Between Wisdom and Ignorance
Read the full text in our reader
Socrates — μάλιστά γε.
Diotima — ἦ καὶ ἂν μὴ σοφόν, ἀμαθές; ἢ οὐκ ᾔσθησαι ὅτι ἔστιν τι μεταξὺ σοφίας καὶ ἀμαθίας;
Socrates — τί τοῦτο;
Diotima — τὸ ὀρθὰ δοξάζειν καὶ ἄνευ τοῦ ἔχειν λόγον δοῦναι οὐκ οἶσθʼ, ἔφη, ὅτι οὔτε ἐπίστασθαί ἐστιν— ἄλογον γὰρ πρᾶγμα πῶς ἂν εἴη ἐπιστήμη;— οὔτε ἀμαθία— τὸ γὰρ τοῦ ὄντος τυγχάνον πῶς ἂν εἴη ἀμαθία;— ἔστι δὲ δήπου τοιοῦτον ἡ ὀρθὴ δόξα, μεταξὺ φρονήσεως καὶ ἀμαθίας.
Socrates — ἀληθῆ, ἦν δʼ ἐγώ, λέγεις.
Most certainly. And is what is not wise, then, ignorant? Or have you not perceived that there is something between wisdom and ignorance? What is this? To opine rightly, yet without being able to give an account — do you not know, she said, that it is neither knowing —for how could an unreasoned thing be knowledge? — nor ignorance —for how could what hits upon what is be ignorance? — right opinion, surely, is just such a thing, between understanding and ignorance. True, said I, you speak.
Diotima teaches the young Socrates the crucial move: between two opposites there can be a middle. Is what is not wise necessarily ignorant? No — there is something between wisdom and ignorance: right opinion (ὀρθὴ δόξα), which hits on the truth yet cannot give an account of why. It is neither knowledge (for it is unreasoned) nor ignorance (for it grasps what is real). Socrates agrees.
This is more than logic-chopping. Right opinion as a middle state appears again in the Meno and the Theaetetus, where knowledge is defined as true opinion with an account — and it is the model on which Diotima will place Eros. If the wise do not seek wisdom (they have it) and the ignorant do not (they do not feel their lack), then the lover of wisdom, the philosophos, is exactly the in-between being who knows he lacks and therefore reaches. Eros will turn out to be that reaching itself: not a god, not a mortal, not beautiful, not ugly, but the desire that stretches from lack toward the beautiful and the good. The whole architecture of the speech is being laid in this small grammatical point about the middle.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Plato, Symposium 202a in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Plato, Symposium — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Plato, Symposium 202a — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/symposium/202a/