>>24518897THEAETETUS : Definitely.
VISITOR : In fact, my friend, it’s inept to try to separate everything from
everything else. It’s the sign of a completely unmusical and unphilosophical person.
THEAETETUS : Why?
VISITOR : To dissociate each thing from everything else is to destroy totally
everything there is to say. The weaving together of forms is what makes
speech possible for us.
“Yet on the other hand, Socrates,” said Parmenides, “if someone, having
an eye on all the difficulties we have just brought up and others of the
same sort, won’t allow that there are forms for things and won’t mark off
a form for each one, he won’t have anywhere to turn his thought, since
he doesn’t allow that for each thing there is a character that is always the
same. In this way he will destroy the power of dialectic entirely.
SOCRATES : But if it is always passing away, can we correctly say of it
first that it is this, and then that it is such and such? Or, at the very instant
we are speaking, isn’t it inevitably and immediately becoming a different
thing and altering and no longer being as it was?
CRATYLUS : It is.
SOCRATES : Then if it never stays the same, how can it be something? After
all, if it ever stays the same, it clearly isn’t changing—at least, not during
that time; and if it always stays the same and is always the same thing,
so that it never departs from its own form, how can it ever change or move?
CRATYLUS : There’s no way.
SOCRATES : Then again it can’t even be known by anyone. For at the very
instant the knower-to-be approaches, what he is approaching is becoming
a different thing, of a different character, so that he can’t yet come to know
either what sort of thing it is or what it is like—surely, no kind of knowledge
is knowledge of what isn’t in any way.
CRATYLUS : That’s right.
SOCRATES : Indeed, it isn’t even reasonable to say that there is such a
thing as knowledge, Cratylus, if all things are passing on and none remain.
For if that thing itself, knowledge, did not pass on from being knowledge,
then knowledge would always remain, and there would be such a thing
as knowledge. On the other hand, if the very form of knowledge passed
on from being knowledge, the instant it passed on into a different form
than that of knowledge, there would be no knowledge. And if it were
always passing on, there would always be no knowledge. Hence, on this
account, no one could know anything and nothing could be known either.
But if there is always that which knows and that which is known, if there
are such things as the beautiful, the good, and each one of the things that
are, it doesn’t appear to me that these things can be at all like flowings or
motions, as we were saying just now they were.
