Page:Plato or Protagoras.djvu/27

 truth and a claim to truth, and as the latter may be wrong, error becomes a kind of truth and we are, once more, unable to distinguish between truth and error.

Such in essence is the impasse to which all Plato’s ingenious speculations in the end conducted him. He could not find the real clue to the maze, because of his initial abstractions. Having abstracted from the personal maker of the judgment, he never noticed that errors do not exist as such until they are found out. A false judgment is in form indistinguishable from a true one, a self-contradictory judgment being unmeaning as expressed. Hence in dealing with errors no man can ever be simultaneously in a condition of both knowing and not knowing. While we maintain the ‘error,’ we judge it to be ‘true’; when we have discovered it to be an ‘error,’ we no longer affirm it. As critics we can of course perceive errors which others judge to be true. Indeed, the ‘errors’ that trouble us are generally not our own, but those of others, which they affirm and we deny. But when the traditional ‘logic,’ after tabooing all systematic reference to the psychological context of its subject-matter, proceeds to treat of Error in the abstract, it declines to look beyond the fact that ‘the same’ proposition is both affirmed and denied, both known and not known. I.e., it has abstracted from this difference in the persons who affirm and reject the erroneous judgment. But this difference is essential, because it may always affect and dissolve the unity of what has been called ‘the same’. Hence ‘logic’ has debarred itself from all intelligible treatment of the question.

The second point to be grasped is that the seat of Error is not in any defective configuration of the ‘object,’ but in its relation to a cognitive purpose. That some errors consist in the affirmation of non-existent objects is not only unimportant, but wholly irrelevant. It is irrelevant because it involves a confusion of an ontological with a logical ‘object’. The logical ‘object’ is never non-existent, even though we may be discussing Centaurs, Chimaeras, Absolutes, intellectualistic theories of knowledge and other ontological nonentities. But all errors denote the defeat of a cognitive purpose. Hence the failure of a purposive thought to attain the aim