SELF-REFLEXIVITY IN PLATO'S THEAETETUS: TOWARD A PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE LIFEWORLD.

WOOD, ROBERT E.

I

IN A PREVIOUS ARTICLE I argued that Plato's Line of Knowledge in the middle of his Republic taught a "pedagogy of complete reflection."(1) What I intend to show in this article is that the general lines of that "complete reflection" indicated in the Republic are brought down to the everyday in the Theaetetus where we are invited, among other things, to reflect upon what is involved in the fact that we are reading the dialogue in our lifeworld.

In the Republic the proportional construction of the visible line drawn according to instructions invited reflection upon its instantiating a geometrical theorem involving the equality of its central segments. Further reflection situated the theorem in the wider field of levels of knowing by placing it on the third level of the same line taken differently, that is, metaphorically. Reflection upon the sameness and difference between a theorem and its visible instantiation and, correspondingly, between intellection and sensation introduced us to an otherwise empty fourth level of reflection upon the framework presupposed not only in mathematics but in every situation of human wakefulness. The initial aim of such increasingly wider levels of reflection was to introduce us to the notion of the Good as object of the philosophic quest. The Good is; proclaimed as "the principle of the whole" which grounds philosophic contemplation of "all time and all [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]," grounds, that is, the consideration of the interplay of temporal individual (for example, a drawn line) and atemporal Form (the theorem represented by the line). The Good is thus [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("beyond [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]") because it is related to more than the level of Form, including in its domain the whole of the temporal as well. Complete reflection thus requires a return to the Cave of time and individuality where thought always takes place. The Line should thus be read as a segment of a circle which rises from fixation upon the concrete situation in which one finds oneself unreflectively in order to grasp reflectively the intelligible lines of the whole so that one can participate more reflectively and more comprehensively in the concrete world. That is why Plato is not only master of dialectic, but also master of the image.(2)

Theaetetus is the first of three works, followed in turn by the Sophist and the Statesman. The questions as to the nature of knowledge and of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] raised in the Theaetetus are linked to the question of the sameness and/or difference between the philosopher, the sophist, and the statesman. Since Plato expressly links them, what is said in each dialogue has to be seen in relation to what is going on in all of them. Our focus will be upon some of the central features of the Theaetetus, but we will also employ significant insights from the other two dialogues.

After the preface to the Theaetetus, the body of the dialogue is read to the original interlocutors by a slaveboy recounting the event, many years previous, of the introduction of Socrates to Theaetetus by Theodorus the geometer. Socrates proceeded to examine three theses advanced by Theaetetus as to the nature of knowledge: that it is [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or immediate sensation,(3) that it is [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or true opinion,(4) and that it is true opinion accompanied by a [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].(5) An examination of the meaning of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in turn involves three options: that it is clarification through "the stream that comes from the mouth,"(6) that it is reducible to elements, and that it is the providing of a difference. Each successive thesis presupposes the former as a reflective remark upon it. Thus the thesis itself that knowledge is sensation is presented sensorily in speech; it is an example of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], which turns out to be false; and both theses are worked out by "giving an account." The account consists in sorting out in speech the elements that are involved in displaying samenesses and differences at various levels. In the middle of the dialogue taken as a whole there appears a "digression" comparing the philosopher with the lawyer in court in which, as in the Republic, the philosopher is presented as having his eyes always fixed on the whole and the whole nature of each within the whole.(7) The preface and introduction give us a concrete instantiation of what our being situated in the whole involves. It involves the philosopher "returning to the cave."

In the examination of the proffered answers to the questions "What is knowledge?" and "What is [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]?" one should attend, not simply to the refutation of the answers and thus the seemingly aporetic conclusions arrived at, but to what Socrates appeals as already known about the concrete world we humans inhabit that makes the answers inadequate. It is what we already functionally know about the lifeworld that we can make explicit through applying the observations, made in the arguments, to the preface and introduction, which might otherwise be glossed over by the philosophic reader as mere window dressing. In the process we will run with the hints provided in the text which, as proleptic devices, invite just such an extension. As Burnyeat admonishes us: "This is a dialogue, not a treatise. As such it invites us not merely to witness but to participate ourselves in the philosophical activity of the speakers."(8)

We will focus first of all on the framing of the dialogue in the preface. We will go on to consider language, reading, and the flux; then, through the initial encounter with Theaetetus, the weaving of the web of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and geometry. Finally we will consider philosophy and the ultimate framework in the question of being.

II

[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]? ("Just now did you arrive from the country, Terpsion, or did you come some time ago?") asks Euclides.(9) The dialogue begins with a reference to "just now," to what one might call the immediate present, situated in Megara. Here the two interlocutors ran their philosophic school which was noted for its eristic procedure and carrying on in the lines of both Socrates and Parmenides. More precisely, the beginning is situated in the agora, the civic space cleared in the city for politics, for exchange, but also for the leisure (the [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] alluded to several times in the dialogue)(10) required for the pursuit of the past and for philosophic inquiry. It is the place to have such a leisurely chat as Terpsion and Euclides are now engaged in. Yet as some of the later discussion will observe, and we will ourselves later examine, the meeting is more basically situated in the temporal flux of human lives intersecting one another as manifest in perception and language.

Within the immediate present, the dialogue also simultaneously refers to a not too remote past as Terpsion replies:[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("Quite some time ago; and I was looking for you in the agora and wondering that I did not find you"). He immediately refers back to a past anticipation of the meeting that is occurring. Here future orientation prevails as anticipation is linked with wonder at the absence of what was expected. Socrates will later link [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] to the practice of philosophy which lays hold of a person and sets him or her on the project of examining the object of wonder.(11) The dialogue will end with a future anticipation linked to a promise:[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("But in the morning, Theodorus, let us meeting again here").(12) In order to be able to promise to return and thus to anticipate that the future will be sufficiently like the past and present to allow the anticipation involved, recurrent regularities must be retained from the past.(13) Reference to the recent past in the beginning and the short-term future at the end thus furnishes the first frame of the dialogue.

Euclides reports that he had just seen Theaetetus, barely alive, being carried from the battle at Corinth, suffering from wounds and dysentery. We are reminded of both the political and the natural context of the dialogue, the intrusion of the other, the political enemy from without and nature from within, both introducing destabilizing elements which set the political and biological systems in negative flux. A complete reflection must take into consideration the larger political and the even larger natural context within which its own activity is conducted. The political is what clears the space for the leisure found in the agora by defending the city, sustaining her institutions, freeing the interlocutors from the work involved in providing the biological necessities. Hence a part of the trilogy is the Statesman, which focuses upon the political, but as set within a myth of the cosmos and as exhibiting a reflection upon philosophic methodology.(14)

En route to die at Athens, Theaetetus's entourage had stopped at Megara. The one whose name appears as the title of the dialogue is presented initially at the end of Ids life, the ultimate future of the individual, the place from which one can survey his life as a whole. The end section of the dialogue presents Socrates as going to the court of the king (another reminder of the larger political context) for a preliminary hearing on the charges brought against him by Miletus--charges that would ultimately lead to his own death. So Socrates too appears near his end. This framing extends beyond the more immediate situation of the Now between more proximate moments of past and future and sets the dialogue within a consideration of the whole temporal span of a human being--indeed of two human beings--in order to discover their wholeness.

A dialogue which deals with the question of knowledge is situated within a context of a reflection which is not an idle and curious academic exercise but focuses upon the whole of a human life as projected toward its term. It is knowing this whole which is really knowing a person. As Aristotle will say, you know a man when you know his whole life.(15) This illustrates Socrates' claim that the eyes of the philosopher are fixed on the whole and upon the whole nature of each within the whole. That whole includes the wholeness of oneself and of those with whom one has dealings. Philosophy, the Phaedo claims, is the practice of dying.(16) Human life itself, concretized in reflection upon one's own life as a whole and the lives of those with whom one is involved, is the explicit context of the philosopher properly understood, although the issues it raises may become the province of the detached, segmented and pedantic inquiry and/or game of argument construction and ideological defense that later comes to pass as philosophy in academic circles.

In looking back over the life of Theaetetus, Terpsion and Euclides praise his nobility. Euclides remarks that in this Socrates was prophetic, for he had met and examined the dying man years ago and predicted he would live a noble life.(17) Terpsion asks for a fuller account of the meeting, and thus they go in search of the deeper past. That past is ahead of them as their project. However, Euclides did not have to rely simply upon his memory: he has a written account of the meeting which Socrates helped him to write.(18) In writing it down Euclides secured for the distant future the presence of the past. The two interlocutors proceed to listen to a slave boy read the account to them. As several later references to reading suggest, we are meant to reflect first of all upon the fact that the body of the dialogue is being read to Euclides and Terpsion and what Ibis entails as far as knowledge of the lifeworld is concerned. It may then occur to us to reflect upon what is involved in the fact that we ourselves are reading the same account many centuries later.

III

In the examination of the first of the three theses on the nature of knowledge, namely that knowledge is sensation ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), and in reference to a statement by Protagoras that "man is the measure of all things," Theaetetus remarks that he had read the same thing many times.(19) Socrates links the sensation thesis with Protagoras's statement on the one hand and with Heraclitus's doctrine of universal flux on the other: sensation is presented as a flow relative to each individual who experiences sensations.(20)

Now the result of the Heraclitean statement is that there can be no "same," for "one can never step into the same river twice because ever new waters are flowing."(21) [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] itself is a flux, the flow of distinctively subjective ways of being affected by the impact of influences from an ever changing environment combined with the upsurge of desire, imagination, and past associations. It is the immediate level of the stream of consciousness with constantly changing aspects of many different things appearing within an awareness that is flowing from image to image and from desire to desire. Theaetetus's testimony to having read the same many times refers to the capacity of writing to arrest the flux and involves Protagoras's and Heraclitus's transcendence of their own privacies through writing and through the recognition that writing and reading presuppose. Socrates even claims Theaetetus's thesis that knowledge is sensation and Protagoras's "man the measure" are "the same."(22)

To press the flux theme further: sensory flux rests upon organic flux. Theaetetus's condition at the beginning of the dialogue, suffering from dysentery, is a matter of suffering from a flux which disrupts the regularity with which the flow of biological processes normally occurs and leads to the total dissolution of organic regularity in death when the elemental flow presupposed and controlled by biological process takes over. The framework for awareness itself is set by the temporal limits of biological process.

All this takes place within the most general framework that goes beyond biology to encompass all things. This whole is characterized and thus fixed in mind as flux and the mind thereby exhibits its concern with the whole of time and not just the limited time of its own biological limits and the even more limited time of its proximate and more remote projects. This general thesis is not simply proclaimed but is also backed up by observation through showing motion in different types of things. The motion of the sun and the heavens is linked to the preservation of things, presumably through the generation of the seasons. In living things motion brings things into fuller possession of themselves. This is also true of the soul which develops through exercise.(23) The mental activities of recollection, conversation, fixation in writing, and reading preserve what we can of the past. The current activity of dialectical examination of the thesis that knowledge is sensation gives us a better reflective grip on experience as a whole. It is at least curious that the types of motion appealed to are not examples of sheer flux bat first of all are types ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) and secondly, types which preserve and enhance "the same" through the exhibition of specific types of difference. Socrates will later distinguish two general [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of motion: locomotion and [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].(24) Again, more generally, if all is flux, all is to that extent the same, even though everything is constantly becoming different.

Socrates links the thesis that all knowledge is nothing but sense perception to an interpretation of Protagoras's "man the measure" to mean that truth is what appears to an individual at a given time.(25) The latter is based on the observation that the same wind may appear cool to one who is hot and warm to one who is cold. Socrates observes that this does not make cool itself warm or vice versa. In fact, in order to make the observation that is intended to prove the complete relativity of sense perception, one has to recognize the various [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of wind, hot, cold, warm, cool, appearance, and perceive in their samenesses, differences and relations. Language itself implies--and in developed stages of literate culture contains explicitly--a lexical inventory of fundamental eidetic distinctions. Socrates continually calls attention to the distinction between the sensorily perceived and the [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] present therein. The perception of this page as white involves not only a sensory awareness of this here and now present instance of white, but also a simultaneous awareness of the whiteness of which this is an instance. A thing, Socrates says, becomes, not whiteness, but white.(26) He makes parallel distinctions between bitterness and bitter, perception and perceptive,(27) vision and seeing,(28) heat and hot.(29) All of them involve distinguishing [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and instance where sameness is exhibited in the difference of concrete instances.

Not all perceiving is on the same footing, for there are normal and abnormal states of mind. Normal functioning within a linguistic community is seen by its opposite: in diseased states certain perceptual capacities are diminished; in states of insanity, coherence of recognition and functioning are impaired; in dreaming, at least surface incoherence, recognizable as such upon waking, reigns supreme.(30) We know we are not dreaming or hallucinating when we can put our experience coherently together and verify that coherence by resting upon linguistic communication with others.

Socrates calls attention to several basic distinctions operative on the side of the normally functioning subject. First, there is a necessary distinction between the objects of the sensory faculties and, correspondingly, between the faculties themselves. No normally functioning individual mistakes a color for a sound and hence seeing for hearing.(31) As Socrates says, seeing and hearing are fixed in what they are. Secondly, there is the distinction between organ and perception such that the perception occurs through the organ and not by it.(32) What we see are features of things manifest outside our own organism, so that sensation is not simply a self-enclosed experience but is about something.(33) Thirdly, there is a single functioning center of perception linking together the modes of manifestness occurring through the different senses. That linkage has a necessary relation to time insofar as through a given sense the past of experience, more immediate or more remote, has to be retained by the synthesizing center of awareness as it anticipates features of a given object in relation to which we know how to operate. Yet the mode of retention may be relatively poor (in Socrates' homey analogy, the wax of memory which retains the impression of past experience might be craggy)(34) or we may not be able to dredge up the right association immediately (the birds of past experience are in the aviary but not readily apprehensible, as Socrates again puts it)(35) and may make the wrong association (we grab the wrong bird). For recognition to be possible, there has to be, in spite of the continuing differences, an enduring sameness through time of the field of awareness in the perceiver which corresponds to a relative sameness through time in the perceived.

Applied to the situation of knowing Theaetetus, it is the same Theaetetus who is known to lay dying on the stretcher, whom Socrates met thirty years previous, and whom Theodorus had come to know so well. The same Euclides as was previously acquainted with Terpsion now recognizes the same Terpsion and vice versa in and through the flux of their experiences. One thus has to admit a distinction between properties and things, with things enduring through variations in their properties. That is knowable because the subject of awareness remains in some sense the same through the variations in its states over time.

Things do not themselves endure forever. They too are subjected to ultimate flux. As the utterly sober context of the dialogue makes clear, we have to die. However, though properties and individuals come and go, the kinds of properties and the kinds of individuals as well as the nature of flux itself all endure: the [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] remain as permanent possibilities for exhibition in the flux of things and of our awareness thereof. Just as it is not the eyes which see but the power of vision by which we see through the eyes, so also it is not by means of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] that we perceive the [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] but through it.(36) Such awareness involves another dimension of the self other than that involved in sensory recognition: a mode of being in time correlative to the [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. If the [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] are recognizable as recurrent throughout space and time, wherever and whenever they appear instantiated, space and time as a whole are part of the purview of the self now viewed as mind ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). Mind is the capacity to grasp the repeatability of the [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] wherever and whenever they might appear.(37)

In the examination of the third thesis about knowledge, namely that it is true opinion accompanied by a [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], in the first notion of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] advanced Socrates claimed that it was clarification through the stream of words which flowed from the mouth. In the beginning Euclides and Terpsion talk to one another about their specific temporal situation. They stand beyond their respective privacies, linked to each other because linked to a linguistic community. Speech itself is a temporal flow. Sentences are generated in such a way that the sound of the beginning of each has passed away before the sound of its end is generated. However, the sentence persists in memory, until it is forgotten. Of course, much depends upon the quality of one's memory. It is memory--good or poor--which allows one to return to the same singular historical event long after it has flowed down the stream of time. Writing rescues memory from its tendency to weaken over time. So Euclides wrote down Socrates' account of the event of coming to know Theaetetus. Memory also implies that the past event, long since flown away, still retains the sameness of "objective immortality"(38) to which our memory refers and which we attempt to revisit through deliberately employed techniques of recovery.

In the Phaedrus writing is presented as [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], an exterior supplement to the native, interior memory which is inclined over time to forget what was said. The Romans noted: "Verba fluunt, scripta manent" ("Spoken words flow, written words remain")--a warning by the pragmatists to be careful what you commit to writing, but also a significant observation about the relation of speech to writing. At the same time, Plato presents writing ambiguously as a [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] for natural forgetfulness, that is, as a drug which can, on the one hand, aid failing memory by arresting the flux, but which could also, on the other hand, be a poison leading to a decline of the kind of Herculean memory feats exhibited by the rhapsodes and likewise to the emergence of the dead letter which, unlike the living voice, cannot talk back to clarify what it says. A Platonic dialogue, however, is an ingenious pedagogical device that actually does talk back when we apply its observations to itself.(39)

Writing also changes the scope of the audience. Speech is restricted to the immediate situation of the interlocutors--or eaves-droppers: to the space within which the voices can be heard and the time within which the conversation occurs. Writing, however, opens up to all those capable of reading the language, wherever they might be spatially located and whenever they might read the text for the duration of the time when the material medium supports the text. The same words can be read again and again. Yet the flux will inevitably overtake the material medium. However, these same words can be written again and again by copyists and later reproduced by mechanical means. Indeed, today the living voice itself can be transcribed electronically--thus significantly disambiguating by tonal dynamics what, as written, could remain ambiguous.(40)

In discussing the reduction of knowledge to sensation, Socrates notes that one can hear a foreign language and not know what is being said.(41) This calls attention to the enduring presence but also the insufficiency of the most basic feature of experience: the flow of sensations, here the flow of sounds in speech.(42) The discussion sets this off from just what is going on in the conversation conducted in Greek among those who know the Greek language. It also calls our attention to the fact that right now we are reading something of the same thing translated into English, that is, into a different set of sound and visual patterns. These observations also call attention to the requirement of an antecedent community into which, on the one hand, we find ourselves and, on the other hand, the ancient Greeks about whom we read found themselves inserted. We find ourselves to begin with, as do human beings generally, beyond the reputed privacy of our own sensations as sharing in our respective linguistic traditions and the current communities which employ the same language.

Actually, we have several levels operative here. There is first of all the level of sound and hearing as carrier of language. Then there is the level of the spoken sentence configuring the sound which can be repeated again and again in an indefinite number of different instances by the same or different speakers. The same sentence can also be written and read an indefinite number of times by the same or by different writers or readers. The same sentence can thus be embedded in either sound or in visual patterns. The slave boy sees the words on the page and translates them into the sounds heard by Euclides and Terpsion. The same thing could also be produced in Braille and thus be made available through tactual sensations. The meaning of the sentence can be translated into an indefinite number of different languages as is Plato's Greek now rendered in English, thus revealing a distinction between the ethnically specific sentence and the universally available meaning. Finally there is the truth of the proposition accessible to one who has the appropriate evidence.(43)

There is a further aspect: the Sophist, which immediately follows the Theaetetus in the trilogy Theaetetus-Sophist-Statesman, recalls five most basic [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], introduced in the Theaetetus, that operate throughout the whole of human experience: being, sameness, difference, motion, and rest.(44) Their interweaving establishes the basis for the fabric of human experience. We see them instantiated from the very beginning and have called attention to them several times. We are reading some of the same things--hopefully we will do so at several different times--in English as Plato wrote in Greek. We are going through the motion of reading. Motion, Socrates said, is of two basic sorts: locomotion and alteration. It admits of many subtypes, among which some are more superficial and others more profound.(45) At the level of locomotion, our hands turn the pages as our eyes move over the text. We undergo progressively deeper levels of alteration as we experience the flow of the sensations coming through our eyes and the interrelations of meaning carried by the patterns we read. This is inserted into the flux of our lives, in which nonetheless we remain the same persons from beginning to end of the reading, and indeed throughout the whole of our lives, even though we become significantly different as we grow up, as we learn to read, and as we learn to read Plato. What we are reading about is a conversation in motion in the past, appearing now in a text that is at rest (though at a deeper level it too is in motion, since it will inevitably decay). The conversation refers to events which have flown by but are now at rest, fixed permanently in the past and fixed as far as human conditions allow in the text. Plato himself has long ago flown by, having passed from birth to death, the most profound level of alteration. Yet he also, through the motion of his hand, fixed the flow of his ideas in writing. This in mm, mediated by a tradition of preservers and copyists, overcame the underlying flux of the materials upon which he wrote to make available the text we are now reading and upon which we are now commenting. Encompassing all of this is the fact that it all is; it partakes in being.

Return again to the very beginning of the dialogue. In the latter discussion of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Socrates examines the notion that [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as account consists in reduction to elements. He uses as an example the S and the O as letters which spell the first syllable of his name. What we see on the page are words composed of elements.(46) Socrates also uses the example of a wagon which is composed of wheels, spokes, hubs, bed, tongue, and the like. Some are parts which are also wholes: for example, the wheels, the bed, and the tongue. The wheels, in turn, are composed of rim, spokes, and hub.(47) Indeed, all such parts are further composed of the elements that comprise the wood and iron out of which the parts have been fashioned. So we can break down language into sentences, words, syllables, and finally letters--or, in the case of speech, into phonemes and then into vowels and consonants based upon the sound possibilities of the human oral cavity.(48) Just as the account of the wagon given in the terms discussed only provides necessary conditions, while the essence ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) is given in terms of the function (a wagon is a wheeled vehicle for conveying loads), so also the account of language, spoken or written, must proceed beyond the necessary conditions of elements and their combinations to their significance. That significance is to reveal meanings and things which bear them to a set of interlocutors inhabiting a common linguistic community by way of a weaving together of meanings in discourse. This combining of elements into a functional whole is true, says Socrates, for all things.(49) Linguistic procedure, as an instance of real process, exhibits the structure of real process. Socrates claims that the combination of names is the essence of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].(50)

Now I began reading the dialogue, looking at a sentence: [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]?, which presents itself through the flow in our visual field of a set of words fixed on a page and composed of syllables and letters. It gives an account of the aural flow from the mouth of Euclides to the ears of Terpsion. Both the original aural flow and the visual flow are used, however, to convey a meaning to a Greek-speaking interlocutor. The specific meaning concerns a reference to the present moment and the recent past, but it also involves the employment of a weaving together of recurrent [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as universal meanings.(51) The meanings are fixed and are currently available in a lexicon which gives an inventory of the eidetic distinctions made and/ or discovered by the classical Greek linguistic community and related to each other in systematic ways. They are taken up in the flux of the current situation of the dialogue, but they are likewise taken up by us as readers in the flux of our own lives separated by a distance of over 2000 years.

IV

When the central dialogue is read to Euclides and Terpsion Socrates is presented together with Theodorus watching three people approach.(52) One of them is Theaetetus about whom Socrates knows that he is the son of the rich man Euphronius, though he has never met him and does not know his name, while Theodorus, Theaetetus' teacher, has come to know him quite well, both as a promising mathematician and as a sterling character. Here, as in the case of the meeting of Euclides and Terpsion at the beginning of the dialogue, we have several components which are modes of knowing. There is the perceptual Now of encounter between two sets of people who not only immediately sense each other but also recognize each other--as beings, as humans, but also as Socrates and Theodorus. They each have knowledge of the Greek language. This makes possible hearsay knowledge through a linguistic report of a fact about one of the members of the approaching set of humans. There is knowledge of the mind and character of one of them by Theodorus who, as well, has expert knowledge of geometry. These will all be focused upon explicitly in the course of the discussion of the nature of knowledge.

Even the perceptual encounter is not merely a matter of sensations but a matter of recognition and thus of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Seen at a sufficient distance or under darkening conditions, the three figures might be misrecognized as animals or, if stationary, as trees.(53) Seen more proximately and under sufficient lighting conditions, we might see that they are humans, indeed, men; and then, as they come nearer still, recognize or become acquainted with them as Theaetetus and his friends. In knowing the individual there is a double gestalting process involved: first, the immediate sensory apprehension of a face with only subsidiary awareness of the elements that comprise it, but also, secondly, the recognition of character through the expressivity of the whole bodily comportment, especially through the speech that is generated by the mouth of that person. The second involves observation over time to see what habits of behavior underlie and are eventually readable in the sensory facial gestalt.

Recognition involves a primary sensory cognition, but it allows spatially and temporally configurated individuals and types to be discriminated in and through sensory perceptions. That involves an apriori: past experiences entering into our mode of taking up present experiences and establishing modes of anticipation of action and interaction. An operational field opens up for us, carving out possibilities for our own adjustment and modification.

Hearsay knowledge will crop up again in the discussion of the second thesis advanced about the nature of knowledge: that it is true opinion ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). A jury, it is said, has no true knowledge but only opinion arrived at by hearsay which may or may not be true. True knowledge, it is claimed, is a matter of direct evidence.(54) We are invited by the beginning of the dialogue where Euclides reports on his attempt to recollect in writing the hearsay reports about what happened years ago, by the opening encounter between Socrates and Theaetetus as mediated by Theodorus, and by the discussion of the judgment of a jury, to think about the nature and extent of hearsay as a legitimate mode of knowing. Science itself is largely based on hearsay, taken not so much from spoken as from written expression. Yet it functions as a kind of operative whole, encompassed by no one, but systematically linked together and tested in its parts by our ability to carry out certain operations on its basis. It inserts itself into the operative whole of our prescientific lifeworld where we are bound together by the largely hearsay operation of language. What we learn by hearsay gains in cognitive value as it is seen to converge both with other things we know similarly and especially with things we know by direct acquaintance and, above all, when it allows for our efficient operations, individually and collectively, fitted into a network of antecedents and consequents.(55)

Socrates claims to know that the young man in the middle of the three approaching youths is the son of Euphronius, and thus a reasonably rich heir, without knowing his name or, for that matter, anything further about him. Theodorus had forgotten that, so Socrates adds that bit of information to Theodorus' otherwise more ample knowledge of the youth. In this way, Theodorus would not, strictly speaking, know that as a fact; he would believe what Socrates tells him, as Socrates believed those who originally informed him of this detail. The same is true of Theodorus' adding to Socrates' hearsay knowledge about the approaching Theaetetus. In this way the network of hearsay is anchored in direct and indirect methods of confirmation. It is upon this that we base our lives. Of course there is this notable difference between the scientific and everyday web of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]: the everyday contains many more features of nonverifiable beliefs which science attempts to replace with evidence.

We enter into this network through entering into language, which, as we have already noted, contains an inventory of the eidetic distinctions laid out ahead of time as an historical apriori. We actually run through the repertoire when we begin with the sensorily given, apply a general category and still narrower categories as the evidence becomes clearer, until we arrive at the proper fit between the category and the individual given. We come to know the structural and behavioral features that belong to each type through direct and indirect modes of verification, based upon the networking of language and observed behavior which entails, in a given instance, the observer's holding together the first moment of observation with the last, and, further, bringing that togetherness to bear upon other instances of observation of the same behaving individual, and, further still, linking all that by relations of sameness and difference to the behavior of other individuals present indirectly in recollection.

At another level, the interlocutors of Socrates are themselves practitioners of geometry. Theodorus, a geometer of note, taught Theaetetus, who is credited with discovering several of the theorems systematized in Euclid. He is reported in the dialogue as having cooperated with another (a young man also named Socrates who is the chief interlocutor in the Statesman) to solve a problem with roots by working out all the logical variants.(56) The approach through exhausting the logically possible combinations of given elements is reinvoked when dealing with all the cases where knowing, perceiving, and remembering allow for the possibility of false judgment.(57) In this case, however, a necessary logic is employed without clear understanding of the three elements combined. One can know formal combinatory possibilities for and in abstraction from any given elements. When, however, formal logic operates upon clearly discriminated elements, a powerful mode of scientific knowing emerges, realized paradigmatically in geometry.

What is startling about such knowing is its relative independence of perception. One starts with idealized figures and a set of axioms and, wholly within the mind, proceeds to work out theorems that show the necessity of certain metric relations which may never have been sensorily observed. One thus takes a leap far beyond the trial and error method of learning by sensory observation certain metric regularities useful for building, laying out cities and the like.

Even the retention of such observed regularities exceeds the Now of their original givenness. The builder, as an expert in his craft, knows something of the future on the basis of his ability to extract regularities from past experience. He is thus more reliable in building than one who has not learned such regularities and their possible combinations. This is true of all the expert knowings to which Socrates calls attention: in addition to the geometer, the cobbler, the carpenter, the cook, the physician, the agronomist, the painter, the musician and, indeed, even the sophist/lawyer who knows enough about people to know how to win in court.(58) They all possess an expert know-how based upon their ability to observe regularities, discern possibilities and bring new things into being. This is all based in turn upon a primary know-how which is knowing how to use language which constitutes the fabric of tested interrelations within a community between a people and its environment. Once again, it is just this that is being evoked in our own reading of the dialogue in English translation.

Knowing has different levels and components: sensation, configuration through retention, entry into language, inference, and projection. It concerns the interplay of forms and instances. The forms allow us to know the instances by locating them on a map of the whole comprised of samenesses and differences. In each case, knowing is a matter of having something manifest to a knower, other than the act or organ--unless the act or organ are objects of knowing--and manifest in differing sets of relations to other things--but first of all to a knower, for the most part through the medium of sensations. We are both clued in to and, to an extent, stereotypically distracted from attending fully to what is presenting itself in encounter with others by reason of the web of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. However, the construction of the web involves an inventory of eidetic distinctions that a community makes and recognizes in the course of its history. Their combinations lead to errors, partial disclosures and passive sedimentations of previous disclosures or errors. Knowing involves sensation, conceptualization, formation of judgment, and both testing and deepening of judgment through following out distinctions and relations at different interrelated levels, ultimately within a network of eidetic distinctions and relations articulating our awareness of the whole of what is.

V

As we have observed, the dialogue is immediately set within the framework of recent past and quotidian future, looking to the deeper past of the meeting between Socrates and Theaetetus, and more deeply to the ultimate individual future set by the death of the two major interlocutors of the dialogue being read to Euclides and Terpsion. Its description of the initial meeting between Socrates and Theaetetus involves several of the observations made upon knowing in the course of the examination. The center of the dialogue sets the larger framework within which we are reflecting upon what is going on throughout: that is the framework set by the task of philosophy to which we have alluded several times.

The Theaetetus presents a notion of the philosopher calculated to lure Theodorus, a practitioner of geometry, into philosophy.(59) Now geometry is a discipline abstracted from the totality of the lifeworld--from its qualities and ends, pleasures, pains, struggles, victories and defeats. So directed, this rhetorical view of the philosopher is of a particularly caricatured abstract type who neither knows nor is interested in his neighbor, on a par with devotion to geometry as a life-practice. Nonetheless, the philosopher is also presented in an unexaggerated manner as [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], ("with eyes always fixed on the character of the whole")(60) and [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("investigating the universal nature of everything that is, each in its entirety").(61) Philosophy is concerned with "the whole" and with "whole natures." What empowers both features is the notion of being which includes everything in its scope--a notion mentioned in the Theaetetus,(62) which delays elaborating upon it until the middle of the next dialogue in the trilogy, the Sophist.

Socrates qualifies the focus upon "each in its entirety" by saying that in this we find the mind of the philosopher [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("never lowering itself to anything close at hand").(63) The wholes would be natures and not individuals. Socrates' practice belies that restriction, since he is deeply concerned with his interlocutors, and especially here with Theaetetus whom he examines to find out his character and of whom he subsequently predicts a noble future. Plato's practice in writing dialogues which invite reflexive application to their own beginnings, and thus to the concrete whole of what they intend, completely gives the lie to that rhetorical exaggeration. It is the philosopher who opens his work with attention to a situation of immediate encounter in a written text close at hand. The view presented of the philosopher parallels the ascent out of the Cave, but the actual practice of Socrates in Plato's presentation and of Plato himself in his writing show the descent back into the Cave.

The philosophic life stands in direct contrast with the life of the sophist/lawyer who is concerned only with those aspects of the appearance of those natures which can bring about victory in court. Limited in focus, the lawyer is also limited in time, limited to the time allotted by the court to presenting his case.(64) Given the alleged goal of the philosopher, the time spent can only be in proportion to what it takes to get to the nature of each type within the whole. Hence the need for leisure. Yet since the task is to know the whole, that would imply a lifetime, and then some. It would seem to imply, beyond that, the history of the human race devoted to that search. The notion of philosophy which its name, [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] suggests and Plato several times affirms would entail such a time. Philosophy as a form of love is, like eros, born of Poverty and Plenty, aware of its lack by being devoted to what could alone fill it, a knowledge of the whole. Philosophy is love of the vision of the whole and not possession thereof, for the latter is reserved to the gods.(65) The vision of the whole, we suggest again, is involved centrally with the notion of being to which both the Theaetetus and the Sophist call our attention.

In the Theaetetus, philosophy emerges as a gift of the god Thaumas, for, according to Socrates' testimony earlier in the dialogue, [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is the [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of philosophy.(66) The very etymology of the term suggests its origin in inspiration. Now one could take that the way Aristotle seems to have taken it: one becomes unaccountably curious about certain puzzles; one works at solving them; and one then finds one's curiosity eliminated by the solution, perhaps then going on in endless curiosity, gaining more and more godlike control over the field of experience, both theoretical and practical.(67) However, one could also understand [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as awe, astonishment, when the ordinary shows itself in an extraordinary way. That could then function not simply as a chronological starting point, but as a continuing source of reflection and inquiry, situating our puzzles and solutions within the widest possible horizon, evoking our sense of both emptiness and orientation toward fullness in a continually deepening process.(68)

Some recent commentators, while giving careful attention to issues related to recent themes focused in analytical philosophy, pass over the whole central section as simply rhetorical.(69) Devoted to piecemeal analysis, they seem to have forgotten the concern with wholeness which Plato has Socrates enunciate here. However, at this point the claims are only announced--take them or leave them!--and not grounded. The grounding, I suggest again, occurs in the center of the next dialogue--the center of the three centers, which is illuminated by the center of the Republic.

The Parmenidean notion of Being in the center of the Sophist(70) is located in a dialogue which attempts to carry on, in a deeper fashion, the contrast of the lawyer and the philosopher in the Theaetetus. The lawyer is one of the forms in which the sophist appears. His sphere of operation is that of appearance, which he learns to manipulate for his own desirous or competitive ends, to which remuneration is attached. He creates "images" which are and are not what they image--not "are not" is the sense of "being other than," but in the deeper sense of being misleading distortions of what they image.(71) It is in this context that the notion of being is introduced as the particular focus of the philosopher: [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("The philosopher always devotes himself through reasonings to the idea of being").(72)

[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("Thought and being are the same"), an adage which opens Western thought.(73) It is the notion of being that awakens us to the character of thought as precisely concerned with the whole, for being covers all that which "is" and all there is about each thing that "is." As we know, with Plato "is" takes on a peculiar interpretation. In the Republic the goal of philosophic striving is presented as the [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], usually translated as "the good beyond being."(74) Yet [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] identifies the realm of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], of Form, correlate to [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or intellect as the capacity to apprehend the universal type. The [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is beyond [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and is correlate not to [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] but to [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as something which involves "the whole of one's being."(75) The [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is also [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the more manifest region of Being.(76) To [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] thus has a wider extension than [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], which is related to the feminine past participle form of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] to be: [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (masculine [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], neuter [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). It also translates as `property', which may be significant insofar as the speculative aim is cognitive possession of the eidetic. We suggest that the move "beyond [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" is a move beyond possession to being possessed, being visited by awe at a Beyond presented as a [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], as a term of aspiration, as the Good. The [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is also presented as [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], as "principle of the whole."(77) Now, the whole is not simply the whole of the intelligible, of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], but the whole consisting of the interplay between [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the Forms and the mutable particulars which instantiate them. The philosopher whose gaze is fixed on the whole in the center of the Theaetetus, is, in the Republic, "contemplator of all time and all [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]."(78) It is this which brings us to consideration of the center of the final dialogue of the trilogy, the Statesman.

The center of this dialogue lies in the notion of the mean ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), a notion involved precisely in the relation between the eternal realm of form and the contingencies of the temporal: the measured ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), the opportune ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), the due ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), the fit ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]).(79) One who loves the whole is alert especially to how the universal can be instantiated in the flowing Now. Of course, we see that Plato's paradigmatic philosopher, Socrates, is one who throughout the dialogues exhibits concern with the character of his interlocutors--one who indeed does know and is interested in his neighbor. We might even say that what the Theaetetus is about is not simply "theory of knowledge," but about Socrates' coming to know Theaetetus the man, a concern which carries through into the Sophist. Socrates was able to predict Theaetetus' future nobility because he found him gripped by [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] viewed as a divine visitation,(80) because he feared to contradict himself,(81) because he cleared a space for the divine and backed off from Protagoras when it was said Protagoras's relativism was extended to the divine.(82) He allowed what was viewed as the highest obligation to take hold of him.

In the dramatic chronology, the subsequent dialogues present the philosopher as defending his life of devotion to the oracle of Delphi and to the laws and citizens of the polis (Apology and Crito), thus as one who loves the instantiation of the order of the forms within his life and the lives of his neighbors. However, that instantiation precisely involves a developed ability to recognize the mean. Socrates thus would appear to be one who could be the philosopher-king.(83)

We have earlier called attention to the places in the text where the political context is involved. The "complete reflection" of the philosopher, whose eyes are fixed on the Whole, must take into consideration the tacit political context. It is that context wherein the interlocutors are freed from the provision of natural necessities and the need to fend off attackers so they might pursue a philosophic life. It is that context which also threatens that same philosophic life when it touches a nerve through inquiry regarding the stabilizing factors of the polis. The Statesman reflects upon the everyday "closeness at hand" of those arts which provide the relatively secure context for inquiry: such homely arts as the growth and preparation of food, the production of clothing and the construction of homes,(84) as well as the more directly "political" activities of the judge, the general, the king.(85) As we read, write, and speak of these matters, we are fed, clothed, shod, sheltered, protected from criminal attack at home and enemy threats abroad. They too deserve the reflective attention of one whose eyes are fixed upon the Whole and the whole nature of each within that Whole.

VI

In the reading we have given, Platonic philosophy is not concerned with some "heaven of Forms" separated from human experience--though there does indeed remain the problem of the relation between [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and instance debated intensely throughout the history of philosophy. What such philosophy shows are the eidetic features involved in the lifeworld as indicated by the characters and incidents in the dialogue. It provides a phenomenology of the lifeworld and thus illustrates Heidegger's claim that phenomenology is a return to Plato and Aristotle.(86) It is intent, as the Phaedrus has it, to "carve along the joints [of experience] like a good butcher" and not to hack away at the body of experience, arbitrarily introducing distinctions.(87)

One peculiarity of the Theaetetus is that it invites us to think about the fact that we ourselves are reading, and to do a concrete inventory of all that is involved in that, guided by what the dialogue calls attention to in its effort to overcome the limitations of the definitions offered. Philosophy for Plato is a framework inquiry, moving from the most immediate, the narrowest, to the most encompassing. It always looks to the whole, the most encompassing framework found in the notion of being; and it looks to locate the whole nature of each type, and indeed of oneself and of each individual encountered, within that whole. In pursuing the whole, it is always anchored in the most acute attention to the operation in the world of immediate experience of the structures exhibited. Hence the character and the naming of the dialogue after the character of Theaetetus is integral to what the dialogue is communicating.

University of Dallas

Correspondence to: Department of Philosophy, The University of Dallas, Irving, TX 75062.

(1) "Plato's Line Revisited: The Pedagogy of Complete Reflection," The Review of Metaphysics 44 (1991): 525-47. I have attempted to fit that into the full context of the Republic in "Image, Structure and Content: A Remark on a Passage in Plato's Republic," The Review of Metaphysics 40 (1987): 495-514.

(2) One could also see how reflexivity works more concretely by attending to the opening of the Republic, which, according to antiquity, Plato reworked many times to get it just right: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 310-311. The very first line, "I went down to the Peireius yesterday," announces the metaphoric theme of going down and going up which structures the whole work precisely because it structures the way we talk about our lives in terms of values. Yet what immediately follows presents a concrete instantiation of the proximate work of the Republic, which is to persuade the citizens that philosophy is no threat to the city but could even be a boon to it. Socrates and Glaucon are about to go "up to the city" when they are arrested by a group which claims the power to hold them from their goal by reason of their greater numbers. Socrates tells them that that in addition to such power, there is also the power to persuade the group to let him and Glaucon do what they originally intended, namely go up to the city. The dialogue leads, through an attempt to persuade the group that philosophy is no threat for the city, to Socrates' leading them in discourse to "a city laid up in heaven," which will never exist on earth but of which each individual can make himself or herself a member by becoming the philosopher-king of his or her own life. It is this self-reflexivity clue that leads us to look at the opening of the Theaetetus in the light of the dialogue taken as a whole. It is the central claim of this paper that in the Theaetetus the self-reflexivity is not merely metaphorical; it is substantive.

(3) Theaetetus 151e-187a.

(4) Theaetetus 187b-201c.

(5) Theaetetus 201c-210a.

(6) See also Sophist 263e.

(7) Theaetetus 172c-177c.

(8) Myles Burneat, The Theaetetus of Plato with the M. J. Levett translation (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), 2-3. In Gadamerian terms, we will try to achieve a Horizontverschmelzung. See Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Crossroads, 1982), 267-74 and 337-34.

(9) Theaetetus 142a. The translations are from H. N. Fowler, Theaetetus and Sophist, Loeb Classics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).

(10) Theaetetus 154d, 143a, 172c, 175e, 187d.

(11) Theaetetus 155d.

(12) Theaetetus 210d.

(13) See Theaetetus 178e.

(14) Statesman 269d-274e. The surface level background to the Statesman is projected at the beginning of Sophist as an inquiry into the sameness and/or difference between the sophist, statesman, and philosopher (Sophist 217a). The deeper level is the inquiry into sameness and difference themselves playing in relation to motion and rest as encompassed by the notion of being in the Sophist (254a-257b). The latter announces its aim as securing a place for logos among beings (260a), thus continuing the discussion of Theaetetus into logos. The Statesman announces that its aim is not simply to teach how to think about the statesman but how to think about all things (285d). It weaves the hard and soft fibers of apodeixis ("showing from the top down") and paradeigma (a model "showing alongside") respectively. It begins with a paradigm (shepherding, 261c), as does the Sophist (angling, 221b), and comes later to weaving (305e), but the models are set within a top-down framework of the human arts which are set, in turn, within the widest distinction between nature and techne. It proceeds, as does the Sophist, by bifurcatory diairesis, showing relations of sameness and difference. It modifies the paradigm by manipulating and integrating traditional myths which has the effect of setting the divine shepherd at a distance and viewing the statesman as a man among men (268d). It further modifies the diairetic procedure by an articulation of the functions of the city which follows the Phaedrus's advice to "carve along the joints" (265e). It also distinguishes between the universalizing function of law and the particularizing function of prudence in seeking the mean (284e).

(15) Nicomachean Ethics 1.10.1 100a10-1100b10.

(16) Phaedo 64a.

(17) Theaetetus 142c.

(18) This is the sole reference in antiquity to Socrates' engagement in writing, outside of the belated attempt in the Phaedo at writing a hymn to Apollo and turning Aesop's fables into verse, following the command in a dream to compose poetry (Phaedo 60d-61b).

(19) Theaetetus 152a.

(20) Theaetetus 152d.

(21) The Presocratic Philosophers, ed. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven (London: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 197 n. 218.

(22) Theaetetus 152a.

(23) Theaetetus 153a, 200e.

(24) Theaetetus 181d.

(25) Theaetetus 152a.

(26) Theaetetus 156e.

(27) Theaetetus 159e.

(28) Theaetetus 156e.

(29) Theaetetus 182a.

(30) Theaetetus 158d.

(31) Theaetetus 182d.

(32) Theaetetus 184c.

(33) Theaetetus 160a. To my knowledge, this is the first instance of the notion of intentionality in the history of thought.

(34) Theaetetus 191d.

(35) Theaetetus 197c.

(36) Theaetetus 186a.

(37) Theaetetus 185e. I am utterly amazed at the claim some scholars make that the Theaetetus does not consider the [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. They appear again and again throughout the dialogue, although, it must be admitted, they are not considered in the three theses focally but only in passing.

(38) The expression is Whitehead's: Process and Reality (New York: Harper, 1960), 44-7.

(39) Phaedrus 274c-277a. See Derrida's comments in his "Plato's Pharmakon," in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61-171. We should also look to the Herculean memory feats of Cephalus, Antiphon, and Polydorus in the Parmenides where the immensely complex account of the dialectical turnings between the one and the many (others) have been committed to memory without, at least in the case of Antiphon, sustaining their interest in the issues involved. Antiphon, after all, turned from such memory feats to raising horses!

(40) On the comparison of writing to speech, see Paul Ricoeur, "The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text," Social Research 38 (1971): 530-7.

(41) Theaetetus 163b.

(42) Heidegger notes, in "The Origin of the Work of Art," that we have to "listen away" from our actual experience to hear sounds. What we hear are voices in the next room, the airplane overhead, the car going by outside, etc.: Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 26.

(43) See Bernard Lonergan for a discussion of these levels: Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 271-278.

(44) Sophist 254d. In the Theatetus for `being' see 186; for sameness and difference, 185a; for motion and rest, 180e-182e.

(45) Theaetetus 181d.

(46) Theaetetus 203c.

(47) Theaetetus 207a.

(48) See Aristotle's treatment in his Poetics 20.1456b-1457a.

(49) Theaetetus 204a.

(50) Theaetetus 202b.

(51) See Theaetetus 202b.

(52) Theaetetus 144c.

(53) Theaetetus 191b.

(54) Theaetetus 201b.

(55) See Gail Fine, "Knowledge and Logos in the Theaetetus," Philosophical Review 88 (1979): 391-2. For a more ample treatment, see Rosemary Desjardins, The Rational Enterprise: Logos in Plato's Theaetetus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).

(56) Theaetetus 147d.

(57) Theaetetus 192a.

(58) Theaetetus 146c, 171e, and 178b.

(59) Theaetetus 172c-184b.

(60) Theaetetus 175a.

(61) Theaetetus 174a.

(62) Theaetetus 186.

(63) Theaetetus 174a.

(64) Theaetetus 172e.

(65) Symposium 202e.

(66) Theaetetus 155d.

(67) Metaphysics 1.2.982b13.

(68) I owe this reading to Heidegger, What Is Philosophy?, trans. William Klubak and Jean T. Wilde (New York: Twayne, 1958), 78-85. Heidegger says elsewhere that in great philosophy and poetry so much "world-space" is created that even the ordinary appears extraordinary: Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 26.

(69) See, for example, Robin Waterfield, commentary appended to his translation of Plato's Theaetetus (London: Penguin, 1987), 177. In his commentary appended to M. J. Levett's translation of Theaetetus, 34-5, Burnyeat gives a short history of response to this "digression."

(70) Sophist 243d.

(71) Sophist 234c.

(72) Sophist 254a.

(73) Parmenides, in Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 269 n. 344. The editors render it: "the same thing can be thought as can be."

(74) Republic 6.509d.

(75) See Republic 4.436b.

(76) Republic 6.518d.

(77) Republic 6.511b.

(78) Republic 6.486a.

(79) Statesman 284e.

(80) Theaetetus 155c.

(81) Theaetetus 154d.

(82) Theaetetus 162d.

(83) Republic 5.476.

(84) See Theaetetus 178e.

(85) Statesman 287e-289a, 303d-305d.

(86) Prolegomena to a History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 136.

(87) Phaedrus 265e.