Dialogue on the Mentor and Trust

Setting: late afternoon in the agora. Glaucon is sitting on a step with two papyrus scrolls on his lap, neither of them unrolled. Socrates comes over and sits beside him.

SOCRATES: Two scrolls and neither one open. Either both are bad, or you do not know which to read first.

GLAUCON: Neither, Socrates. They are too good, and that is the problem. This one is by Damon, with whom I have studied for three years. That one is by Theophilus, whom I met last winter. I have never heard anyone explain things the way those two do.

SOCRATES: And what is the affliction in having two good masters?

GLAUCON: Yesterday I quoted Theophilus in front of Damon. He went silent, then said Theophilus is a charlatan and that I would be wasting my time. Today I told Theophilus, and he laughed and said Damon is an old man repeating what he read at twenty. Each of them is everything I admire. And each despises the other.

SOCRATES: And what do you conclude from that?

GLAUCON: That one of the two is wrong, and that I need to find out which, so I can follow the right one.

SOCRATES: Tell me something first. Why did you look for a master?

GLAUCON: Because one does not learn alone. Whoever has already walked the road spares the others from tripping on the same stones.

SOCRATES: That is true, and it is good that you looked. But answer honestly: when you found Damon, was it only the road that interested you, or also the rest?

GLAUCON: What rest?

SOCRATES: The rest of no longer having to decide. Having someone to ask “is this right?” and accepting the answer. Sleeping in the knowledge that, if you err, the error belongs to whoever taught you.

GLAUCON: I do not like how it sounds, but yes. There was rest in it.

SOCRATES: Do not be ashamed. Every man wants that rest, and that is why every man looks for a mentor in such a hurry. It is not only knowledge we seek; it is someone on whom to lay the weight of judging. And notice: as long as you had a single master, the rest worked. What broke it was the second one.

GLAUCON: Because now one says one thing and the other says another.

SOCRATES: No. On most things, the two say the same, or you would not admire both. What broke your rest was something else: you discovered that the admiration you feel for one does not oblige the other to feel the same. You wanted your masters to love each other as you love them. They have no such duty.

GLAUCON: But if Damon is wise, and says Theophilus is a charlatan, should I not at least consider it?

SOCRATES: You should, and you should also consider the opposite. But let us go slowly. When Damon teaches you geometry, where does his authority come from?

GLAUCON: From knowing geometry.

SOCRATES: And when he tells you Theophilus is a charlatan, where does the authority come from?

GLAUCON: From… knowing Theophilus, I suppose.

SOCRATES: And does he? Has he heard him teach? Has he read what he writes? Or does he know the reputation, a sentence spoken in an argument, the memory of an old feud nobody remembers how it started?

GLAUCON: I do not know. I never asked.

SOCRATES: Then here is the first thing to keep. A man can be a master in one art and as ignorant as anyone in a second. Knowing geometry makes no one a judge of character. When you accept Damon’s judgment of Theophilus with the same trust you give the theorem, you are extending his authority into ground where he never earned it. And he, if honest, would not claim it.

GLAUCON: So neither one is wrong about geometry. They are wrong about each other.

SOCRATES: Perhaps. Or perhaps one of them is right, and you do not yet know. But notice what you just did: a minute ago, the problem was “which of the two to follow”. Now it is “what does each one actually know, and about what”. It is a better question.

GLAUCON: It is a question that hands the work back to me.

SOCRATES: That work was always yours, Glaucon. You had only lent it out. We talked, on another afternoon, about the tablet in the square: the label someone sticks on you does not excuse you from examining. The same holds for the label one master sticks on another. “Charlatan” and “old man who repeats” are thrown stones, not reasons. Ask for the reasons. If they come, weigh them. If they do not, leave the stones on the ground.

GLAUCON: And if I weigh them and conclude that Damon, who taught me so much, was wrong about Theophilus? What do I do with that?

SOCRATES: What do you do when your horse stumbles?

GLAUCON: I get it up and carry on. I do not sell the horse.

SOCRATES: And why would you sell the master? Glaucon, listen well to this, because it is the part that costs the young the most: your master will err. Not “may err”, will. He will err about people, he will err about facts, he will have days of jealousy, of tiredness and of stubbornness. And when that happens, you will have two wrong ways out and one right one. The first wrong one is pretending you did not see, to protect the rest. The second wrong one is tearing down the whole man, because one column cracked. The right one is harder: keep learning geometry from the one who knows geometry, and keep for yourself the judgment about people.

GLAUCON: It sounds like having less trust in him.

SOCRATES: It sounds like having the right trust, instead of whole trust. Whole trust is what one gives the gods, and not even them that much. Giving a man the trust that belongs to a god is not honoring him. It is condemning him to disappoint you, because he has no way to pay a debt you yourself invented.

GLAUCON: So the mentor is a man like me.

SOCRATES: Who went a little further down a road. Only that, and that is already a lot. Notice that it is precisely the error that lets you recognize an equal in him. A master who never erred would not be a master, he would be an oracle, and before oracles one does not learn, one obeys. A man who errs and corrects, who shows where he stumbled, teaches you twice: he teaches the art and he teaches that the art fits inside a human life. The error is the proof that the road he walked is a road you can also walk.

GLAUCON: I had never thought of the master’s error as a gift.

SOCRATES: It is not a gift, it is a fact. But it is a fact that frees you, if you accept it. As long as your master is perfect, you will be a pupil forever. On the day you see him err, and still respect him anyway, you will have begun to have an opinion of your own. And having your own opinion about people, including those you most admire, is the beginning of being someone, and not someone’s shadow.

GLAUCON: And Theophilus? Do I keep listening to him?

SOCRATES: Keep listening to both. Learn from each what each one knows. And when one speaks ill of the other, do what you would do with any other claim: ask “why?”, listen, and decide for yourself. It is possible that one day you will find one of them was right. It is possible you will find both were being small, as men sometimes are. In either case you will have learned something neither of them could teach you: that your eyes count too.

GLAUCON: And if my eyes err?

SOCRATES: They will, and then you will be like them. That is what makes us human, Glaucon: not the absence of error, but the duty to judge even knowing we may err, and the decency to keep honoring those who erred before us.

..then Glaucon put both scrolls in the same bag, Socrates remarked that the bag looked lighter, and the two went for a beer.

Glossary

• agora: the central square of Greek cities, where the people gathered
• papyrus: the material people wrote on before paper, kept in rolled scrolls
• oracle: a place or person that, in ancient Greece, gave answers held to come from the gods

Note

This dialogue is a continuation of the Dialogue on Labels and Truth. There, the question was the label others stick on us. Here, it is the label the people we admire stick on one another.

Everyone looks for a mentor, and the need is legitimate: nobody learns everything alone. The problem is not in trusting, it is in the amount. It is very easy to hand someone we admire not only what they know, but also what they think, including about other people. And when two people we respect do not respect each other, the comfort of having a guide collapses, because we discover that their judgment of the world was never a single one.

The way out is neither picking a side nor abandoning both. It is accepting that everyone errs, mentor included, and that having our own opinion about people, formed with our own reasons and our own eyes, is not disrespect. It is the only form of respect that does not demand the other be more than human.