Philebus

Soc. The gods, then, as I said, handed down to us this mode of investigating, learning, and teaching one another; but the wise men of the present day make the one and the many too quickly or too slowly, in haphazard fashion, and they put infinity immediately after unity; they disregard all that lies between them, and this it is which distinguishes between the dialectic and the disputatious methods of discussion.

Pro. I think I understand you in part, Socrates, but I need a clearer statement of some things.

Soc. Surely my meaning, Protarchus, is made clear in the letters of the alphabet, which you were taught as a child; so learn it from them.

Pro. How?

Soc. Sound, which passes out through the mouth of each and all of us, is one, and yet again it is infinite in number.

Pro. Yes, to be sure.

Soc. And one of us is no wiser than the other merely for knowing that it is infinite or that it is one; but that which makes each of us a grammarian is the knowledge of the number and nature of sounds.

Pro. Very true.

Soc. And it is this same knowledge which makes the musician.

Pro. How is that?

Soc. Sound is one in the art of music also, so far as that art is concerned.

Pro. Of course.

Soc. And we may say that there are two sounds, low and high, and a third, which is the intermediate, may we not?

Pro. Yes.

Soc. But knowledge of these facts would not suffice to make you a musician, although ignorance of them would make you, if I may say so, quite worthless in respect to music.

Pro. Certainly.

Soc. But, my friend, when you have grasped the number and quality of the intervals of the voice in respect to high and low pitch, and the limits of the intervals, and all the combinations derived from them, which the men of former times discovered and handed down to us, their successors, with the traditional name of harmonies, and also the corresponding effects in the movements of the body, which they say are measured by numbers and must be called rhythms and measures—and they say that we must also understand that every one and many should be considered in this way— when you have thus grasped the facts, you have become a musician, and when by considering it in this way you have obtained a grasp of any other unity of all those which exist, you have become wise in respect to that unity. But the infinite number of individuals and the infinite number in each of them makes you in every instance indefinite in thought and of no account and not to be considered among the wise, so long as you have never fixed your eye upon any definite number in anything.

Pro. I think, Philebus, that what Socrates has said is excellent.

Phi. So do I; it is excellent in itself, but why has he said it now to us, and what purpose is there in it?

Soc. Protarchus, that is a very proper question which Philebus has asked us.

Pro. Certainly it is, so please answer it.

Soc. I will, when I have said a little more on just this subject. For if a person begins with some unity or other, he must, as I was saying, not turn immediately to infinity, but to some definite number; now just so, conversely, when he has to take the infinite first, he must not turn immediately to the one, but must think of some number which possesses in each case some plurality, and must end by passing from all to one. Let us revert to the letters of the alphabet to illustrate this.

Pro. How?

Soc. When some one, whether god or godlike man,—there is an Egyptian story that his name was Theuth—observed that sound was infinite, he was the first to notice that the vowel sounds in that infinity were not one, but many, and again that there were other elements which were not vowels but did have a sonant quality, and that these also had a definite number; and he distinguished a third kind of letters which we now call mutes. Then he divided the mutes until he distinguished each individual one, and he treated the vowels and semivowels in the same way, until he knew the number of them and gave to each and all the name of letters. Perceiving, however, that none of us could learn any one of them alone by itself without learning them all, and considering that this was a common bond which made them in a way all one, he assigned to them all a single science and called it grammar.

Phi. I understand that more clearly than the earlier statement, Protarchus, so far as the reciprocal relations of the one and the many are concerned, but I still feel the same lack as a little while ago.

Soc. Do you mean, Philebus, that you do not see what this has to do with the question?

Phi. Yes; that is what Protarchus and I have been trying to discover for a long time.

Soc. Really, have you been trying, as you say, for long time to discover it, when it was close to you all the while?

Phi. How is that?

Soc. Was not our discussion from the beginning about wisdom and pleasure and which of them is preferable?

Phi. Yes, of course.

Soc. And surely we say that each of them is one.

Phi. Certainly.

Soc. This, then, is precisely the question which the previous discussion puts to us: How is each of them one and many, and how is it that they are not immediately infinite, but each possesses a definite number, before the individual phenomena become infinite?

Pro. Philebus, somehow or other Socrates has led us round and plunged us into a serious question. Consider which of us shall answer it. Perhaps it is ridiculous that I, after taking your place in entire charge of the argument, should ask you to come back and answer this question because I cannot do so, but I think it would be still more ridiculous if neither of us could answer. Consider, then, what we are to do. For I think Socrates is asking us whether there are or are not kinds of pleasure, how many kinds there are, and what their nature is, and the same of wisdom.

Soc. You are quite right, son of Callias; for, as our previous discussion showed, unless we can do this in the case of every unity, every like, every same, and their opposites, none of us can ever be of any use in anything.

Pro. That, Socrates, seems pretty likely to be true. However, it is splendid for the wise man to know everything, but the next best thing, it seems, is not to be ignorant of himself. I will tell you why I say that at this moment. You, Socrates, have granted to all of us this conversation and your cooperation for the purpose of determining what is the best of human possessions. For when Philebus said it was pleasure and gaiety and enjoyment and all that sort of thing, you objected and said it was not those things, but another sort, and we very properly keep reminding ourselves voluntarily of this, in order that both claims may be present in our memory for examination. You, as it appears, assert that the good which is rightly to be called better than pleasure is mind, knowledge, intelligence, art, and all their kin; you say we ought to acquire these, not that other sort. When those two claims were made and an argument arose, we playfully threatened that we would not let you go home until the discussion was brought to some satisfactory conclusion. You agreed and put yourself at our disposal for that purpose. Now, we say that, as children put it, you cannot take back a gift once fairly given. So cease this way of meeting all that we say.

Soc. What way do you mean?