Jowett: concrete

The reason why I say this is that I want you to agree with me in thinking, not only that absolute greatness will never be great and also small, but that greatness in us or in the concrete will never admit the small or admit of being exceeded : instead of this, one of two things will happen — either the greater will fly or retire before the opposite, which is the less, or at the advance of the less will cease to exist ; but will not, if allowing or admitting smallness, be changed by that ; even as I, having received and admitted smallness when compared with Simmias, remain just as I was, and am the same small person. And as the idea of greatness cannot condescend ever to be or become small, in like manner the smallness in us cannot be or become great ; nor can any other opposite which remains the same ever be or become its own opposite, but either passes away or perishes in the change. PHAEDO  

Socrates   inclined his head to the speaker and listened. I like your courage, he said, in reminding us of this. But you do not observe that there is a difference in the two cases. For then we were speaking of opposites in the concrete, and now of the essential opposite which, as is affirmed, neither in us nor in nature can ever be at variance with itself : then, my friend, we were speaking of things in which opposites are inherent and which are called after them, but now about the opposites which are inherent in them and which give their name to them ; these essential opposites will never, as we maintain, admit of generation into or out of one another. At the same time, turning to Cebes, he said : Were you at all disconcerted, Cebes, at our friend’s objection ? PHAEDO

Then now mark the point at which I am aiming : not only do essential opposites exclude one another, but also concrete things, which, although not in themselves opposed, contain opposites ; these, I say, also reject the idea which is opposed to that which is contained in them, and at the advance of that they either perish or withdraw. There is the number three for example ; will not that endure annihilation or anything sooner than be converted into an even number, remaining three ? PHAEDO

Soc. Consider a further point : did we not understand them to explain the generation of heat, whiteness, or anything else, in some such manner as the following : — were they not saying that each of them is moving between the agent and the patient, together with a perception, and that the patient ceases to be a perceiving power and becomes a percipient, and the agent a quale instead of a quality ? I suspect that quality may appear a strange and uncouth term to you, and that you do not understand the abstract expression. Then I will take concrete instances : I mean to say that the producing power or agent becomes neither heat nor whiteness but hot and white, and the like of other things. For I must repeat what I said before, that neither the agent nor patient have any absolute existence, but when they come together and generate sensations and their objects, the one becomes a thing a certain quality, and the other a percipient. You remember ? THEAETETUS  

Soc. When, my boy, the one does not belong to the class of things that are born and perish, as in the instances which we were giving, for in those cases, and when unity is of this concrete nature, there is, as I was saying, a universal consent that no refutation is needed ; but when the assertion is made that man is one, or ox is one, or beauty one, or the good one, then the interest which attaches to these and similar unities and the attempt which is made to divide them gives birth to a controversy. PHILEBUS