Horses, dogs, oxen, and the change of knower

Use in the book

Horses and dogs enter at 137b–c as subjects to be improved and punished rightly. The knowers are the people capable of doing that work. The point is that one craft both makes its subjects best and recognizes which are decent or worthless. The first analogy therefore concerns expert knowledge about an animal kind.

At 137e Socrates instead asks about someone “being a horse.” If this horse did not know decent and base horses, would it also fail to know itself and what sort it is? The same question follows for an ox and then a dog. Oxen occur only at this self-knowledge stage; the text did not previously establish an ox-training craft in the way it introduced horses and dogs.

This switch is the passage’s critical hinge. Knowledge possessed by an expert about horses is not automatically knowledge possessed by a horse about itself. The argument can be read as proposing that any member of a kind needs evaluative knowledge of the kind to understand its own quality. But that proposition requires argument of its own, and the dialogue supplies rapid assents rather than an explanation of animal self-understanding. Edition note 26 explicitly marks the move from knowing horses to being one.

The human case at 138a makes the intended result clear. Someone ignorant of decent and worthless people is said to be ignorant of himself, since he too is human. The animals help detach the abstract relation of one to many from the interlocutor’s pride before it returns to human self-knowledge. They are not evidence for a developed theory of animal consciousness.

The animals’ evaluative vocabulary is also worth preserving. “Decent,” “base” and “worthless” occur across species. This makes human quality seem continuous with standards an expert applies to a kind, but it leaves open whether moral excellence can be treated just like excellence in a trained animal.

Places to read

1. 137cκύνας οὐχ οἳ βελτίστους ἐπίστανται ποιεῖν — At first the knowers are the people who make dogs best.
2. 137eΕἰ ἄρα ἵππος ὢν ἀγνοοῖ — The imagined ignorant subject is now a horse itself.
3. 137eΚαὶ εἰ βοῦς ὢν — The ox appears in the later self-knowledge series.
4. 137eΟὕτω δὴ καὶ εἰ κύων — The dog repeats the changed structure.

Translation in this edition

The second occurrence of “oxen” is supplied in the Greek as ⟨βοῦς⟩, a conjectural addition credited to Bekker in the apparatus. The translation includes the supplied word, according to the edition’s convention. The supplementation clarifies the animal objects; it does not remove the larger shift in who is supposed to know.