More on the "Midwife" in the Theaetetus

In the Theaetetus, Socrates tells a man and a boy who don't know him that he knows nothing himself, yet he is a midwife of speeches, capable of eliciting a speech and then determining whether it's a fertile egg or an infertile "wind-egg." I've already noted that in the extended metaphor itself, the midwife never speaks and I've claimed (though not previously in these words) that the wind-egg's being carried away is its infertility. To apply an Aristotelianism (as Sachs translates the expression), the being-carried-away of the wind-egg is its "being what it must be in order to be at all." Likewise, the fertile egg's remaining is the same as its fertility. You understand that this is how things look to me mid-way through reading the Theaetetus.

But although I still cannot recall the midwife's ever speaking within the extended metaphor itself, Socrates's action as midwife of the speeches of Theaetetus and Theodorus is to bring the action of the midwife into speech. Consider: Theaetetus and Theodorus make speeches about speeches; Socrates tends to answer with speeches about the natural disposition of speeches. As one of his criticisms of the Truth of Protagoras (or perhaps Socrates's caricature of it) that what each person perceives is the truth, Socrates points out that in times of crisis, people aren't willing to rely on their own perception of right action as being the truth about right action; instead, they look for leadership from someone they think has better perception or knowledge than they do. Another of Socrates's critical tactics is to engage Theaetetus and Theodorus in looking along the temporal dimension; he gets them to agree that if two people make conflicting predictions about the future, then however true it may be that their speeches are true for each of them, they won't both turn out to be right in the event.

Socrates appears to be modeling in speech the mute midwifery of the deadly present and future, in which the perceptions, thoughts, and (spoken) speeches that survive are those of the humans who survive. I don't think Socrates really even tries to challenge what I take to have been the core of the Truth of Protagoras, which I think is expressed so well by Aristotle, that the being-at-work of the perceptible thing is the same as the being-at-work of the perceiver. However, Socrates does show the fragility of the Truth of Protagoras in time: Perspectivalism is a perspective that doesn't seem much favored by the midwifery of the dangerous future. Yet it does survive or re-emerge and, I mean, it does so as a speech that is quite persuasive when developed intelligently, as I think Plato and Aristotle intend it to be developed by their readers.

Perspectivalism must have value for life despite the dangerous tendency of its popular caricature to erode people's reliance on those who have better understanding and greater foresight. It also has some means of surviving the danger it faces, itself, the rejection of its popular caricature when people are faced with the evidence that they must find and rely on those who have (somehow) "better" understanding and "greater" foresight. I think improving one's understanding of perspectivalism (in regard to its value for human life and its own fitness to survive, so to speak, on "the battleground of ideas") depends on achieving a perspective on perspectivalism from which one can see a hierarchy of perspectives on perspectivalism. And in regard to politics, I think the best arrangement is one in which a "Higher Perspectivalism" is cultivated among a party of leaders, while the people at large are vigorously defended from the "Lower Perspectivalism."