The Digressions on Substance and Method (267c–287b)

Abstract

Young Socrates’ uncritical acceptance of the two ways and of the definition of the statesman as ‘herdsman to man’ makes vivid the special difficulty facing the stranger. While the stranger intends to put young Socrates’ critical capacities to the test, young Socrates is eager to defer to the stranger’s lead. In part, this excessive docility is the natural response of a respectful youth to an impressive elder. Considered against the spectrum of interlocutors presented by earlier dialogues, he most resembles Hippocrates of the Protagoras. For both, their very eagerness to learn, since it is not tempered by critical reflectiveness, is actually an obstacle. As the elder Socrates points out to Hippocrates, without such reflectiveness he is in danger: enthusiastically ‘entrust [ing his] soul to this stranger who has arrived among us,’ he opens himself indiscriminately to ‘harmful’ as well as ‘beneficial’ ideas. (See Protagoras 313a–314b.) Just as important, however, is the influence of Theodorus (friend of Protagoras!) and his mathematical education. We have already noted the crucial but pointedly limited value of mathematics as propaideutic for philosophy. The mathematician makes use of visible things as symbols; and since he does not, qua mathematician, reflect focally on the non-sensible nature of his real objects, he risks an unwitting dependence on the visible. More basic, in its axiomatic character mathematics stresses the deductive ‘downwards’ path at the expense of the reflective ‘upwards’ way which puts the axioms themselves in question; starting from what is ‘obvious to everyone,’ the mathematician risks accepting results which, however well reasoned along the way, lack a true foundation.