widespread if not prevalent perception among fifth- and fourth-century intellectuals that, at least so far as justice is concerned, the local provisions that structure it have been artificially imposed for the sake of social expediency, and do not reflect any antecedent principles of right and wrong given in nature. So it is no surprise that justice turns out to be the main focusasSocratesdevelopshisobjectionsto thisbrand of moral relativism. The fair and foul are not further considered in the Digression.97 Piety, on the other hand, continues to play a subtle role. I shall return in due course to the extremely important lessons about piety. But in order to reach that stage we must follow the order of events which Socrates dictates, with a strong initial focus on the paradigmatic case of justice.
global interpretation predicts—is the metaphysics of the Cave, with its distinction between the sensible world inside the cave and the intelligible world outside it. Instead, the contrast between the chained and the released prisoners is represented by one between those who frequent the law courts, described as slaves, and philosophers, who alone count asfree. Socratesexplainsthisdifference between the judicial and the philosophical realmsasdue to rigidly enforced time-limits,98 which constrain legal speeches but not philosophical discourse. Its relevance to Socrates' own fate will be brought back into focus in the closing lines of the dialogue, where, eerily reminding us that the philosopher's free use of time is not altogether invulnerable to the slavish demands of the law courts, Socrates says he must now leave, postponing further philosophical discussion until the following day, in order to attend a hearing with the king Archon at which he will answer Meletus' indictment. (Readers familiar with the Euthyphro will be aware that, in the dramatic world created by Plato, on the way to thishearing Socrateswill meet the religiouszealot Euthyphro, and, before proceeding to the hearing, engage Euthyphro in a conversation devoted explicitly to the nature of piety. This may not be insignificant for our understanding of the Digression.)
So far, in the opening part of the Digression, the philosopher's lack of aptitude for the legal process has been presented in largely familiar terms, establishing a link with Plato's earlier attempts, from the Apology onwards, to account for Socrates' failure to secure an acquittal. But next we are going to see that old theme exploited for a new purpose—to vindicate the status of justice as an absolute value.
The philosopher's indifference to the world of the assembly, the law court, and the council is portrayed in almost comically extreme terms. Not only does such a philosopher not know the way to the marketplace and other places of political and legalistic commerce, or indeed know anything else about the political and social affairs of the city, he does not even know that he doesnot know these things(173c7–e1). The obviously exaggerated diagnosis serves to make the philosopher the polar opposite of those self-styled worldly experts whom Socrates in the Apology describes himself ashaving interrogated: on questionsof real ethical importance they had proved not
98 Cf. Apol. 37a6–b2, where Socrates attributes his expected condemnation to the short time allotted to capital trials at Athens and his consequent inability to persuade the jury.
only to be ignorant on the mattersin hand but, even worse, to be ignorant of their very ignorance.99The philosopher, it turns out, treats mundane matters in exactly the way that non-philosophers treat the true concerns of philosophy. By making the philosopher the mirror image of worldly ‘experts’, Socrateshasalready embarked on what by the end of the Digression will be his demarcation of two contrasting realms inhabited by them, the one realm inherently mortal, the other divine.
Should we be bothered by the exaggeration in this picture of the philosopher? As is often pointed out, Socrates himself certainly knew hisway to the marketplace, where he spent much of histime. He also appearsat the end of the dialogue to know how to get to the law courts, leaving the scene of the dialogue for the court of the king Archon without any hint that he does not know the way (although we might remind ourselves that the philosopher not only does not know hisway to the law courts, he doesnot even know that he doesnot know it).
In reply to this worry, it is vital to bear in mind that the philosopher described here is never fully identified with Socrates himself. Socrates is speaking, not of all philosophers, but of their ‘leaders’ (173c7–8), a device which, although formally employed only in order to exclude unworthy dabblers in philosophy from consideration, perhaps also signals a degree of idealization.100His own apparently unique god-given mission as midwife to his fellow citizens, we may take it, has kept his mind more within the city than would be the case for the idealized philosopher whom he is describing.
As the Digression proceeds, we will see Socrates' picture of ideal philosophical detachment further developed into what has often come over to readers as advocacy of a callous disregard for his fellow citizens. The philosopher's interest in broad definitional questions about justice and man, we will learn, makes him relatively indifferent to practical questions regarding actual justice between actual human beings. It is a mistake to try to explain away this prominent feature of the Digression. That a life of pure intellectual endeavour, or ‘contemplation’, asit came to be known, is superior to one devoted to civic virtue, more godlike, and for these reasons more worthy of the philosopher, was a doctrine which Plato would
99 Apol. 21b1–22e6. Thistheme findsan echo at 176d5–6: the unphilosophical are that much more the sort of people they think they are not for the very fact of not thinking it.
100 My thanksto Alice van Harten for thissuggestion.
enunciate at the climax of the Timaeus (89d2–90d7),101and which his pupil Aristotle would advocate in largely similar termsat the end of the Nicomachean Ethics.102 It isimportant that we should try to understand and contextualize this recurrent thesis of ancient ethics, rather than seek ways of reading the texts that will save our philosophical heroes from saying it in the first place.
Now is not the right moment to pursue so ambitious an agenda. But it is the right moment to observe how the Socratesof the Theaetetus isbeing presented by Plato asthat doctrine'sharbinger, with hisdistinction between a lower, civic morality and a higher one of godlike self-distancing. The message of the Digression is that Socrates did not himself fully lead this latter, godlike life, presumably because his divine mission as midwife tied him to his fellow citizens:103that is why, as we have seen, the idealized philosopher whom he portrays is not directly identifiable with Socrates himself. Nevertheless, it is implied, his life pointed towards this philosophical ideal, both, we may speculate, through his minimalist approach to the political and legal affairs of the city, and because his midwife role itself led him to focuson the broad definitional questions that transcend the particular and the local.
It may at the same time be significant that the fully depoliticized philosopher whose progress we shall be pursuing in the Digression ends up authentically just. There is no indication that this justice, and the state of understanding in which it consists, will thereafter be applied to the affairs of the city: on the contrary, he will have left the city behind in all but body (173e2–3, quoted below). But the fact that Socratesemphasizesjustice, rather than, for example, pure wisdom, as the divine attribute which the philosopher will attain looks like a hint that his philosophical ideal could yet, in the right circumstances, be harnessed to the good of the city. That is—bearing in mind the return to the Cave in the Republic—philosophy as Socrates understood it is such that it might be repoliticized, even if that isnot what he himself envisaged.
101 Isthisin contradiction with the Republic, where philosophers are expected to govern? No. That obligation arises only in the special context of an ideal city which has given them their philosophical education. Philosophers in ordinary cities like Athens are not required to do the same (Rep. 520a6–c1).
102 I explore the relation between the Timaeus and Nicomachean Ethics on thisin Sedley (1999).
103 Cf. Socrates' opening words, 143d1–6: he caresfor the philosophical advancement of Atheniansmore than that of Cyrenaeans.
How do these considerations fit with Socrates' barrenness? In Chapter 1 (pp. 33–4) I listed ten principles underlying midwifery, each of which hasto be mastered by Socratesin hismidwife role, and which therefore appear to constitute an exception to his self-declared intellectual barrenness. A concern with universal definitional truthswas, indeed, one of those items (no. 3). It is slightly less obvious how his political non-involvement should be similarly accommodated within the principles of midwifery, but an answer is to hand. In the Socratic dialogues, it is precisely Socrates' understanding of how expertise functions that convinces him that politics, as conventionally understood and conducted, isno expertise (e.g. Protagoras 319b1–d7; Gorgias, passim). And that may suffice to bring hischoice of political minimalism broadly under item 8, the expert midwife's understanding of the nature of expertise itself.
The ensuing passage deserves to be quoted in full (173e1–174b6):
SOCR. … His reason for this detachment from them [i.e. civic matters] is not reputation. The reality is that only his body isin the city and livesthere, while hismind, thinking all these thingssmall and of no worth, devaluesthem and flieseverywhere, in Pindar'swords, ‘in the depthsof the earth’, doing plane geometry, ‘and above the heaven’, doing astronomy, and investigating in every respect the entire nature of the whole of each of the things there are, and never settling for anything near at hand.
THEOD. What do you mean by thisSocrates?
SOCR. Like in the story of how Thales, when he was doing astronomy, and looking upwards, fell into a well, Theodorus. An elegantly witty Thracian slave-girl is said to have teased him for wanting to know the things in the heaven while not noticing what was right in front of him at his feet. The same jibe will do for everyone who spends their time on philosophy. For the reality is that such people do not notice their neighbour: not just what their neighbour isdoing, but practically whether he isa man or some other creature. What he doesask, and work hard to investigate, is what a man is, and what, as distinct from other kinds, it is appropriate for a nature of this kind to do or undergo.
Thisisa highly complex piece of writing, which respondswell to the two-level reading that I have advocated for the Theaetetus asa whole. What Socrates—the metaphysically unsophisticated Socrates portrayed in the dialogue—intends seems to be the following. The philosophical type always seeks the broadest possible view on things. To get his broad perspective, he roams everywhere in thought, like one who, in the otherwise unknown passage of Pindar quoted here,
flies ‘in the depthsof the earth and above the heaven’. Hisventures‘in the depthsof the earth’ are taken by Socratesto represent plane geometry, those above the heaven astronomy, as in both cases he makes explicit.104
That philosophers should be saddled with these mathematical concerns, and by the mathematical tyro Socrates of all people, is not as surprising as might at first appear, in that all along he has made it clear that he is using ‘philosophy’ in a sense broad enough to embrace the mathematical sciences: dramatically, this has the function of treating Socrates' addressee, the geometer Theodorus, in a courteously inclusive way.105 But in addition, for those of us tracking the Platonic subtext, it surely adumbrates the Republic's integration of the mathematical sciences into philosophical training.
Socrates is at the same time appropriating, and reinterpreting in his own favour, the old calumny from Aristophanes' Clouds of Socrates the mad scientist suspended in his basket and ‘inquiring into the thingsup above and all those in the depthsof the earth’, a calumny that wasnow coming back to haunt him at hisimminent trial (Apology 18b4–8, 19b3–c6).106The real, and favourable, meaning of hisguilt on thisscore, Socrateshere makesclear, isthat hiscrime has been to take the broadest possible perspective on everything, a perspective which in their own way the mathematical sciences share.
It is true that the distance travelled by the soaring soul is exaggerated by Pindar's words. Geometry, first of all, is literally ‘land-measuring’. The geometry referred to isfar likelier, the commentatorspoint out, to be concerned with the surface of the earth than with its depths. Correspondingly, astronomy is in its very nature the mathematics of what isin the heaven, not above it. If
104 The reference to plane geometry, as distinct from the geometry of solids, is made fairly explicit by ϰαὶ τὰ ἐπίπεδα γεωμετϱοῦσα, ‘and doing the geometry of planes’, 173e5–6, and translators' preference for more mundane renditions like ‘measuring the plains’ (Cornford), or ‘geometrizing the earth, measuring its surfaces’ (Levett, at least down to 2003) do not fully convey this. McDowell's ‘ “in the depthsof the earth” and on the surfaceswhen it doesgeometry’ is too loose, but in some ways closer to the spirit of the text.
105 See Campbell (1861, ad 172c). At 172c9–d1 ‘those who have been brought up in philosophy and similar activities ’ seem to be equated with 172c4–5 ‘those who have devoted a long period of activity to the philosophies’. That these include Theodorus' own activity, geometry, is confirmed by 143d3, ‘geometry or some other philosophy’.
106 For similar reappropriations of this same charge, cf. Crat. 401b7–9, Phdr. 269e4–270a8. Compare also Pol. 299b7–8.
the talk of ‘in the depthsof the earth’ hasany direct appropriatenessto the present passage, it ismerely to the accident that befell Thales: in concentrating on the heaven he did, in a fairly literal sense, end up in the earth's depths.
However, if I am right about the Theaetetus' two-level strategy, we should not rest content with interpreting Socrates' own meaning, but go on once again to ask what Platonic subtext may be present. Travelling to the heaven, if that is taken as it is by Socrates to symbolize astronomical study, is already a vital Platonic means to philosophical enlightenment. But it isPindar'sreference to a journey ‘above the heaven’ that endowsit with itsgreater significance.
In the imagery of the myth in Plato's Phaedrus, above the heaven are the Forms, accessible to the gods and to those souls whose charioteers, during their procession round the outer perimeter of the heaven, manage to steal a look into the realm beyond. If we acknowledge thisintertextual link with a dialogue of Plato'smaturity, likely to be close in date to the Theaetetus, we can recognize an authorial allusion to the Platonic two-world view. The philosopher's flight to the heaven, his act of intellectual self-distancing from civic concerns, is for Plato his transportation from the sensible to the intelligible world, where the truly non-relativized paradigm of justice, and the other Forms, are to be found.
The indirect allusion to Forms is confirmed by the end of the passage just quoted, where the philosopher's almost exclusive focus on the universal definitional question ‘What isa human being?’, while having no explicit metaphysical content, hasoften and understandably been assumed to refer to Forms.107 The message is once again implied that, although Socrates did not himself see the metaphysical implications of his ideas, he was the midwife who brought Platonic metaphysics to birth. His constant search for universals invited and inspired the discovery of the transcendent realm populated by Forms.108
And how about the geometry of planes, conducted by the philosophical mind when it swoops down into the depths of the earth?
107 Cornford (1935: 85 n. 1), ‘A clear allusion to the theory of Forms’. One could, more specifically, think of Ti. 69a6–90e3, the one Platonic context where a Form of Human Being might be thought to be under investigation (cf. 30c2–d1 for the clear implication that there is such a Form, in contrast to the youthful Socrates' hesitation on the point at Prm. 130c1–4; cf. pp. 107–8 below). I am grateful to Malcolm Schofield for discussion of this.
108 Cf. Aristotle, Met. M 9, 1086b 2–10.
Just as this mind's flight to and beyond the heaven can, to a Platonic ear, indicate Platonist metaphysics, so the geometry of planes should suggest Platonist physics, as described in the Timaeus. Although physics is a discipline that in itsvery nature cannot attain knowledge, dealing asit doeswith a realm which isinherently unstable, itshighest achievement109liesin the analysisof the four primary stuffs—earth, water, air, and fire—into particlesidentifiable with four regular solids, and of those solids into a set of absolutely primary triangles. Thus the geometry of planes is the basis of Platonic physics, and, whatever Socrates himself may intend, to a Platonic ear it is surely this discipline that the philosophical mind is practising when it swoops down from heaven to earth. In this way, the dual description ‘in the depthsof the earth…and above the heaven’ sums up the two main halves of the Platonic enterprise (Timaeus 29b3–c3):
the entirely stable mode of discourse (logos) focused on the intelligible world of Forms, to which astronomy is the privileged entry route (Timaeus 47a1–b3, 90a2–d7), and the inherently unstable kind of discourse, concerning the nature of the sensible world, which the Timaeus itself displays in its most sophisticated form.110
The next passage (174b9–175b7) returnsto the philosopher'sineptitude in the law courts, and relatesit, first, to his incapacity for vituperation of others, and, secondly, to his amused incredulity at the kind of thing that people are praised for. When a eulogy vaunts its subject's vast landholdings or long pedigree, these too seem paltry to the philosopher, implicitly because his own domain incorporates the whole of space and time. Here too, then, the breadth of the philosopher'sperspective ishisweaknessin worldly mattersbut hisstrength in intellectual ones.
There follows(175b8–d7) yet another hint that this Socratic breadth of perspective somehow maps onto a Platonic metaphysics:
But when he himself, my friend, drags somebody upwards, he secures someone's willingness to progress from the question ‘What wrong am I doing you, or you me?’ to an investigation of justice itself and likewise injustice—what each of them is, and how they differ from everything and from each
109 Cf. Ti. 53d4–7.
110 That even this highly intellectualized physics cannot deliver knowledge is, I shall argue later (Ch. 6 §3), a lesson of Socrates' argument at 206e6–208b12.
other—or when he progresses from the question ‘whether a king, possessor of much gold,111 ishappy’ to an investigation concerning kingship and human happiness and unhappiness in general—what sorts of thing they are, and how it isappropriate for human nature to obtain the one and escape the other—when on all these questions that small-minded and shrewd lawyer-type has to give an account, the tables are turned. Suspended high up, he gets dizzy, and looking down from a great height he isperplexed and puzzled by the unfamiliarity of the situation; and with his stammering he makes himself a laughing-stock, not to Thracian girls or to anyone else who is uneducated—for they don't notice him—but to all who have been brought up in the opposite of a slavish way.
Here the philosopher is envisaged forcing a non-philosopher to confront philosophical questions, with comic results.
The description of this forcing as his ‘dragging somebody upwards’ haslong been recognized asa pointed use of the language of the Cave, where enlightenment is a painful process, requiring the prisoner to be forcibly dragged up into the outside world. In the present case, however, the prisoner (or ‘slave’, in the preferred idiom of the Digression) is not philosophical material, trained as he has been in the ways of the law courts. Consequently, dragging him into the realm of universals serves merely to expose his confusion, leaving him a laughing-stock reminiscent of those ill-prepared interlocutors made to look silly by Socratic questioning. Such an allusion to the effects of his own elenchus may be all that Socrates intends, and there is no reason why even the reference to investigating ‘justice itself and likewise injustice’
should necessarily imply a Platonic metaphysics. (The same locution can be used in Socratic dialogues to sharpen the focusof an inquiry, without metaphysical overtones. Cf. Protagoras 330d8–e1, where ‘piety itself’ iscontrasted with other piousthings, almost exactly as‘justice itself and likewise injustice’ are contrasted with ‘What injustice am I doing to you, or you to me?’ in the present passage.)
Once again, however, there isan alternative, Platonic mode in which the linescan be read. Prompted by the Cave reminiscence, we may want to take the envisaged inquiry into the nature of kingship,
111 Following Madvig, I am reading the apparent quotation at 175c4–5 as εἰ βασιλεὺς εὐδαίμων ϰεϰτημένος ταῢ χϱύσιον. Here ταῢ (rather than the τ̕αὖ of the MSS) would be the neuter of the adjective ταῢς, recorded by Hesychius as meaning ‘much’. Thisissupported by the reading πολύ that in some MSS and ancient sources follows or replaces τ̕αὖ (see app. crit. of OCT).