Chapter XXIX. Of the Pure Philosopher. From the Theaetetus

THE Hebrew Scripture says of the earnest philosopher: ‘It is good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth: he will sit alone, and keep silence, because he hath taken it upon him:’ [1] and of the prophets beloved by God, that they passed their lives in deserts, and mountains, and caves,[2]for the sake of attaining the height of philosophy, fixing their thought upon God alone; and now hear Plato, how he too makes this mode of life divine, giving the following description of one who aspires to the height of philosophy:

[P] [3] ‘We are to speak then, it seems, since this is your pleasure, of the leaders: for why should one talk about those who spend their time to bad purpose in philosophy? But these leaders, I suppose, in the first place from their youth up have never known the way to the Agora, nor where the court of justice is, or the council-chamber, or any other public assembly of the State: and laws and decrees, whether read or written, they neither see nor hear. The strivings of political clubs to gain offices, and meetings and banquets and revellings with flute-girls, are practices which do not occur to them even in dreams.

‘And what has happened well or ill in the city, or what evil has come to any one from his ancestors male or female, is less known to him than, as the proverb says, the number of gallons in the sea. And as to all these things he knows not even that he does not know them, for he does not abstain from them for the sake of gaining reputation; but in fact it is only his body that has its place and home in the city, but his mind esteeming all these things as little or nothing, disdains them and is “flying all abroad,” [4] as Pindar says, measuring both the things beneath the earth and on its surface, and studying the stars above the sky, and scrutinizing in all ways the whole nature of existing things each as a universal, but not condescending to anything close at hand.

‘How do you mean this, Socrates?

‘Just as, when Thales was star-gazing, Theodorus, and looking upward fell into a well, a clever and witty Thracian handmaid is said to have made a jest upon him, that he was eager to know about things in heaven, but took no notice of what was before his face and at his feet.

‘And the same jest holds good against all who pass their lives in philosophy. For in fact a man of this kind knows nothing of his nearest neighbour, not merely as to what he is doing, but hardly even knows whether he is a man or some other kind of animal. But what man is as man, and what is becoming to such a nature to do or to suffer different from all others, this he is investigating, and takes much trouble in searching it out. You understand, I suppose, Theodorus, do you not?

‘Yes, I do, and what you say is true.

‘Therefore, my friend, the man of this character both in his private intercourse with every one, and in public life, as I said at first, whenever he is compelled either in a law-court or anywhere else to talk about the things at his feet and before his eyes, becomes a laughing-stock not only to Thracian girls but also to the rest of the rabble, by falling into wells and every kind of trouble from want of experience: and his awkwardness is shocking and makes him seem no better than a fool.

‘For when scandal is going on he has nothing personal wherewith to reproach anybody, inasmuch as he knows no harm of any one from having paid no attention to it: so he appears ridiculous in his perplexity. And amidst the praises and loud boastings of others it is evident that he is laughing not in pretence but in reality, and so he is thought to be silly.

‘For when either a tyrant or a king is eulogized, he fancies that it is some kind of herdsman, as a swineherd, or a shepherd, or cowherd that he hears congratulated for drawing much milk; but he supposes that they have a more ill-tempered and more treacherous animal than those to tend and to milk.

‘He supposes also that a man in this position must become from want of leisure no less boorish and uneducated than the herdsmen, being shut in by his citywall as by a fold on the mountain. And when he hears how some one or other, possessing ten thousand plethra of land or yet more, possesses a wonderful amount, he thinks that what he hears of is very little, being accustomed to look at the earth as a whole.

‘And when men sing the praises of family, saying that some man of birth can show seven wealthy ancestors, he regards the commendation as that of very dull and short-sighted persons, who from want of education cannot look always to the whole, nor calculate that every man has had countless myriads of ancestors and forefathers, among whom any man whatever has had many times over thousands and thousands of rich and poor, and kings and slaves, barbarians and Greeks: but when men pride themselves upon a pedigree of five and twenty ancestors, or trace back to Hercules son of Amphitryon, their narrow-mindedness seems to him extraordinary, and he laughs at their being unable to calculate that the twenty-fifth upwards from Amphitryon, and the fiftieth from him, was such as fortune made him, and so to shake off the vanity of an unintelligent soul.

‘In all these matters then such a philosopher is derided by the multitude, on the one hand as seeming to be arrogant, and on the other as ignorant of what is before his feet, and at a loss on every occasion.

‘You state exactly what takes place, Socrates.

‘But when the philosopher himself, O my friend, draws a man upwards, and the other is willing to escape with him from the question, “In what do I wrong you, or, you me,” into the contemplation of abstract justice and injustice, and what is the essence of each of them, and in what they differ from other things or from each other; or from the question, whether a king possessing much wealth is happy, to the contemplation of abstract monarchy and human happiness and misery in general, of what nature “they are, and in what way it is befitting to human nature to acquire the one of them, and avoid the other,----when in turn that narrow-minded, shrewd and pettifogging creature is required to explain all these subjects, he gives the philosopher his revenge. Turning giddy where he hangs on high, and looking down, unaccustomed as he is, from the upper air, dismayed and perplexed and stammering a barbarous jargon, he makes himself a laughing-stock not to Thracian girls, nor to any other uneducated person, for they do not understand it, but to all who have been brought up otherwise than as slaves.

‘This then, O Theodorus, is the character of each. The one is the character of the man who has been really brought up in freedom and leisure, whom you call a philosopher, with whom we need not be indignant at his seeming to be a simpleton and a nobody, when he is thrown into any servile offices, as for instance if he does not understand how to tie up a bundle of bed-clothes, nor to sweeten a sauce or a flattering speech. But the other is the character of the man who is able to render all such services as these smartly and quickly, but does not understand how to throw his cloak over his right shoulder like a gentleman, nor in just harmony of language to hymn the praises of the true life of gods and of divinely favoured men.

‘If, Socrates, you could persuade all men, as you do me, of the truth of what you say, there would be more peace and fewer evils among men.

‘But it is not possible, O Theodorus, either that evils should disappear (for there must always be something antagonistic to good), or that they should be settled among the gods, but they necessarily haunt our mortal nature and this our place of abode.

‘Wherefore also we should try to escape from this world to the other as speedily as possible. And escape means assimilation to God as far as is possible, and assimilation means to become just and holy and wise withal. But in fact, my good friend, it is not at all an easy thing to persuade men that the reasons for which the multitude say that we ought to shun wickedness and pursue virtue are not the right reasons for practising the one and avoiding the other, I mean the wish not to seem to be bad, but to seem to be good.

‘For this, as it seems to me, is the proverbial old wives’ gossip: but the truth we may state as follows: God is never in any way unrighteous, but most perfectly righteous: and nothing is more like Him than any one of us who may likewise become most righteous. On this depends a man’s true ability, or his nothingness and cowardice.

‘For to know this is wisdom and genuine virtue, but not to know it is manifest ignorance and vice: and all other kinds of seeming cleverness and wisdom, when they display themselves in political power, are vulgar, and in arts mechanical. With the man then who does wrong, and says or does unholy things, it is far best not to admit that villany makes him a clever man.

‘For such men glory in their shame, and suppose that they are spoken of as no fools, nor mere cumberers of the ground, but men of the right sort to prosper in a State. We ought therefore to tell them the truth, that they are all the more what they think they are not, because they think they are not. For they are ignorant of the penalty of injustice, the last thing of which they ought to be ignorant. For it is not the penalty which they fancy, stripes and death, which wrong-doers sometimes escape altogether, but a penalty which it is not possible to escape.

‘What penalty then do you mean?

‘Though there are two examples set forth in the world of reality, the divinity being the example of the greatest happiness, and the godless of the greatest misery, they do not see that this is true, but from silliness and the extreme of folly they are not conscious of growing like to the one and unlike the other because of their evil deeds: and they pay the penalty for this by living the life fitted for the pattern to which they are growing like.

‘And if we tell them that unless they get rid of their cleverness, the place that is free from all evil will not receive them after death, but that they will always have a life here on earth corresponding to their own character by a continual association with evil, being evil themselves, they will listen to this, as men of the utmost cleverness and cunning listening to fools.

‘Quite so, Socrates.

‘I know it indeed, my friend. There is, however, just one circumstance in their case, whenever they are obliged to give and to receive an explanation in private about the studies which they condemn, and are willing to stand their ground manfully for a long time, and not run away like cowards, then at last, my good sir, they are strangely dissatisfied with themselves and their arguments, and their fine rhetoric somehow fades away, so that they seem to be no better than children.’