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refutation.
I think that you are right, he replied; and I will do as you say.
Tell me, then, I said, what you mean to affirm about wisdom.
I mean to say that wisdom is the only science which is the science of itself
as well as of the other sciences.
But the science of science, I said, will also be the science of the absence of
science.
Very true, he said.
Then the wise or temperate man, and he only, will know himself, and be
able to examine what he knows or does not know, and to see what others
know and think that they know and do really know; and what they do not
know, and fancy that they know, when they do not. No other person will be
able to do this. And this is wisdom and temperance and self-knowledge—for
a man to know what he knows, and what he does not know. That is your
meaning?
Yes, he said.
Now then, I said, making an offering of the third or last argument to Zeus
the Saviour, let us begin again, and ask, in the first place, whether it is or is
not possible for a person to know that he knows and does not know what he
knows and does not know; and in the second place, whether, if perfectly
possible, such knowledge is of any use.
That is what we have to consider, he said.
And here, Critias, I said, I hope that you will find a way out of a difficulty
into which I have got myself. Shall I tell you the nature of the difficulty?
By all means, he replied.
Does not what you have been saying, if true, amount to this: that there must
be a single science which is wholly a science of itself and of other sciences,
and that the same is also the science of the absence of science?
Yes.
But consider how monstrous this proposition is, my friend: in any parallel
case, the impossibility will be transparent to you.
How is that? and in what cases do you mean?
In such cases as this: Suppose that there is a kind of vision which is not like
ordinary vision, but a vision of itself and of other sorts of vision, and of the
defect of them, which in seeing sees no colour, but only itself and other sorts
52
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book The Complete Plato"
The Complete Plato
- Title
- The Complete Plato
- Author
- Plato
- Date
- ~347 B.C.
- Language
- English
- License
- PD
- Size
- 21.0 x 29.7 cm
- Pages
- 1612
- Keywords
- Philosophy, Antique, Philosophie, Antike, Dialogues, Metaphysik, Metaphysics, Ideologie, Ideology, Englisch
- Categories
- Geisteswissenschaften
- International