The Character and Provenance of Socrates' 'Dream' in the Theaetetus

Abstract

THE PURPOSE of this article is to make one further attempt to understand the theory described by Socrates in the Theaetetus (20I d 8) as a 'dream to match a dream'. This is an elusive and puzzling theory which in recent years has been variously interpreted as a nominalist's theory of definition1, as a physicist's theory of the analysis of natural objects into their ultimate constituents 2 and as an anticipation of modern attempts to analyse propositions and the facts stated by them into their 'atomic' elements.3 Socrates' account is detailed and has a certain specious clarity which makes it easy to state, but it contains so many gaps and problems that the sense of the theory, even its general sense, remains obscure. Nor is it easy to take an indirect route to the sense of the theory by way of its provenance, for the only obvious clue to this, the use of the term etLal't (2oi d 2-3), gives the modern reader no assistance since the word seems not to occur in extant Greek literature before Aristotle. Outside the dialogue itself the only ancient source which promises to be relevant is the Metaphysics of Aristotle, for in Z. I7. 104I b9-3 3 and H. 3 1043b4-32, passages which are themselves not free from difficulties of interpretation, Aristotle criticises some ideas about the analysis of compounds which strongly resemble those put forward by Socrates in his discussion of the 'dream'. These passages have often been related to the Theaetetus, but mainly by those interested in proving or disproving the attribution of the 'dreamed' theory to the Socratic Antisthenes. I shall argue that they in no way support this attribution but that, if taken together with the evidence offered in the Theaetetus not only by Socrates' account but also by his presentation of it, they suggest another line of interpretation.