Sight and colour

Use in the book

At 167c–d Socrates asks whether there could be a sight of sights, itself and non-sights which sees none of the colours ordinary sights see. Critias denies the example. “No colour” is indispensable: Socrates is not merely asking whether someone can see an eye, or whether normal seeing can coexist with awareness that one sees. He is constructing a capacity isolated from the objects that ordinarily define it.

At 168d the argument becomes conditional: if sight sees itself, it must itself have some colour, because sight cannot see the colourless. The consequence is an object-condition on self-application. The text does not immediately state that being coloured and being sight are formally contradictory. Instead it later classifies self-seeing among the cases that many doubt, as distinct from impossible reflexive numerical comparisons (168e–169a).

The distinction guards against two overreadings. The example does not present a physiological theory of vision, and it does not finally prohibit every reflective visual awareness. Its task is to make Critias clarify how a knowledge can have knowledge rather than an ordinary learned field as its object.

Places to read

1. 167c–dSight of sight excluding colours
2. 168d–169aColour required for self-seeing; possibility left under qualified doubt

Translation in this edition

The repeated English “sight” mirrors the Greek repetition rather than distinguishing the organ, the act and its object by new technical nouns. The text says colour, not shape or a general modern category of visual information.

ἄχρως

Attested: ἄχρων (achrōn). Colourless; qualifies the imagined sight that would see itself without possessing its normal visible feature. References: 168d. Lexical identification: lemma: ἄχρως. See Sight and colour.

ὁράω

Attested: ὁρᾷ (horai). See; the sensory capacity normally has visible colours as its object. References: 167d. Lexical identification: lemma: ὁράω. See Sight and colour.

ὄψις

Attested: ὄψις / ὄψεις (opsis / opseis). Sight or vision; an analogy for a capacity supposed to take itself and other instances of its kind as objects. References: 167c, 167d, 168d, 168e. Lexical identification: lemma: ὄψις. See Sight and colour.

χρῶμα

Attested: χρῶμα (chrōma). Colour; the normal object of sight, omitted by the imagined sight that sees only itself and other sights. References: 167d. Lexical identification: lemma: χρῶμα. See Sight and colour.

Use in the book

Colour does not give Flatlanders a second visual dimension. Painted bodies still appear as lines. What changes is the information carried along those lines: a hue identifies a side, distinguishes front from back, and reduces reliance on fine gradations of brightness. This is why the invention can transform perception without changing anatomy. It turns difficult reading of form into an easier code.

The consequences reveal that a mode of recognition is never merely technical. Sight recognition has required education, leisure, and difficult exercises; colour enables people excluded from that training to accomplish practical tasks. The narrator admits that the labouring classes thereby approach equality with higher Polygons. Second Nature challenges the argument that inherited nature itself demands permanent inequality. An artificial convention can undo part of what rulers describe as the natural order.

Yet a code can be imitated. The fraudulent Dodecagon story depends on colour being detachable from the body whose rank it signifies. Twelve colours do not produce twelve sides. The Universal Colour Bill would similarly permit a Woman and a Priest to look alike from particular positions. The possibility does not mean that every viewer must always confuse them: size and fading at the ends remain distinguishable. The narrator's fear depends on people no longer attending to those differences. The crisis concerns habits of interpretation as much as deception.

Colour also preserves an artistic promise that the Square's politics cannot extinguish. He describes the lost period with sensuous pleasure and credits it with the finest poetry. After suppression, however, even its vocabulary is forbidden to most inhabitants. The state controls not only possession but the names through which absence might be remembered or desired. The apparent abolition is selective: the Circles and qualified teachers may name it, its advanced instructional use is reported only from hearsay, and the ruler monopolizes production. “Non-existent” is therefore a social verdict with institutional exceptions. Colour is removed from public life precisely because its power remains understood.

Places to read

1. §82“degrees of brightness and obscurity”
2. §82“To live was then in itself a delight”
3. §923“Colour, which was a second Nature”
4. §923“the chromatic taint”
5. §1023“any word denoting Colour”

In this edition

Note 90 proposes Plato's suspicion of deceptive colour as a comparison; note 95 clarifies the painted Woman–Priest resemblance. The modern editor's comparison does not require treating all appearances as false. Abbott's story keeps colour's convenience, beauty, vulnerability to imitation, and political restriction in tension.

Adage

A familiar maxim or saying. Here the colour movement circulates a brief formula linking distinction of sides to distinction of colours. Printed form: adage (§ 82). See Colour.

Colour Recognition

Identification of bodies through their painted hues rather than difficult inference from angles and fading brightness. Its practical accessibility weakens the higher classes’ monopoly of expertise. Printed form: Colour Recognition (§ 923). See Colour.

Jostled

Knocked or pushed in a crowd. Painting reduces such collisions by making a body easier to recognize. Printed form: jostled (§ 82). See Colour.

Pretext

A professed ground for action, with an implication that it may excuse rather than fully justify it. The narrator treats many-sidedness as the innovators’ pretext for giving different sides different colours. Printed form: pretext (§ 82). See Colour.

Second Nature

An acquired practice so habitual and effective that it functions like an original natural condition. Colour recognition is said to have changed the practical basis of social distinctions. Printed form: second Nature (§ 923). See Colour.

Sophism

A plausible but supposedly misleading argument. The narrator applies the term to the claim that distinct sides naturally imply distinct colours. Printed form: sophism (§ 82). See Colour.

Suffused

Spread over or permeated with a quality. The language of the colour period is imagined as itself tinted with richer feeling or thought. Printed form: suffused (§ 82). See Colour.

Variegated

Marked with different colours. The inventor’s multicoloured frame makes his identity and movements readily legible. Printed form: variegated (§ 82). See Colour.

pure from the pollution of paint (contextual phrase)

Exact wording: “pure from the pollution of paint” (§82).

The repetition of p makes the verdict memorable, almost proverbial. Pure turns the absence of pigment into moral cleanliness, while pollution makes an applied colour sound like contamination. The narrator assigns this purity to Women and Priests together, even though their shared exemption arises from very different social positions. What the Women confess as deficiency, the Priests proclaim as perfection: neither is conventionally credited with distinct sides requiring distinct colours. The phrase therefore exposes how the same visual condition can carry opposite social values before receiving one convenient moral name. It also jars with the narrator’s delight in the lost painted world. His evaluative vocabulary condemns what his description makes desirable.

Related: Colour; Painting; Universal Colour Bill.

a second Nature (contextual phrase)

Exact wording: “a second Nature” (§923).

An acquired habit becomes second nature when it seems as immediate as an original disposition. Flatland gives the idiom constitutional force. Colour recognition has changed what ordinary people can do, so the reformers argue that legal distinctions should change too. The capitalized Nature brings the new practice into competition with the authority constantly invoked for inherited rank. The phrase does not mean that painting literally alters the number of anyone’s sides. It means that a cultural invention can transform the practical consequences of those sides. This distinction is crucial: the new code makes competence more widely available while remaining capable of imitation. Its political strength and its vulnerability arise from the same detachment of visible signs from bodily form.

Related: Colour; Reform and equality; Dodecagon.