words eventually, we will get to some irreducible part, of which we have no knowledge. But when we join two or more irreducible members together of which we have absolutely no knowledge, suddenly knowledge pops into view. How is this logical and not handwavy magic? The dialogue ends in aporia – no definition of knowledge seems possible, although the feeling one gets upon reading this is not one of defeatist nihilism. I’m sure that Plato has subtly answered the question and it is hidden from view except from the most capable minds or he at least planted seeds that were answered elsewhere. I have a strong feeling it has something to do a theory of Forms and the fact that knowledge is objective, of real objects (not imaginary ones), and infallible and so must be related to the eternal and unchanging and not to the unreliable and contingent world.

              As in all the dialogues I’ve read so far there are little parts dispersed throughout that add immensely to the joy one gets from reading them. There are the literary references and illusions; one in particular really sparked my interest. Socrates drops this nugget of wisdom on Theaetetus when he gets distressed at the complexity of the questions before him: “The sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin, and he was a good genealogist who made Iris the daughter of Thaumas” (155d).  Of course, this genealogy is given by Hesiod in his Theogony. Thauma in Greek means wonder and Iris is goddess of rainbows and the messenger between the heavenly and earthly realms. So in this one sentence, Plato is telling us that wonder is what gives birth to the knowledge of things that transfer us from this realm to the eternal aeon above. How beautiful and clever is that? Not only was the man an intellectual genius, but literary as well. It’s like combing Shakespeare with von Neumann and Aquinas. He also puts in the famous amusing and enlightening digression on how philosophers are different from normal people. Why would the poor philosopher with no place to lay his head be jealous of the wealthy landowner when he contemplates the infinite and is free from anxiety and slavery to passions due to being connected to the divine?

It’s truly amazing to read pagan philosophy that anticipates that gospel. I can’t rate the dialogues since I do truly believe the maxim that when you attempt to judge a classic you only judge yourself and not the work in question. I greatly enjoyed this work and it provoked my mind more than anything I’ve ever read in my life. Hopefully one day I will truly understand it, but perhaps on should be more content with pondering the aporias and attempting to live the good life as Plato himself saw. After all, another point made in this dialogue is that the point of this earthly life is to become like God – a core teaching of the church – theosis.