Attention and answering

Use in the book

The first demand for attention follows an unsatisfactory answer. Socrates offers the farmer as a test; the companion replies that a lover of gain thinks he should gain from everything. Socrates objects that he is answering at random, as though someone had wronged him, and asks him to attend and answer as if the question were being posed afresh. The instruction seeks a discriminating response to the particular case instead of an indignant repetition of the general accusation.

At 225d–226a Socrates adds a requirement of sincerity: the younger man must not answer with something he does not himself think. Attention therefore includes responsibility for one’s assent. Yet this rebuke is also part of the scene’s asymmetry. Socrates controls the questions and characterises the companion’s resistance as deception. The latter later reverses the charge, maintaining that Socrates is the deceiver. Careful reading should not treat every Socratic accusation as an independently established fact about the respondent.

The exchange changes at 230a when the companion asks how Socrates means his question. Socrates explains through food. At 230e–231a2 he identifies the same manner of answer for drink, tells the companion to imitate it, and then offers a definition when the companion cannot provide one himself. A proper answer now states what good and bad instances have in common. The earlier discipline of attending to a particular example becomes instruction in supplying a shared account.

This assistance has a consequence: Socrates supplies much of the conceptual work to which the companion assents. When the latter is at a loss at 231c, the questioning continues. At 232a Socrates checks his memory of the argument’s starting point and offers to remind him. These are supports for participation, but they do not guarantee mastery. The companion’s final distinction between being compelled and persuaded shows that giving the required answers can coexist with unresolved resistance.

The dialogue thus makes answering both a methodological and an interpersonal problem. Refusing a careless response is legitimate within inquiry; treating every hesitation as bad faith would foreclose it. The text leaves the reader to assess how Socrates’ pressure, explanations and offer of revision bear on the companion’s eventual assent.

Places to read

1. 225b–cπροσέχων ἐμοὶ τὸν νοῦν ἀπόκριναι — Attention is directed to Socrates and joined to the command to answer.
2. 230eὁ αὐτὸς ἂν τρόπος εἴη τῆς ἀποκρίσεως — The drink analogy supplies a manner of answering.
3. 231aἐμοῦ λέγοντος σκόπει — When the companion cannot answer, he is asked to examine Socrates’ proposal.
4. 232aΜνημονεύεις οὖν — The closing review tests memory as well as assent.

Translation in this edition

The edition’s “pay attention” translates the mind idiom without making nous a separate faculty-theory. “Manner of the answer” at 230e preserves the noun apokrisis, while “imitate me as I answer” keeps the practical modelling at 231a. Its wording also leaves the crucial distinction visible: Socrates asks for truthfulness early, but the companion does not finally report having been persuaded.