BMCR 2009.05.43: Moore on Tschemplik, Knowledge and Self-knowledge in Plato's Theaetetus

Andrea Tschemplik, Knowledge and Self-knowledge in Plato's Theaetetus.
Lanham:  Lexington Books, 2008.  Pp. ix, 183.  ISBN 9780739125731.
$65.00.

Reviewed by Christopher Moore, The University of Texas at Austin
([email protected])
Word count:  2634 words
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Structuring her book as a reading of the Theaetetus, Tschemplik intends
to "examine the interconnected questions of knowledge, self-knowledge,
and the limits of knowledge in Plato" (1). This examination provokes
some interesting further questions: How might mathematical knowledge
differ from other forms of knowledge in its dependence on the
investigator's self-awareness? How might appreciating his "knowledge is
perception" hypothesis require Theaetetus to understand his own soul?
How might the birthing of intellectual ideas require a technically
adept helper?

In pursuit of questions like these, the majority of Tschemplik's book
takes up Socrates' examination of Theaetetus' three definitions of
knowledge, in significant part by discussing cognate passages in the
Symposium, Charmides, Republic, and other dialogues. The book's angle
is to take a work best known for its analyses of knowledge, observe its
aporetic conclusion, and suggest a new reason for that impasse:
Theaetetus fails not in ignoring "the forms," for example, but in
ignoring the importance of self-knowledge. This is a provocative and
appealing thesis. But Tschemplik's book makes an insufficient case for
it. It is not for overwhelming counterevidence that it doesn't succeed;
indeed, aspects of its central claim seem true, and readers of Plato
are hereby enjoined to read the Theaetetus for its lessons about
self-knowledge. The problem is instead that the absence of any
sustained exposition about self-knowledge, impatience in argumentation
and close reading, and overly-quick resolution of interpretive problems
by reference to parallel texts, plus much haphazard prose, prevent this
book from clarifying and substantiating its claims.

Tschemplik is very justified in making another go at the problem of
self-knowledge in Plato. The matter is crucial to the history of
philosophy, the epistemological issues are difficult, and Socrates'
remarks about it in the  Phaedrus, Apology, First Alcibiades, and
Charmides still need unpacking. More specifically:


1. At Apol. 28e and 29d Socrates glosses the way he philosophizes all
the time as an examination of himself and others; this, combined with
his realization that he knows that he knows nothing big (Apol. 21d),
his claim to be preoccupied with knowing himself (Phdr. 229e), and his
recommendation of self-knowledge before self-cultivation (Alc. I 129a),
suggests he equates philosophizing with knowing oneself. But not every
philosopher so explicitly makes this equation (in Plato: Apol. 23d4,
Tht. 143d4, Soph. 213a5, Phdo. 61c6 and passim, etc.). So why is
Socratic philosophizing so attentive to self-knowledge? Why might (or
do) others think getting wisdom doesn't require such direct awareness
of oneself?



2. By the fourth century Greek philosophers debated whether getting
self-knowledge would depend on getting knowledge about one's personal
self or instead about the soul in general or even of god in particular.
One might call the two views the "Romantic" or "individualizing" view
("who am I?" "how am I unique?") and the "Psychological" or "generic"
view ("what am I" "in what way ought I not to be unique?"). How might
we understand Socrates' claims by means of these distinctions?



3. Asking "What is it to know?" may lead to a range of answers; it may
not be the same activity or state to know x as it is to know y (where,
e.g., x = a geometry solution, and y = the self). Knowledge of the self
is a likely candidate for one species of knowledge; what might this
species' differentia be?


These questions are only three out of many others (e.g., "what are the
most effective ways of getting self-knowledge?," "how do we know when
we have it?," etc.), each of which could serve as a capacious dialectic
for a monograph. What's surprising about Tschemplik's book, however, is
that it never gives undivided attention to any of these or other
puzzles about self-knowledge. The reader is obligated to bring his or
her own curiosities and to see whether anything Tschemplik says speaks
to them. (Given this, it is unfortunate that "self-knowledge" is not in
the index,[[1]] and is hardly in the bibliography.[[2]]) Still, the
following summary tries to bring out the ways in which Knowledge and
Self-knowledge in Plato's Theaetetus could speak to someone's
curiosities about self-knowledge in the dialogue.

Tschemplik's brief introduction includes her most systematic remarks
about self-knowledge:


We must... rid ourselves of the usual modern conceptions of
self-knowledge which... are associated with intensive introspection....
Socrates presents his quest for self-knowledge as a task that
necessarily involves other interlocutors who are willing to engage in
dialogue with him.... He is concerned with finding out what kind of
person he is.... The kind of life that someone leads is the best
indication of who she is.... Both in the Republic and in the Phaedrus
Socrates presents his listeners and readers with images of the soul
that clearly indicate that it is complex... which presents for us the
challenge of living a harmonious life. Socrates' question regarding
self-knowledge is best understood as an ethical one. (4-5)


Not all of these issues recur: there is no detailed argument about the
failure of the modern conception of self-knowledge; or of the reasons
Socrates presents, to the extent he does, for thinking of
self-knowledge in one way rather than another; or for the benefit of
thinking of self-knowledge as mainly an ethical inquiry. But a two-page
outline of the book's chapters (8-9) does succeed at pointing
approximately to the issues to which Tschemplik will return.

The first chapter, "Framing the Question of Knowledge and
Self-Knowledge," compares Euclides' narration in the Theaetetus with
Socrates' narration in the Charmides and Apollodorus' in the Symposium.
Its principal goal is to show what the narrative frames in the
Theaetetus "force" (34) us to realize about knowledge and
self-knowledge. Tschemplik does not argue that we draw identical
conclusions thinking about the frames as we do thinking about Socrates'
examination of Theaetetus' definitions, but the implication is that the
two overlap. The sense is, I think, that the early part of the dialogue
acts as an overture, priming us to see what the rest is about. Four of
Tschemplik's claims deserve particular attention.

First: reports of conversations are uncertain because narrators are
unreliable (12, 34). Tschemplik appeals for this claim to the odd and
well-worth-studying conversation, full of remarks about forgetfulness
and verification, between Euclides and Terpsion, the reporter and
auditor of the conversation between Socrates, Theodorus, and
Theaetetus. Yet it does not seem to me an insight into knowledge that
witness or messenger testimony is in principle open to doubt, but into
the trustworthiness of testimony. Nor does Tschemplik vindicate this
insight by ever doubting anything Euclides reports.[[3]]

Second: a frame "calls into question the possibility of objective
accounts... [since] everything said or written carries with it the
burden of perspective" (8). It is smart to consider who a person is
before accepting their claims to knowledge, but it's hard to see how
the frame itself, and thus the early part of the dialogue, reminds
anyone of this. The lesson cannot be for Theaetetus, since he is dying
out of earshot during Euclides' report. Nor does it seem useful for
Plato's readers, since a depicted conversation, with or without a
frame, should suffice to point out that each speaker might have his own
perspective.

Third: in the frame conversation Euclides says he edited the manuscript
he has read out for Terpsion; he hints that he's hiding the report's
essential subjectivity (17). Tschemplik's idea that "Euclides cannot
learn anything about himself from his writing" (35) is an interesting
one, but not apparently a consequence of the kind of editing he's done.
After all, even if both he and Terpsion could forget that he could be
an imperfect stenographer, the obscuring of subjectivity would seem to
come only from the deletion of observer-indexing words such as "I think
he said," not from the deletion of speaker-indexing words such as "he
said," as it was in this case (143c).

Fourth: "the frame reveals what the dialogue proper conceals, namely,
that the mathematician is a man, a human being" (21). Euclides and
Terpsion might indeed come to understand better the meaning of the
conversation Euclides reports if they realize that Theaetetus has been
mortally wounded in war. But the dialogue does not make obvious what
could be the connection between Theaetetus' interests in 399 and his
death serving the Athenians. It is worthwhile to speculate on possible
connections.[[4]] But I'm not sure Tschemplik does speculate in a way
that could make the frame's revelation of Theaetetus' humanity
particularly telling: after all, despite claiming that "Theaetetus the
mathematician... seems to have no concern for his or any other city"
and "strenuously avoids bringing up any political matters" (21), for
which Tschemplik provides little evidence, Socrates' interest in
Theaetetus seems sufficient to establish for the auditor or reader his
young friend's humanity.

Obviously the narrative frames, and Tschemplik's discussion, do raise
important questions about observer-bias and the salience of viewpoints.
But it's hard to see that they enter into an understanding of knowledge
and self-knowledge in the robust way these must matter to Socrates and
Plato.[[5]]

The second chapter, "Intellectual Midwifery, Intellectual Pregnancy,"
aims to argue for the claim that "self-knowledge is the analogue of
self-procreation: Just as procreation requires an 'other,' so too does
self-knowledge" (41). This fruitful analogy is marred by its defective
formulation and is inadequately harvested. While Tschemplik concludes
that "Socrates' explication of midwifery ... explains why philosophy is
dialectical and must be in the form of dialogue" (53, cf. 60, 50), she
does not provide that explanation, either in conceptual or causal form;
nor does she consider potential opposing views--a problem less because
there are devastating opposing views than because it's hard to be
really convinced without reading some play of criticism and rejoinder.

The third and fourth chapters explain why Socrates takes his time
examining his interlocutor's three proposed definitions of knowledge.
The first of these, "Perception and Knowledge," works carefully through
the Protagorean and Heraclitean views of knowledge and is, because of
its sensitivity to details of the argument, the most successful of the
book. Tschemplik writes that "we must pay particular attention to the
way in which Socrates guides Theaetetus toward the discovery of soul,
leading him from the realm of the visible to the invisible" (67, 68).
Socrates wants Theaetetus to see what his first suggested definition
comprehensively entails about subjectivity and metaphysics (70), rather
than straightaway making for him a distinction between sense-organs and
that which uses those sense-organs, i.e., the soul (96-7). The
following chapter, "Doxa-Logy," presents the remaining definitions of
knowledge and the wax-tablet and aviary thought-experiments.

The fifth chapter, "Mathematics and Beyond," works to support
Tschemplik's hypothesis that "the purpose of the dialogue is to explore
the mathematician's understanding of knowledge and to consider whether
it is a possible paradigm for philosophical knowledge[,] and that the
aporetic conclusion of the dialogue is an indication that philosophy is
not reducible to mathematics" (141). This is a stimulating hypothesis,
one that could explain why Plato wrote several dialogues featuring
mathematicians or math-appreciators (e.g., Glaucon). Several times
through the book Tschemplik had alluded to the possibility that
"knowledge" (episte^me^) and "wisdom" (sophia), the pair of terms
introduced by Socrates near the dialogue's beginning (145e), are
importantly distinct: the former, the object of definitional inquiry in
Tht., stands in for mathematical knowledge; the latter, for
philosophical knowledge.

Tschemplik begins the chapter by observing that, unlike math problems,
philosophical problems are not answered systematically; but this is not
the tack Tschemplik takes; in fact she mostly ignores concrete
methodological questions. She instead turns to the Digression (Tht.
172c-177c) and to Rep. VI-VII. The Digression-philosopher, Tschemplik
observes, lacks self-knowledge and interest in his neighbors--and is
peculiarly like Theodorus--but, confusingly enough, is supposedly
concerned with human beings in the abstract. This is confusing because
it sets him off from those Protagoreans who without examination take
human beings to be the "measure" (142-6). (I am not sure, however, what
the reader is to conclude about the Digression-philosophers.)
Tschemplik continues to the Republic. The first part of her analysis
points out that the Line analogy is mathematical in that it omits the
Good. Put another way, the Republic treats mathematics as a good
training tool but also as a pursuit that fails to examine its starting
points; it blurs the distinction between subjective hypotheses and
objective archai (148-55). The second part of Tschemplik's analysis of
the Republic "read[s] Socrates' education of Theaetetus as illustrating
the ascent out of the cave." While the prisoner, even upon being
liberated, seems to take whatever he sees as true, the cumulative
effect of seeing a range of environments seems adequate for bringing
him to realize that perceptions cannot always be trusted: "the ascent
leads the liberated prisoner to see the multiplicity of perspectives
and thus gives him a perspective on perspective" (159). The chapter
ends with Tschemplik's clearest summary of her book's findings (160-1).

In a short conclusion to her book, Tschemplik says that while the
Theaetetus shows the difficulty of defining knowledge, it still
"provides the main ingredients that make up our knowledge of the world:
perception, opinion, and logos" (165). This kind of conclusion, as well
as others Tschemplik makes, makes a nice response to the silly view
that refutation must either be wholly negative and preparatory or
present ground in which to search for the right answer that Plato has
hidden within. Unfortunately, this nice response is partially unearned:
the book did not much assess other candidates for constituents of
knowledge. And so when Tschemplik goes on to say that we're to wonder
whether these three ingredients are also appropriate for knowing
ourselves, I feel my agreement is too strong: I wonder why we didn't
get clearer earlier about whether they are appropriate or not.

Overall, Tschemplik never fully justifies the importance of thinking
about "self"-knowledge. Many kinds of knowledge are important to
understanding the world and living in it well: there is knowledge of
one's position; there is knowledge that reports can be wrong; there is
knowledge that the act of observing can affect one's observations. But
are any of these some special "self-knowledge"--the things the Delphic
inscription commands one get--or are they simply facts that any
epistemically-mature person needs to know, akin to realizing that
things look smaller the farther they are away, and that the sun-spots
in one's eye are temporary? If these are self-knowledge, then what's
the big (philosophical) deal? One needn't doubt that they could be
philosophically important to want to know how. Is the mathematician who
doesn't distinguish knowledge of geometric proofs from knowledge of
herself making a common mistake, or is she being implausibly obtuse, or
does she even have a richer epistemic attitude toward those proofs than
we had thought? I ask these questions because if Tschemplik means to
show that Socrates' lesson is that self-knowledge is a precondition for
knowledge (of other things), then it's important to know what exactly
this precondition amounts to, how difficult it'd be to fulfill that
precondition, and whether it seems to us true that there is such a
precondition.

I should also make a comment about Tschemplik's authorial methodology.
Her self-proclaimed "dramatic" approach (1, 6, 11-13), which I suspect
means paying close attention to everything that happens in the
dialogue, and which is carried off with mixed success,[[6]] is
seriously weakened by her "interdialogic" approach (167). The latter
encourages her to switch between dialogues too readily. Rather than
imagining possible reasons for Socrates or Theaetetus to have said
something, and then eliminating the wrong ones by appeal to context or
validity or character, too frequently she leans on what she takes to be
a cognate passage in some other work. Yet the cognate passage--often in
itself quite intriguing--tends to be dealt with as cursorily as the
target passage, usually mined for utterances made by Socrates. The
reader is left with more, or the pre-existing, puzzles.


------------------
Notes:


1.   Surprisingly, "conversation," "Delphic Oracle," "expertise,"
"interdialogic approach," "knowledge," "Know Thyself," "philosophy," or
"talking," aren't in the index either, though all key to understanding
Tschemplik's thesis.

2.   The closest are Charles Griswold, Self-Knowledge in Plato's
Phaedrus (Yale, 1986) and Mary Margaret McCabe, "Looking Inside
Charmides' Cloak: Seeing Others and Oneself in Plato's Charmides," in
Maieusis, ed. D. Scott (Oxford, 2007). There are not really any works
on ancient or modern conceptions of the self, either.

3.   Tschemplik's terminology in this section is confusing, as she
sometimes refers to the part of the conversation directly concerning
the definition of knowledge "the dialogue." Her terminological missteps
lead her to claim absurdities such as "Plato abnegates responsibility
for the dialogue by identifying Euclides as its author" (60, 166). This
is false: in the fiction of the dialogue, Euclides takes responsibility
for the report of the conversation between Socrates, Theodorus, and
Theaetetus, but everyone knows that Plato is responsible for the
conversation between Euclides and Terpsion, and thus ultimately for the
earlier one as well. One solution might have been to have called the
work Theaetetus the dialogue ("dialogue" as the name of a literary
genre); the conversation between Euclides and Terpsion "the later
conversation" or, if the term "frame" is important, "the framing
conversation"; the part of the conversation between Socrates,
Theaetetus, and Theodorus before Socrates asks for a definition of
knowledge "the beginning (or non-definitional) part of the earlier (or
Socratic) conversation"; and the part of that conversation after the
first request for a definition "the definitional (or long) part of the
earlier (or Socratic) conversation." Or she could have spoken of
Plato's dialogue and Euclides' dialogue and the pre-examination part of
Socrates' conversation and the examination part of Socrates'
conversation.

4.   A recent book that tries to make connections is Paul Stern,
Knowledge and Politics in Plato's Theaetetus (Cambridge, 2008).

5.   Very useful on the framing devices is Kendall Sharp, Socrates and
the Second-Person: The Craft of Platonic Dialogue, Ph.D. diss.
(Chicago, 2006).

6.   I give just three examples of places where this type of reading
seems to falter. First, despite wanting to read Theaetetus with other
dialogues, she gives a general dismissal of the relevance of the
Sophist and the Statesman (16). This exclusion seems unprincipled, in
particular on "dramatic" grounds. Socrates' initiation of the
conversation about philosophers and sophists with the Eleatic; his
recommendation of Theaetetus as the primary interlocutor in the
Sophist; and his claim to Theaetetus to have listened to all his
answers (St. 258a) all seem as or more informative to the matter of
self-knowledge in the Theaetetus as do Socrates' actions and
discussions with people other than Theaetetus in other dialogues.
Second, Tschemplik's commitment to this kind of reading often wavers.
Early on she specifies what "Plato... alleges" (5); no doubt Plato has
all kinds of goals in writing his dialogues, many of which close
reading will recover, but it hard to see the dialogues as "erotic and
maieutic, seducing the reader into giving birth to ideas" (61) if we
ignore who is saying what. Third, there are important insensitivities
to tone; one instance is when Tschemplik claims that Theaetetus "avers"
(70, re: Tht. 151e) something when in fact he seems simply to be
suggesting it.