"And by the sieve, my informant told me, he means the soul, and the soul of the foolish he compared to a sieve, because it is perforated through lack of belief and forgetfulness is unable to hold anything."
— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)
Author
Work Title
Date
c. 387 B.C.
Metaphor
"And by the sieve, my informant told me, he means the soul, and the soul of the foolish he compared to a sieve, because it is perforated through lack of belief and forgetfulness is unable to hold anything."
Metaphor in Context
Socrates: Well, life as you describe it is a strange affair. I ahould not be surprised, you know, if Euripides was right when he said, 'Who knows, if life be death, and death be life?' And perhaps we are actually dead, for I once heard one of our wise men say that we are now dead and that our body is a tomb, and that that part of the soul in which dwell the desires is of a nature to be swayed and to shift to and fro. And so some clever fellow, a Sicilian perhaps or Italian, writing in allegory, by a slight perversion of language named this part of the soul a jar, because it can be swayed and easily persuaded, and the foolish he called the uninitiate, and that part of the soul in foolish people where the desires reside--the uncontrolled and nonretentive part--he likened to a leaky jar, because it can never be filled. And in opposition to you, Callicles, he shows that of those in Hades--the unseen world he means--these uninitiate must be most unhappy, for they will carry water to pour into a perforated jar in a similarly perforated sieve. And by the sieve, my informant told me, he means the soul, and the soul of the foolish he compared to a sieve, because it is perforated through lack of belief and forgetfulness is unable to hold anything. These ideas may naturally seem somewhat absurd, but they reveal what I want to put before you, to persuade you to change and admit that orderly folk are happier than the undisciplined, or even if I offer may such allegories, will you not withdraw an inch?
(492e-493d, pp. 274-275)
(492e-493d, pp. 274-275)
Categories
Provenance
Reading Paul S.MacDonald's History of the Concept of Mind: Speculations About Soul, Mind and Spirit from Homer to Hume (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2003): 43.
Citation
Hamilton, E. and Cairns, H., Eds. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Bollingen Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Date of Entry
06/07/2003
Date of Review
05/14/2007
