Tuflos in Plato's Republic
Reminder: The intention of such word exercises is to give you the opportunity to think through how Plato is using an important term within the dialogue. We will give you our take later this month.
Tuflos (blind)
353c3: “Stop for a moment. Could eyes ever do a fine job of their work if they did not have their proper virtue but, instead of the virtue, vice?” [Socrates] / “How could they?” he [Thrasymachus] said. “For you probably mean blindness instead of sight.”
411d4: “But what about when he does nothing else and never communes with a Muse? Even if there was some love of learning in his soul, because it never tastes of any kind of learning or investigation nor partakes in speech or the rest of music, doesn’t it become weak, deaf, and blind because it isn’t awakened or trained and its perceptions aren’t purified?” [Socrates]
465d1: “Because of their unseemliness, I hesitate to mention the pettiest of the evils of which they would be rid: poor men flattering rich, all the want and grief they have in rearing children and making money for the necessary support of the household, making debts and repudiating them, doing all sorts of things to provide for the allowances that they turn over to the women and domestics to manage. What and how they suffer form these things, my friend, is perfectly plain, ignoble, and not worth mentioning.” [Socrates] / “Yes, it is plain,” he [Glaucon] said, “even to a blind man.”
484c3: 484c6: “But it is it plain,” I [Socrates] said, “whether it’s a blind guardian or a sharp-sighted one who ought to keep watch over anything?” / “Of course it’s plain,” he [Glaucon] said. / “Well, does there seem to be any difference, then, between blind men and those men who are really deprived of the knowledge of what each thing is; those who have no clear pattern in the soul, and are hence unable—after looking off, as painters do, toward what is truest, and ever referring to it and contemplating it as precisely as possible—to give laws about what is fine, just, and good, if any need to be given, and as guardians to preserve those that are already established?” / “No, by Zeus,” he said, “there isn’t much difference.”
506c6: 506c7: 506c11: “And what about this?” I [Socrates] said. “Is it your opinion that it’s just to speak about what one doesn’t know as though one knew?” / “Not at all as though one knew,” he [Adeimantus] said; “however, one ought to be willing to state what one supposes, as one’s supposition.” / “What?” I said. “Haven’t you noticed that all opinions without knowledge are ugly? The best of them are blind. Or do men who opine something true without intelligence seem to you any different from blind men who travel the right road?” / “No,” he said. / “Do you want to see ugly things, blind and crooked, when it’s possible to hear bright and fair ones form others?” / “No, in the name of Zeus, Socrates,” said Glaucon. You’re not going to withdraw when you are, as it were, at end. It will satisfy us even if you go through the good just as you went through justice, moderation and the rest.”
508c7: “You know,” I [Socrates] said, “that eyes, when one no longer turns them to those things over whose colors the light of day extends but to those over which the gleams of night extend, are dimmed and appear nearly blind as though pure sight were not in them.”
518c1: “Then, if this is true,” I [Socrates] said, “we must hold the following about these things: education is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be. They presumably assert that they put into the soul knowledge that isn’t in it, as though they were putting sight into blind eyes.”
527e1: “You are assuming,” I [Socrates] said. “You are like a man who is afraid of the many in your not wanting to seem to command useless studies. It’s scarcely an ordinary thing, rather it’s hard, to trust that in these studies a certain instrument of everyone’s soul—one that is destroyed and blinded by other practices—is purified and rekindled, an instrument more important to save than ten thousand eyes. For with it alone is truth. To those who share your opinion about this, what you say will seem indescribably good, while all those who have had no awareness at all of it can be expected to believe you are talking nonsense. They see no other benefit from these studies worth mentioning. Consider right here with which of these two types of men you are discussing. Or are you making arguments for neither but chiefly for your own sake, without, however, grudging anyone else who might be able to get some profit from them?” / “I choose the latter,” he [Glaucon] said, “to speak and ask and answer mostly for my own sake.”
550d6: “Mustn’t it first be told how the transformation form timarchy to oligarchy takes place?” [Socrates] / “Yes.” [Adeimantus] / “And really,” I said, “the way it is transformed is plain even to a blind man?” / “How?” / “The treasure house full of gold,” I said, “which each man has, destroys that regime. First they seek out expenditures for themselves and pervert the laws in that direction; they themselves and their wives disobey them.”
554b5: “A sort of squalid man,” I [Socrates] said, “getting a profit out of everything, filling up his storeroom—exactly the kind of men the multitude praises—isn’t this the one who is like such a regime?” / “In my opinion at least,” he [Adeimantus] said. “Money, in any event, is held in honor above all by the city and by the man like it.” / “For I don’t suppose,” I said, “such a man has devoted himself to education.” / “Not in my opinion,” he said. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have set a blind leader over the chorus and honored it above all.”