TèchnoSophìa 4.1 Hierarchy of Knowledge.

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Plato takes up the challenge of Socrates, who had curbed rhetoric by questioning morality, and elevates it to a system, constructing a technical barrier against relativism. His objective is to strictly subordinate doing to thinking. His critique, often misunderstood as aristocratic contempt for manual labor, is in reality a structural analysis particularly effective in the frantic contemporary search for machinic efficiency: practical competence, left to itself, is blind.

In the Gorgias Plato operates a sharp distinction between simple empeiría (empirical ability, the trick of the trade acquired by habit) and true téchne. The former is a routine of trial and error, a mere practice that knows how to do things but ignores the why. The latter is a knowledge that knows the nature of its own object and can render reason for it (logon didonai). Practical techniques risk losing much of their value if they are not guided by a technology of thought that allows having a large-scale vision of what the practical technique permits doing and of its impact on society.

Here Plato introduces Dialectic as the supreme technique of thought. Where practical arts manipulate matter, Dialectic manipulates concepts and essences to identify the Good. It is the royal technique that must govern all the others. The metaphor that best describes this vision is that of the helmsman of the ship (kybernétes). The carpenter knows how to build the hull, the oarsman knows how to apply force, but only the helmsman, he who possesses the technique of orientation and watches the stars, knows where to go.

The Platonic move is therefore foundational. Dóxa (unstable opinion) is the realm of practical operativity, which changes and adapts; epistéme (stable science) is the realm of intellectual technique that fixes standards. Plato is the host of the techniques of thought that are able to fix the ends (the Ideas), without which the technique of the hand is only a disordered movement, an efficiency devoid of direction.