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Plato: The Man and His Work
By A. E. Taylor
Note to Second Edition
This Second Edition only differs from the first by the correction of misprints, the addition of one or two references and the modification of a few words in two or three of the footnotes.
A. E. Taylor, Edinburgh, March 1927
Note to Third Edition
Apart from minor corrections and some additions to the references appended to various chapters, this edition only differs from its precursors by the presence of a Chronological Table of Dates and an Appendix, dealing briefly with the dubia and spuria of the Platonic tradition. (I have, for convenience’ sake, included in this a short account of a number of Platonic epistles which I myself believe to be neither dubious nor spurious, but have not had occasion to cite in the body of the book.) I should explain that this essay was substantially written in 1926, though it has been revised since.
I take this opportunity of mentioning the following recent works, to which I should have been glad to give more specific references in the text, had they come into my hands a little sooner. All will be found valuable by the serious student of Plato.
Stenzel, J. Platon der Erzieher. Leipzig, 1928.
Solmsen, F. Der Entwichlung der Aristotelischen Logik und Rhetorik. Berlin, 1929.
Walzer, R. Magna Moralia und Aristotelische Ethik. Berlin, 1929.
Toeplitz, O. Das Verhältnis von Mathematik und Ideenlehre bei Plato, in Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik I. i. Berlin, 1929.
Robin, L. Greek Thought and the Origins of the Scientific Spirit. E. Tr. from the revised edition of the author’s La Pensée Grecque. London, 1928.
A. E. Taylor, Edinburgh, July 1929
Note to Fourth Edition
I have made few changes in this new edition of the text, though I have been led to rewrite one or two paragraphs in the chapter on the Timaeus by study of Professor Cornford’s valuable commentary on his translation of the dialogue. I have tried to remove misprints and detected errors throughout. Among works important for the student of Plato published since the earlier editions of this book I could mention in particular the following:
Frutiger, P. Les Mythes de Platon. Paris, 1930.
Shorey, P. What Plato Said. Chicago, 1933.
Novotný, F. Platonis Epistulae. Brno, 1930.
Harward, J. The Platonic Epistles. E. Tr. Cambridge, 1932.
Field, G. C. Plato and His Contemporaries. London, 1930.
Cornford, F. M. Plato’s Cosmology, the Timaeus of Plato translated with a running commentary. London, 1937.
Schull, P. M. Essai sur la Formation de la Pensée Grecque. Paris, 1934.
A. E. Taylor
The following abbreviations have occasionally been used:
E.G.Ph3 = Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (3rd edition), 1920.
E.R.E. = Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 1908-1921.
R.P. = Ritter and Preller, Historia Philosophiae Graccae (9th edition), 1913.
Preface
I hope two classes of readers may find their account in this book—“Honors students” in our Universities, and readers with philosophical interests, but no great store of Greek scholarship. What both classes most need in a work about Plato is to be told just what Plato has to say about the problems of thought and life, and how he says it. What neither needs is to be told what some contemporary thinks Plato should have said. The sense of the greatest thinker of the ancient world ought not to be trimmed to suit the tastes of a modern neo-Kantian, neo-Hegelian, or neo-realist. Again, to understand Plato’s thought we must see it in the right historical perspective. The standing background of the picture must be the social, political, and economic life of the age of Socrates, or, for the Laws, of the age of Plato. These considerations have determined the form of the present volume. It offers an analysis of the dialogues, not a systematization of their contents under a set of subject-headings. Plato himself hated nothing more than system-making. If he had a system, he has refused to tell us what it was, and if we attempt to force a system on a mind which was always growing, we are sure to end by misrepresentation. This is why I have tried to tell the reader just what Plato says, and made no attempt to force a “system” on the Platonic text.
“Find herein just what Plato has to say about the problems
of thought and life, and how he says it—
not what some contemporary thinks Plato should have said.”
My own comments are intended to supply exegesis, based as closely as may be on Plato’s own words, not to applaud nor to denounce. The result, I hope, is a picture which may claim the merit of historical fidelity. For the same reason I have been unusually careful to determine the date and historical setting assumed for each dialogue. We cannot really understand the Republic or the Gorgias if we forget that the Athens of these conversations is meant to be the Athens of Nicias or Cleon, not the very different Athens of Plato’s own manhood, or if we find polemic against Isocrates, in talk supposed to have passed at a time when Isocrates was a mere boy. If it were not that the remark might sound immodest, I would say that the model I have had before me is Grote’s great work on the Companions of Socrates. Enjoying
I must apologize for some unavoidable omissions. I have been unable to include a chapter on the Academy in the generation after Plato and Aristotle’s criticisms of it; I have had to exclude from consideration the minor dubia and the spuria of the Platonic corpus; I have passed very lightly over much of the biology of the Timaeus. These omissions have been forced on me by the necessity of saying what I have to say in one volume of moderate compass. For the same reason I have had to make my concluding chapter little more than a series of hints. This omission will, I trust, be remedied by the publication of a study, “Forms and Numbers,” which will, in part, appear in Mind simultaneously with the issue of this volume. The details of the Timaeus are fully dealt with in a Commentary now in course of printing at the Clarendon Press. A brief account—better than none—of the transmission of the Platonic tradition will be found in my little book, Platonism and its Influence (1924; Marshall Jones Co., Boston, U.S.A.; British Agents, Harrap & Son).
Want of space has sometimes forced me to state a conclusion without a review of the evidence, but I hope I have usually indicated the quarters where the evidence may be sought. May I say, once for all, that this book is no “compilation”? I have tried to form a judgment on all questions, great and small, for myself, and mention of any work, ancient or modern, means, with the rarest of exceptions, that I have studied it from one end to the other.
There remains the grateful duty of acknowledging obligations. I am a debtor to many besides those whom I actually quote, and I hope I have not learned least from many whose views I feel bound to reject. In some cases I have echoed a well-known phrase or accepted a well-established result without express and formal acknowledgment. It must be understood that such things are mere consequences of the impossibility of excessive multiplication of footnotes, and that I here, once for all, request any one from whom I may have made such a loan to accept my thanks. The recommendations at the ends of chapters are not meant to be exhaustive nor necessarily to imply agreement with all that is said in the work or chapter recommended. The last thing I should wish is that my readers should see Plato through my spectacles. I wish here to make general mention of obligation to a host of scholars of our own time, such as Professors Apelt, Parmentier, Robin, Dr.
To two living scholars I must make very special acknowledgment. How much I owe to the published writings of my friend and colleague in Scotland, Professor Burnet, will be apparent on almost every page of my book; I owe even more to suggestions of every kind received during a personal intercourse of many years. I owe no less to Professor C. Ritter of Tübingen, who has given us, as part of the work of a life devoted to Platonic researches, the best existing commentary on the Laws and the finest existing full-length study of Plato and his philosophy as a whole. One cannot despair of one’s kind when one remembers that such a work was brought to completion in the darkest years Europe has known since 1648. It is a great honor to me that Dr. Ritter has allowed me to associate his name with this poor volume. Finally, I thank the publishers for their kindness in allowing the book to run to such a length.
A. E. Taylor
Edinburgh, July 1926
Chapter I. The Life of Plato
Plato,
On the mother’s side the descent is equally illustrious and more historically
These facts are of considerable importance for the student of Plato’s subsequent career. Nothing is more characteristic of him than his lifelong conviction that it is the imperative duty of the philosopher, whose highest personal happiness would be found in the life of serene contemplation of truth, to make the supreme sacrifice of devoting the best of his manhood to the service of his fellows as a statesman and legislator, if the opportunity offers. Plato was not content to preach this doctrine in the Republic; he practiced it, as we shall see, in his own life. The emphasis he lays on it is largely explained when we remember that from the first he grew up in a family with traditions of Solon and accustomed through several generations to play a prominent part in the public life of the State. Something of Plato’s remarkable insight into the realities of political life must, no doubt, be set down to early upbringing in a household of “public men.” So, too, it is important to remember, though it is too often forgotten, that the most receptive years of Plato’s early life must have been spent in the household of his stepfather, a prominent figure of the Periclean régime. Plato has often been accused of a bias against “democracy.” If he had such a bias, it is not to be accounted for by the influence of early surroundings.
He must have been originally indoctrinated with “Periclean” politics; his dislike of them in later life, so far as it
The actual history of Plato’s life up to his sixtieth year is almost a blank. In his own dialogues he makes a practice of silence about himself, only broken once in the Apology, where he names himself as one of the friends who urged Socrates to increase the amount of the fine he proposed on himself from one mina to thirty and offered to give security for the payment, and again in the Phaedo, where he mentions an illness as the explanation of his absence from the death-scene.
The gossiping Alexandrian biographers represented Plato as “hearing” Socrates at the age of eighteen or twenty. This cannot mean that his first introduction to Socrates took place at that age. We know from Plato himself that Socrates had made the close acquaintance of Plato’s uncle Charmides in the year 431, and was even then familiar with Critias.
Hermodorus,
The founding of the Academy is the turning-point in Plato’s life, and in some ways the most memorable event in the history of Western European science. For Plato it meant that, after long waiting, he had found his true work in life. He was henceforth to be the first president of a permanent institution for the prosecution of science by original research. In one way the career was not a wholly unprecedented one. Plato’s rather older contemporary Isocrates presided in the same way over an establishment for higher education, and it is likely that his school was rather the older of the two. The novel thing about the Platonic Academy was that it was an institution for the prosecution of scientific study. Isocrates, like Plato, believed in training young men for public life. But unlike Plato he held the opinion of the “man in the street” about the uselessness of science. It was his boast that the education he had to offer was not founded on hard and abstract science with no visible humanistic interest about it; he professed to teach “opinions,” as we should say, to provide the ambitious aspirant to public life with “points of view” and to train him to express his “point of view” with the maximum of polish and persuasiveness. This is just the aim of “journalism” in its best forms, and Isocrates is the spiritual father of all the “essayists” from his own day to ours, who practice the agreeable and sometimes beneficial art of saying nothing, or saying the commonplace, in a perfect style. He would be the “Greek Addison” but for the fact that personally he was a man of real discernment in political matters and, unlike Addison, really had something to say. But it is needless to remark that an education in humanistic commonplace has never really proved the right kind of training to turn out great men of action. Plato’s rival scheme meant the practical application to education of the conviction which had become permanent with him that the hope of the world depends on the union of political power and genuine science. This is why the pure mathematics—the one department of sheer hard thinking which had attained any serious development in the fourth century BC—formed the backbone of the curriculum, and why in the latter part of the century the two types of men who were successfully turned out in the Academy were original mathematicians and skilled legislators and administrators,
Unfortunately the exact date of the foundation of the Academy is unknown. From the obvious connexion between its programme and the conviction Plato speaks of having definitely reached at the time when he visited Italy and Sicily at the age of forty, we should naturally suppose that the foundation took place about this time (388-7 BC); and it is easier to suppose that the visit to Sicily preceded it, as the later biographical statements assume, than that it followed directly on its inception. If there is any truth in the statement that the real object of Plato’s journey was to visit the Pythagoreans, who were beginning to be formed into a school again under Archytas of Tarentum, we may suppose that it was precisely the purpose of founding the Academy which led Plato just at this juncture to the very quarter where he might expect to pick up useful hints and suggestions for his guidance; but this can be no more than a conjecture.
We have to think of Plato for the next twenty years as mainly occupied with the onerous work of organizing and maintaining his school. “Lecturing” would be part of this work, and we know from Aristotle that Plato did actually “lecture” without a manuscript at a much later date. But the delivery of these lectures would be only a small part of the work to be done. It was one of Plato’s firmest convictions that nothing really worth knowing can be learned by merely listening to “instruction”; the only true method of “learning” science is that of being actually engaged, in company with a more advanced mind, in the discovery of scientific truth.
In the year 367 something happened which provided Plato, now a man of sixty, with the great adventure of his life. Dionysius I of Syracuse, who had long governed his native city nominally as annually elected generalissimo, really as autocrat or “tyrant” died. He was succeeded by his son Dionysius II, a man of thirty whose education had been neglected and had left him totally unfitted to take up his father’s great task of checking the expansion of the Carthaginians, which was threatening the very existence of Greek civilization in Western Sicily. The strong man of Syracuse at the moment was Dion, brother-in-law of the new “tyrant,” the same who had been so powerfully attached to Plato twenty years before. Dion, a thorough believer in Plato’s views about the union of political power with science, conceived the idea of fetching Plato personally to Syracuse to attempt the education of his brother-in-law. Plato felt that the prospect of success was not promising, but the Carthaginian danger was very real, if the new ruler of Syracuse should prove unequal to his work, and it would be an everlasting dishonor to the Academy if no attempt were made to put its theory into practice when the opportunity offered at such a critical juncture. Accordingly, Plato, though with a great deal of misgiving, made up his mind to accept Dion’s invitation.
If the Epistles ascribed in our Plato MSS. to Plato are genuine (as I have no doubt that the great bulk of them are), they throw a sudden flood of light on Plato’s life for the next few years. To understand the situation we must bear two things in mind. Plato’s object was not, as has been fancied, the ridiculous one of setting up in the most luxurious of Greek cities a pinchbeck imitation of the imaginary city of the Republic. It was the practical and statesmanlike object of trying to fit the young Dionysius for the immediate practical duty of checking the Carthaginians
At this point Plato’s personal intervention in Sicilian politics ceases. The quarrel between Dion and Dionysius naturally went on, and Dion, whose one great fault, as Plato tells him, was want of “adaptability” and savoir-faire, made up his mind to recover his rights with the strong hand. Enlistment went on in the Peloponnese and elsewhere, with the active concurrence of many of the younger members of the Academy, and in the summer of 357 Dion made a sudden and successful dash across the water, captured Syracuse, and proclaimed its “freedom.” Plato wrote him a letter of congratulation on the success, but warned him of his propensity to carry things with too high a hand and reminded him that the world would expect the “You-know-who’s” (the Academy)
It is not necessary to follow the miserable story of events in Syracuse beyond the point where Plato’s concern with them ends. But it is worthwhile to remark that Plato’s forecast of events was fully justified. The “unification of Sicily,” when it came at last, came as a fruit of the success of the Romans in the first two Punic wars; and, as Professor Burnet has said, this was the beginning of the long series of events which has made the cleavage between Eastern Europe, deriving what civilization it has direct from Constantinople, and Western Europe with its latinized Hellenism. If Plato had succeeded at Syracuse, there might have been no “schism of the churches” and no “Eastern problem” today.
Nothing is known, beyond an anecdote or two not worth recording, of Plato’s latest years. All that we can say is that he must still have gone on from time to time lecturing to his associates in the Academy, since Aristotle, who only entered the Academy in 367, was one of his hearers, and that the years between 360 and his death must have been busily occupied with the composition of his longest and ripest contribution to the literature of moral and political philosophy, the Laws. Probably also, all the rest of the dialogues which manifestly belong to the later part of Plato’s life must be supposed to have been written after his final return from Sicily. A complete suspension of composition for several years will best explain the remarkable difference in style between all of them and even the maturest of those which preceded. It may be useful to remember that of the years mentioned as marking important events in Plato’s life, the year 388 is that of the capture of Rome by the Gauls, 367 the traditional date of the “Licinian rogations” and the defeat of the Gauls at Alba by Camillas, 361 that of the penetration of the Gauls into Campania.
See further:
Burnet, J. Greek Philosophy, Part I., Chapters xii, xv.
Burnet, J. Platonism, 1928.
Friedlander, P. Platon: Eidos, Paideia, Dialogos, 1928.
Grote, G. Plato and the other Companions cf Socrates, Chapter v.
Ritter, C. Platon, i., Chapters i-v. Munich, 1914.
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. v. Platon. Ed. 2. Berlin, 1920.
Sienzel, J. Platon der Erzieher. Leipzig, 1928.
The general historical background of Plato’s life may be studied in any good history of Greece. Specially excellent is
Meyer, E. Geschichte des Altertums, vol. v. Stuttgart and Berlin, 1902.
Robin, L. Platon, pp. 1-8.
Chapter II. The Platonic Writings
§ I. Plato is the one voluminous author of classical antiquity whose works seem to have come down to us whole and entire. Nowhere in later antiquity do we come on any reference to a Platonic work which we do not still possess. It is true that we know nothing of the contents of Plato’s lectures except from a few scanty notices in Aristotle or quotations preserved from contemporaries of Aristotle by the Aristotelian commentators. But the explanation of this seems to be that Plato habitually lectured without any kind of manuscript. This explains why Aristotle speaks of certain doctrines as taught in the “unwritten teaching” (ἄγραφα δόγματα) of his master, and why at least five of the auditors of a particularly famous lecture (that on “The Good), including both Aristotle and Xenocrates, published their own recollections of it. We must suppose that Plato’s written dialogues were meant to appeal to the “educated” at large and interest them in philosophy; the teaching given to Plato’s personal associates depended for its due appreciation on the actual contact of mind with mind within the school and was therefore not committed to writing at all. As we shall see later on, this has had the (for us) unfortunate result that we are left to learn Plato’s inmost ultimate convictions on the most important questions, the very thing we most want to know, from references in Aristotle, polemical in object, always brief, and often puzzling in the highest degree.
When we turn to the contents of our manuscripts, the first problem which awaits us is that of weeding out from the whole collection what is dubious or certainly spurious. We may start with the fact that certain insignificant items of the collection were already recognized as spurious when the arrangement of the dialogues which we find in our oldest Plato MSS. was made. By counting each dialogue great or small as a unit, and reckoning the collection of Epistles also as one dialogue, a list of thirty-six works was drawn up, arranged in “tetralogies” or groups of four. It is not absolutely certain by whom or when this arrangement was made, though it certainly goes back almost to the beginning of the Christian era and perhaps earlier. It is commonly ascribed by later writers to a certain Thrasylus or to Thrasylus and Dercylides. The date of
As to the now generally rejected dialogues it may be observed that they are all brief and of no great moment. Our conception of Plato as a thinker and a writer is not seriously affected by the rejection of any of them. If it were possible to put in a word on behalf of any of these items, I should like personally to plead for the short sketch called the Clitophon, which seems to be in any case a mere unfinished fragment, the main purport of which can only be conjectured. The style and verve are not unworthy of Plato, and I believe I could make out a case for the view that the point to which the writer is working up is also Platonic, as well as important. Yet there is the difficulty that the little work appears on the face of it to be in form a criticism of the parts played by Socrates and Thrasymachus in Republic I, and it is hard to think of Plato as thus playing the critic to one of his own writings.
About all these dialogues we may say at least two things. There is only one of them (the Alcibiades II) which does not seem to be proved by considerations of style and language to be real fourth-century work. And again, there is no reason to regard any of them as “spurious” in the sense of being intended to pass falsely for the work of Plato. They are anonymous and inferior work of the same kind as the lighter Platonic dialogues, and probably, in most cases, contemporary with them or nearly so, not deliberate “forgeries.” Hence, this material may rightly be used with caution as contributing to our knowledge of the conception of Socrates current in the fourth century. Alcibiades II is probably an exception. It is the one dialogue in the list which exhibits anything very suspicious on linguistic grounds, and it appears also to allude to a characteristic Stoic paradox.
The Ion, so far as can be seen, has in its few pages nothing either to establish its authenticity or to arouse suspicion. It may reasonably be allowed to pass as genuine until some good reason for rejecting it is produced.
The Menexenus offers a difficult problem. It is referred to expressly by Aristotle in a way in which he never seems to quote any dialogues but those of Plato, and it seems clear that he regarded it as Platonic.
The Hippias Major, though not cited by name anywhere in Aristotle, is tacitly quoted or alluded to several times in the Topics in a way which convinces me that Aristotle regarded it as a Platonic
The Epinomis and Epistles are much more important. If the Epinomis is spurious, we must deny the authenticity of the most important pronouncement on the philosophy of arithmetic to be found in the whole Platonic corpus. If the Epistles are spurious, we lose our one direct source of information for any part of Plato’s biography, and also the source of most of our knowledge of Sicilian affairs from 367 to 354 BC (As E. Meyer says, the historians who reject the Epistles disguise the state of the case by alleging Plutarch’s Life of Dion as their authority, while the statements in this Life are openly drawn for the most part from the Epistles.) Documents like these ought not to be surrendered to the “athetizer” except for very weighty reasons.
As to the Epinomis, the case stands thus. It was certainly known in antiquity generally and regarded as genuine. Cicero, for example, quotes it as “Plato.” On the other hand, the Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus (410-485 AD) wished to reject it as spurious because of an astronomical discrepancy with the Timaeus. Diogenes Laertius also tells us that Plato’s Laws were “copied out from the wax” by the Academic astronomer Philippus of Opus, adding “and his too, as they say, is the Epinomis.” It has become common in recent times to assert, on the strength of this remark, that the Epinomis is an appendix to the Laws composed by Philippus. It ought, however, to be noted that Proclus was apparently unaware that any doubt had been felt about the Epinomis before his own time, since he based his rejection wholly on argument, not on testimony. His argument is, moreover, a bad one, since the “discrepancy with the Timaeus” of which he complained is found as much in the Laws as in the Epinomis. The internal evidence of style seems to reveal no difference whatever between the two works. And it may be urged that since the state of the text of the Laws shows that the work must have been left at Plato’s death without the author’s final revision and then circulated without even the small verbal corrections which the editor of a posthumous work commonly has to make in the interests of grammar, it is most unlikely that disciples who treated the ipsissima verba of a dead master with such scrupulous veneration would have ventured on adding a “part the last” to the work on their own account. Hence, it seems to me that Hans Raeder is right in insisting on the genuineness of the Epinomis, and that the remark of Diogenes about Philippus of Opus only means
Professor Werner Jaeger
In particular, as he shows, there is an immediate connexion between the “fifth” or “etherial” bodily region of the Epinomis and Aristotle’s famous “celestial matter” of which the “heavens” are assumed to be made (the essentia quinta (fifth essence) or materia coelestis (lighter than air)). Professor Jaeger interprets the connexion thus. We have first the Laws circulated promptly after Plato’s death, then Aristotle’s proposals for modifications of Platonic doctrine in the περὶ φιλοσφίας, finally (all in the course of a year or two), the Epinomis, rejoining to Aristotle, and composed by Philippus. While I regard Professor Jaeger’s proof of the intimate relation between Epinomis and περὶ φιλοσφίας as important, I think it more natural to interpret the facts rather differently by supposing the Laws and Epinomis together to have been transcribed and circulated shortly after the death of Plato, and then followed by Aristotle’s criticism of Platonic doctrine in the περὶ φιλοσφίας. This at least leaves Aristotle more leisure than Professor Jaeger’s hypothesis for the composition of a work which, as we know it ran to three “books,” must have been of considerable compass. Whatever the truth about the Epinomis may be, I am at least sure that it is premature to assume that it is known not to be Plato’s.
As for the Epistles, it is not necessary now to argue the case for their genuineness as elaborately as one would have had to do some years ago. Since Wilamowitz in his Platon declared for the genuineness of the very important trio VI, VII, VIII, those who depend on “authority” for their opinions have been in a hurry to protest that these three at least must be accepted. But the acceptance of the three logically carries with it recognition of the correspondence between Plato and Dionysius (II, III, XIII) and the letter of congratulation and good advice to Dion (IV); and when these are accepted as Platonic, there remains no good ground for rejecting any of the thirteen letters of our MSS. except the first, which is written in a style wholly unlike the others, and by some one whose circumstances, as stated by himself, show that he can be neither Plato nor Dion, nor have any intention of passing for either. Presumably this letter got into the correspondence by some mistake at a very early date. The twelfth letter (a mere note of half a dozen lines) was apparently suspected in later antiquity, since our
The external evidence supplied by trustworthy testimony only assures us on one point. Aristotle tells us (Pol. 1264b 26), what could in any case never have been doubted, that the Laws is later than the Republic. There was also an ancient tradition, mentioned by Proclus and implied in the statement of Diogenes Laertius about Philippus of Opus, that the Laws was left by Plato “in the wax” and the “fair copy” for circulation made after his death. The statement is borne out by the frequency in the dialogue of small grammatical difficulties which cannot reasonably be ascribed to later “corruption” but are natural in a faithfully copied first text which has never received the author’s finishing touches. Trustworthy testimony takes us no farther than this. Comparison of certain Platonic dialogues with one another yields one or two other results. Thus, the Republic must be earlier than the Timaeus, where it is referred to and the argument of its first five books briefly recapitulated. The Politicus must be not earlier than the Sophistes, to which it is the professed sequel; and the Sophistes, for the same reason, later than the Theaetetus. These are all the certain indications furnished by the matter of the dialogues themselves. There may be an allusion in the Phaedo to a point more fully explained in the Meno, and the Republic has been supposed to allude to both. Both the Theaetetus and the Sophistes refer to a meeting between Socrates, then extremely young, and the great Parmenides; and there must be some connexion between these references and the fact that the Parmenides professes ostensibly to describe this encounter. But we cannot say that the allusions enable us to determine with certainty whether the Parmenides is earlier than both the others, later than both, or intermediate between the two. Raeder has tried to show at length that the Phaedrus contains allusions which would only be intelligible to readers who already knew the Republic; but there are gaps in his argument, and it has not completely convinced some prominent Platonic scholars. Clearly, if we are to arrive at results of any value, we need a clue to the order of composition of the dialogues which will take us much farther than the few certain indications we have so far found.
In the earlier part of the nineteenth century more than one unsatisfactory attempt was made to provide such a clue. Thus, it was at one time held that we can detect signs of comparative youth in the gorgeous rhetoric of certain dialogues, and the Phaedrus in particular was often assumed to be the earliest of the dialogues on this ground. But it is obvious that reasoning of this kind is inherently untrustworthy, especially in dealing with the work of a great dramatic artist. Inferences from the manner of the Phaedrus are, for example, to be discounted partly on the ground that its rhetoric is largely parody of the rhetoricians, partly because so
The serious scientific investigation of the internal evidence for the order of composition of the dialogues really begins in 1867 with Lewis Campbell’s philological proof of the genuineness of the Sophistes and Politicus. It has been further developed, sometimes with too much confidence in its results, by a whole host of writers, notably Dittenberger and C. Ritter in Germany, and W. Lutoslawski in this country. The underlying and sound principle of the method may be simply stated thus. If we start with two works which are known to be separated by a considerable interval and exhibit a marked difference in style, it may be possible to trace the transition from the writer’s earlier to his later manner in detail, to see the later manner steadily more and more replacing the earlier, and this should enable us to arrive at some definite conclusions about the order of the works which occupy the interval. The conclusion will be strengthened if we take for study a number of distinct and independent peculiarities and find a general coincidence in the order in which the various peculiarities seem to become more and more settled mannerisms. The opportunity for applying this method to the work of Plato is afforded by the well-authenticated fact that the Laws is a composition of old age, while the Republic is one of an earlier period, and forms with certain other great dialogues, such as the Protagoras, Phaedo, Symposium, a group distinguished by a marked common style and a common vigor of dramatic representation which experience shows we cannot expect from a writer who is not in the prime of his powers. Growing resemblance to the manner of the Laws, if made out on several independent but consilient lines of inquiry, may thus enable us to discover which of the Platonic dialogues must be intermediate between the Laws and the Republic. There are several different peculiarities we may obviously select for
It is another question whether the employment of the same method would enable us to distinguish more precisely between the earlier and later dialogues belonging to either of the two great groups, so as to say, e.g., whether the Philebus is earlier or later in composition than the Timaeus, the Symposium than the Phaedo. When two works belong to much the same period of an author’s activity, a slight difference of style between them may easily be due to accidental causes. (Thus in dealing with the Symposium we should have to remember that a very large part of it is professed imitation or parody of the styles of others.) Lutoslawski in particular seems to me to have pushed a sound principle to the pitch of absurdity in the attempt, by the help of the integral calculus, to extract from considerations of “stylometry” a detailed and definite order of composition for the whole of the dialogues. It may fairly be doubted whether “stylometric” evidence can carry us much beyond the broad discrimination between an earlier series of dialogues of which the Republic is the capital work and a later series composed in the interval between the completion of the Republic and Plato’s death.
It is possible, however, that some supplementary considerations may take us a little further. Plato himself explains, in the introductory conversation prefixed to the Theaetetus, that he has avoided the method of indirect narration of a dialogue for that of direct dialogue in order to avoid the wearisomeness of keeping up the formula of a reported narrative. Now the greatest dialogues of the earlier period, the Protagoras, Symposium, Phaedo, Republic, are all reported dialogues, and one of them, the Symposium, is actually reported at second-hand. So again is the Parmenides, where the standing formula, as Professor Burnet calls it, is the cumbrous “Antiphon told us that Pythodorus said that Parmenides said.” The original adoption of this method of narration of a conversation is manifestly due to the desire for dramatic life and colour.
We may turn next to the question whether it is possible to fix any definite date in Plato’s life as a terminus ad quem for the earlier series of dialogues, or a terminus a quo for the later. Something, I believe, may be done to settle both these questions. I have already referred in the last chapter to the statement made by Plato in Ep. vii., written after the murder of Dion in the year 354, that he came to Sicily in his forty-first year already convinced that the salvation of mankind depends on the union of the philosopher and the “ruler” in one person. The actual words of the letter are that Plato had been driven to say this “in a eulogy on true philosophy” and this seems an unmistakable allusion to the occurrence of the same statement in Rep. 499 ff. It should follow that this most philosophically advanced section of the Republic was already written in the year 388-7, with the consequence that the Republic, and by consequence the earlier dialogues in general, were completed at least soon after Plato was forty and perhaps before foundation of the Academy. If we turn next to the dialogue which seems to prelude to the later group, the Theaetetus, we get another indication of date. The dialogue mentions the severe and dangerous wound received by the mathematician Theaetetus in a battle fought under the walls of Corinth which cannot well be any but that of the year 369. It is assumed tacitly all through that Theaetetus will not recover from his injuries and is clear that the discourse was composed after his death and mainly as a graceful tribute to his memory. Thus, allowing for the time necessary for the completion of so considerable a work, we may suppose the dialogue to have been written just before Plato’s first departure on his important practical enterprise
Once more, the Sophistes seems to give us an approximate date. It is the first of the series of dialogues in which the deliberate adoption of the Isocratean avoidance of hiatus occurs. This would naturally suggest a probable break of some length in Plato’s activity as a writer just before the composition of the Sophistes. Now it is antecedently probable that there must have been such an interruption between 367 and 360, the year of Plato’s last return from Syracuse. His entanglements with Dionysius and Sicilian affairs, combined with his duties as head of the Academy, are likely to have left him little leisure for literary occupation in these years.
Thus, we may say with every appearance of probability that there are two distinct periods of literary activity to be distinguished in Plato’s life.
See further:
Burnet, J. Platonism, Ch. I, 4.
Campbell, L. “Sophistes” and “Politicus” of Plato. 1867, General Introduction.
Hackforth, R. The Authorship of the Platonic Epistles. Manchester, 1913.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung. Leipzig, 1905.
Lutoslawski, W. Origin and Growth of Plato’s Logic. 1897.
Parmentier, L. La Chronologie des dialogues de Platon. Brussels, 1913.
Ritter, C. Untersuchungen ueber Platon. Stuttgart, 1882;
Ritter, C. Neue Untersuchungen ueber Platon. Munich, 1910.
Levi, A. Sulle interpretazioni immanentistiche della filosofia di Platone. Turin, N.D.
Shorey, P. The Unity of Plato’s Thought. Chicago, 1903.
Shorey, P. What Plato Said, pp. 58-73.
Robin, L. Platon, pp. 19-48.
Novotný, F. Platonis Epistulae.
Harward, J. The Platonic Epistles, Introduction.
Note. I do not deny that Plato’s “first period” may have extended into the opening years of his career in the Academy. On my own reasoning this must be so if the Phaedo should, after all, be later than the Republic. It has been argued (e.g. by M. Parmentier) that the Symposium must be later than 385, the year of the death of Aristophanes. I doubt, however, whether too much has not been made of the supposed Platonic rule not to introduce living persons as speakers. Callias was alive and active years after any date to which we can reasonably assign the Protagoras. Euclides, who was alive and apparently well when Theaetetus received his wound, is more likely than not to have survived the writing of the Theaetetus. Socrates “the younger” can hardly be taken to have been dead when the Politicus was written. Gorgias may have lived long enough to read the Gorgias. Simmias, if we may believe Plutarch de genio Socratis, was alive and active in 379. That the majority of Plato’s personages are characters already dead when his dialogues were written, seems to me a mere consequence of the fact that the dialogues deal with Socrates and his contemporaries.
[It might be urged against the reasoning of the first paragraph of p. 20 supra that several, if not all, of the dialogues of Aeschines (certainly the Aspasia, Alcibiades, Callias, Axiochus) were of the “narrated” type. But they were narrations of the simplest kind of which the Charmides and Laches are examples, and such evidence as we have suggests that they are all later in date of composition than the earliest work of Plato.]
Chapter III. Minor Socratic Dialogues: Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, Ion, Menexenus
Lovers of great literature have every reason to be wholeheartedly thankful that once in the world’s history a supreme philosophical thinker should also have been a superb dramatic artist. But what is to them pure gain is, in some ways, gain at the expense of the average student of “metaphysics.” For several reasons it is quite impossible to construct a neatly arranged systematic handbook to the “Platonic philosophy.” In the first place, it is doubtful whether there ever was a “Platonic philosophy” at all, in the sense of a definite set of formulated doctrines about the omne scibile. Plato has done his best to make it quite clear that he took no great interest in “system-making.” To him philosophy meant no compact body of “results” to be learned, but a life spent in the active personal pursuit of truth and goodness by the light of one or two great passionate convictions. It is not likely that, even at the end of his life of eighty years, he fancied himself to have worked out anything like a coherent, clearly articulated “theory of everything.” Systematization of this kind commonly has to be paid for by intellectual stagnation; the vitality and progressiveness of Platonism is probably largely owing to the fact that, even in the mind of its originator, it always remained largely tentative and provisional. If there ever was a Platonic “system,” at least Plato himself resolutely refused to write an exposition of it,
Further special difficulties are created for us by certain peculiarities of Plato’s literary temperament. Unlike Aristotle, he does not introduce himself and his opinions into his dialogues. He is, in fact, at great pains, with the instinct of the great dramatist, to keep his own personality completely in the background. Socrates is present as one of the speakers in all the dialogues except the Laws, and in all except those which we have seen reason to regard as written in late life, Socrates is not only the chief speaker but dominates the whole dialogue by his vivid and strongly marked personality. It can hardly be doubted that in the long list of works written before Plato had found his real vocation as head of the Academy, the main conscious object of the writer is to preserve a faithful and living portrait of the older philosopher.
Even if we accept the view originated about the beginning of the nineteenth century, that Plato has transfigured the personality and teaching of Socrates out of recognition, we are bound, I think, to hold that the transfiguration has been unconscious. We cannot seriously ascribe to Plato deliberate and pointless mystification. This means, of itself, that Plato carefully devotes himself to reproducing the life and thought of a generation to which he did not himself belong, and that whatever indications he may have given us of his personal doctrines have to be given under restrictions imposed by this selection of a vanished age as the background of the dialogues. (Thus we cannot read the Republic intelligently unless we bear carefully in mind both that the whole work presupposes as its setting the Athens of the Archidamian war and that this setting had vanished into the past by 413, when Plato was still no more than a boy. So to understand the Protagoras, we have to remember that we are dealing with a still earlier time, Athens under Pericles shortly before the outbreak of the great war, and that Plato was not even born at the date of the gathering of the “wits” in the house of Callias.) There are only two characters among the host of personages in Plato’s dialogues of whom one can be certain that they are not actual historical figures of the fifth century, the unnamed Eleatic of the Sophistes and Politicus and the unnamed Athenian of the Laws. They have been left anonymous apparently on purpose that their creator may be at liberty to express thoughts of his own through them with a freedom impossible in the case of figures who are “kennt men” with characters and views of their own which have to be taken into account.
This is generally admitted on all hands except for the one most important figure of all, that of Socrates. Him, it is still maintained
Accordingly, I propose first to consider what we may call the “Socratic” group among the dialogues, the series of works culminating, so far as ripeness of thought and compass of subjects are concealed, in the Republic, grouping the slighter dialogues together but dwelling more fully on the detail of the greater and richer. Next I propose to treat separately each of the great dialogues of Plato’s later age in the same way. In both cases I must remind my reader that I do not believe that many results of anything like certainty can be reached in the determination of the precise order of composition of particular dialogues. In the case of the earlier group, which I call Socratic in the sense that they are dominated by the personality of Plato’s Socrates, I make no assumption about this order beyond the general one that the four great dialogues which
With one or two trifling exceptions most of the dialogues we shall have first to review have an ethical purport. (Perhaps the only complete exception of any importance is afforded by the Cratylus.) The interest of many of them is by no means exclusively ethical, sometimes (as in the case of the Euthydemus) not ostensibly primarily ethical, but we commonly find that the discussion either begins with, or is found as it proceeds to involve, the great practical issue of the right direction of conduct. It is therefore advisable to begin at the outset by formulating very briefly and in a way which brings out their interconnexion, a few simple principles which we shall find running through the whole of Plato’s treatment of the moral being of man. Since we find these principles taken for granted in what has every mark of being Plato’s earliest work as well as in his ripest and latest, we may fairly regard them as a legacy from Socrates; and the most characteristic of them are, in fact, specifically attributed to Socrates by Aristotle, though we have no reason to suppose that Aristotle had any reason for the attribution beyond the fact that the principles in question are put into the mouth of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues, notably in the Protagoras. The most bald and straightforward statement of these principles as a whole in the Platonic corpus is perhaps that of the Alcibiades I, which has every appearance of being intended as a compendium of ethics composed by an immediate disciple and possibly during Plato’s lifetime. We may reproduce the main line of argument adopted there and elsewhere much as follows.
The one great standing aim of men in all they do is to attain happiness (eudaimonia), in other words to make a success, in the best sense of the word, of life. Every one wants to make a success of his private life; if a man is conscious of abilities and opportunities which open the way to prominence as a public man, he is anxious to make a success of the affairs of his “city,” to be a successful statesman. This is what we mean by being a good man; the good man is the man who “conducts his own affairs, those of his household, those of the city, well.” And the words good and well are not used here in a narrowly moralistic sense. To conduct your business well means to make a thorough success of it; the good man is the thoroughly effective man. But to make a thorough success of life means to achieve and possess good. We may say then that all men alike desire good and nothing but good. A man may conceivably prefer the appearance or reputation of some things to their reality; e.g. a man may prefer a reputation for a virtue he does not possess to
Now when we come to consider the different things which men commonly call “good” and wish to have, we see at once that they are of various kinds. Some of them are material possessions. Many men think that good means just plenty of things of this sort. But we can easily see that material things are not good except for a man who knows how to use them. It would be no good to a man, for example, to have flutes, or musical instruments of any kind, unless he knew how to use them. Flutes are good—for the man who knows how to play on them. Similarly, it would be no real good to you to possess all the gold in the world, unless you know how to use it. Again, men think that bodily beauty, strength and agility, robust health, are very good things. But health and strength again may be misused; they are good only for the man who knows how to make the proper use of them. If a man has not this knowledge, but “abuses” his physical advantages, it might be much better for him if he had been less robust and active. The same thing is true of intellectual “parts” A man is not really the better for parts and accomplishments which he does not know how to use rightly. In fact we may say that if health, wealth, and the recognized “good” things are to be really good, it is first of all necessary that the user of these things should be good. Now that which uses all other things, even a man’s body, is his soul. The soul is the man, and everything else that is his is merely something he has or owns. A man, in fact, is a “soul using a body” (this is the standing Academic definition of “man”).
“The first duty of every man who means to enjoy good or happiness is to ‘tend his soul,’ ‘to see to it that his soul is as good as it possibly can be,’ that is, to get the knowledge or insight which ensures his using everything rightly.”
These fundamental elementary notions will suffice to explain the general character of most of the earliest “Socratic” dialogues. The procedure adopted is commonly this. Some term of moral import for the conduct of life, one of those words which everyone is using as familiar expressions daily without much consideration of their precise meaning, such as “courage,” “self-mastery,” or even “virtue” itself, is taken and we ask the question whether we can say exactly what it means. A number of answers are suggested and examined, but all are found wanting. None of them will stand careful scrutiny. Usually the result arrived at is a negative one. We discover to our shame that we do not really know the meaning of the most familiar epithets which we use every day of our lives to convey moral approval or censure. This revelation of our own ignorance is painful, but it has the advantage that we have taken a
We may now, bearing these few simple ideas in mind, consider the arguments of some of the early dialogues.
The Greater Hippias
The form of the dialogue is the simplest possible; it is a direct colloquy between Socrates and a single speaker, the well-known polymath Hippias of Elis, who figures also in the Lesser Hippias, the Protagoras, and a conversation, perhaps suggested by the opening remarks of our dialogue, in the fourth book of Xenophon’s Memorabilia.
1 Xenophon, Memor. iv. 4)
But then the objection occurs that Phidias notoriously did not gild the features of his famous chryselephantine Athena, and surely Phidias may be presumed to have known his own business as an artist (290b). This leads, at last, to a real attempt to define “the fine.” The “fine” is “the becoming” or “fitting” or “appropriate” (τὸ πρέπον, 290c). It would follow from this at once that a soup-spoon of wood, because more “fitting,” is more beautiful or “fine” than a golden spoon (291c).
Note that Socrates does not
Hippias evidently feels the difficulty, and is made to fall back again on an illustration, this time from the moral sphere. It is eminently “fine” to live in health, wealth, and honors, to bury your parents splendidly, and to receive in the fullness of days a splendid funeral from your descendants (291d). But this, again, is manifestly no true definition. A definition must be rigidly universal. But every one will admit that Heracles and Achilles and others who preferred a short and glorious to a long and inglorious life, and so died young and left their parents to survive them, made a “fine” choice (292e-293c). The illustration has thus led nowhere, and we have still to discuss the definition of the “fine” as the “fitting” or “becoming” on its own merits. When a thing has the character of being “becoming,” does this make it “fine,” or does it only make the thing seem “fine”? Hippias prefers the second alternative, since even a scarecrow of a man can be made to look “finer” if he is “becomingly” dressed. But, obviously, if “propriety” makes things seem finer than they really are, “the appropriate” and the “fine” cannot be the same thing (294b). And we cannot get out of the difficulty, as Hippias would like to do, by saying the “appropriateness” both makes things “fine” and makes them seem “fine.” If that were so, what really is “fine” would always seem fine too. Yet it is notorious that communities and individuals differ about nothing more than about the question what sort of conduct is “fine” (294c-d). Thus, if “appropriateness” actually makes things “fine,” the proposed definition may possibly be the right one; but if it only makes them “seem” fine (we have seen that the alternatives are exclusive of one another) the definition must clearly be rejected. And Hippias is satisfied that this second alternative is the true one (294e). (Hume’s well-known ethical theory affords a good illustration of the point of this reasoning. Hume sets himself to show that every society thinks the kind of conduct it “disinterestedly” likes virtuous and the
If the definition once given were magisterially proposed for our acceptance, Socrates would thus stand revealed as a pure utilitarian in moral and aesthetic theory. But it is, in fact, put forward tentatively as a suggestion for examination. The examination is conducted in strict accord with the requirements of the dialectical method as described in the Phaedo.
What consequences follow, then, from the identification of the “fine” with the “useful”? There is one at least which must give us pause. A thing is useful for what it can do, not for what it cannot; thus our formula apparently leads to the identification of τὸ καλόν with power to produce some result. But results may be good or they may be bad, and it seems monstrous to hold that power to produce evil is “fine.” We must, at the least, modify our statement by saying that the “fine” is that which can produce good, i.e., whether the “useful” is “fine” or not will depend on the goodness or badness of the end to which it is instrumental. Now we call that which is instrumental to good “profitable” (ὠφελιμόν); thus our proposed definition must be made more specific by a further determination.
2 Phaedo 100a-b, 101d
We must say “the fine”
Even so, we have a worse difficulty to face. We are saying in effect that the “fine” = that which causes good as its result. But a cause and its effect are always different (or, in modern language, causality is always transitive). Hence, if the “fine” is the cause of good, it must follow that what is “fine” is never itself good, and what is good is never itself “fine,” and this is a monstrous paradox (297a). It seems then that the attempt to give a utilitarian definition of τὸ καλόν must be abandoned.
Possibly we may succeed better with a hedonist theory of beauty. The pictures, statues, and the like which we call “fine” all give us pleasure, and so do music and literature. In the one case the pleasure is got from sight, in the other from hearing. This suggests the new theory that the “fine” is “that which it is pleasant to see or hear” (298a). And we may even get in “moral beauty” under the formula, for “fine conduct” and “fine laws” are things which it gives us pleasure to see or to hear. But there is a logical difficulty to face. We are trying to define the “fine” as “that which it is pleasant to see and hear.” But, of course, you do not hear the things which it is pleasant to see, nor see the things which it is pleasant to hear. Thus our proposed definition will not be true of either of the classes of things which are “fine,” and, being true of neither, it cannot be true of both. We assumed that τὸ καλόν, whatever it may be, must be a character common to all “fine” things, but “to be seen and heard” is not a character either of the “pleasures of sight” or of the “pleasures of hearing” (300a, b).
Aristotle comments on the fallacy, formally committed in this argument, of confusing “and” with “or,” but the real trouble lies deeper. When the reasoning has been made formally sound by substituting “or” everywhere for “and,” it still remains the fact that it is hard to say that the “pleasures of sight” and those of hearing have anything in common but their common character of being pleasant, and it has been the standing assumption of the dialogue that all “fine” things have some one common character. But the conclusion, which might seem indicated, that the “fineness” which all “fine” things have in common is just “pleasantness” is excluded by the firm conviction of both Plato and Aristotle that there are “disgraceful,” morally “ugly” pleasures, e.g. those of the sexual “pervert.” At the same time, the proposed formula is at any rate suggestive. There must be some reason why the two unmistakably “aesthetic” senses should be just sight and hearing, though the utilization of the fact demands a much more developed aesthetic psychology than that of our dialogue. The equivocation between “and” and “or” is, on Socrates’ part, a conscious trap laid for his antagonist, as he shows when he goes on to remark that, after all, it is possible for “both” to have a character which belongs to neither singly, since, e.g., Socrates and Hippias are a couple, though Socrates is not a couple, nor is Hippias. Thus, it would be logically
It is in this salutary lesson and not in any of the proposed definitions of the “fine” that we must look for the real significance of the dialogue. But it is also suggestive in other ways. The lesson it gives in the right method of framing and testing a definition is more important than any of the tentative definitions examined. Yet it is a valuable hint towards a more developed aesthetic theory that sensible “beauty” is found to be confined to the perceptions of the two senses of sight and hearing, and the illustration of the golden and wooden spoons might well serve as a warning against the dangers of an unduly “rationalistic” aesthetic theory. A wooden porridge-spoon is not necessarily a thing of beauty because it may be admirably “adapted” for the purposes of the porridge-eater. It is a still more important contribution to sound ethics to have insisted on the impossibility of reducing moral excellence (the “fine” in action) to mere “efficiency,” irrespective of the moral quality of the results of the “efficient” agent.
The Lesser Hippias
This short dialogue, though less ambitious in its scope, is much more brilliantly executed than the Hippias Major. Its authenticity is sufficiently established by the fact that Aristotle, though not mentioning the author, quotes the dialogue by name as “the Hippias”; such explicit references never occur in his work to writings of any “Socratic men” other than Plato.
Socrates opens the talk by quoting an opinion that the Iliad is a finer poem than the Odyssey, as the hero of the former, Achilles, is a morally nobler character than Odysseus, the hero of the latter. The moralistic tone of this criticism is characteristically Athenian, as we can see for ourselves from a reading of the Frogs of Aristophanes, but does not concern us further. The remark is a mere peg on which to hang a discussion of the purely ethical problem in which Socrates is really interested. The transition is effected by the declaration of Hippias that Achilles was certainly a nobler character than Odysseus, since Achilles is single-minded, sincere, and truthful, but Odysseus notoriously rusé and a past master of deceit. We see this from the famous lines in the ninth book of the Iliad, where Achilles pointedly tells the “artful” Odysseus that he hates the man who says one thing and means another “worse than the gates of Hades” (365a). Socrates replies that, after all, Achilles was no more “truthful” than Odysseus, as the context of this very passage proves. He said he would at once desert the expedition, but, in fact, he did nothing of the kind, and, what is more, he actually told his friend Aias a different story. To him he said not that he would sail home, but that he would keep out of the fighting until the Trojans should drive the Achaeans back to their ships (371b). (This is meant to negative the suggestion of Hippias that Achilles honestly meant what he said when he threatened to desert, but changed his mind afterward because of the unexpected straits to which his comrades-in-arms were reduced.) It looks then as though Homer, unlike Hippias, thought that the “truthful man” and the “liar” are not two, but one and the same.
This is the paradox which Socrates proceeds to defend, and Hippias, in the name of common sense, to deny. Or rather it is the application of a still more general paradox that the man who “misses the mark” (ἁμαρτάνει {hamartánei}) on purpose (ἑκών {hekón}) is “better” than the man who does so “unintentionally” (ἄκων {akón}).
Popular morality rejects
On reflection we see that the key to Plato’s meaning is really supplied by one clause in the proposition which emerges as the conclusion of the matter: “the man who does wrong on purpose, if there is such a person, is the good man.” The insinuation plainly is that there really is no such person as “the man who does wrong on purpose,” and that the paradox does not arise simply because there is no such person. In other words, we have to understand the Socratic doctrine that virtue is knowledge, and the Socratic use of the analogy of the “arts,” in the light of the other well-known Socratic dictum, repeated by Plato on his own account in the Laws, that “all wrong-doing is involuntary.” It is this, and not the formulated inference that the man who does wrong on purpose is the good man, which is the real conclusion to which Plato is conducting us. And we need have no difficulty about admitting this conclusion, if we bear in mind the true and sensible remark of Proclus about the Platonic sense of the word “voluntary” (ἑκούσιον {hekousion}). In Plato, the voluntary, as Proclus says,
It follows that knowledge of the good is, in one respect, different from every other kind of knowledge, and this difference affects the employment of the analogy from professional and technical knowledge, the sort of thing the “sophists” meant by “knowledge” It is the only knowledge which cannot be put to a wrong use; every other kind of knowledge can be abused, and is abused when it is put to a bad use, as, e.g., when the medical man employs his special professional knowledge to produce disease or death, instead of curing the one or preventing the other. There is a real analogy between “goodness” and the “arts”; false beliefs about what is good or bad will ruin the conduct of life, as surely as false beliefs about what is wholesome will ruin a man’s practical success as a medical man; but if you press the analogy to the point of arguing that a man can use his knowledge of good for the deliberate doing of evil, as he might use his knowledge of medicine to commit a clever murder, you will be led astray, a truth with which Socrates is made to show himself familiar in Book I of the Republic, when he urges this very point against Polemarchus; that the analogy has its limits does not prevent it from being a sound analogy within those limits; that it becomes unsound when you forget them is no reason for denying that virtue really is knowledge, though it is not, like the “goodness” taught by the sophists, mere technical knowledge how to produce certain results, if you happen to wish for them.
Ion
Little need be said about this slight dialogue on the nature of “poetic inspiration.” The main ideas suggested are expounded much more fully in those important Platonic works with which we shall have to deal later. We may, however, make a few remarks about the current conceptions of poetry against which Socrates is made to protest. It is important to remember that the whole conception of “inspiration,” so familiar to ourselves, is foreign to the way of thinking of poetry characteristic of the age of Pericles and Socrates. Poets were habitually reckoned, along with physicians, engineers, engravers, and others, as σοφοί, “wits” or “clever men.” This means that what was thought distinctive of the poet was not what we call “native genius,” but “craftsmanship,” “workmanship,” “technique.” He was conceived as consciously producing a beautiful result by the deft fitting together of words and musical sounds, exactly as the architect does the same thing by the deft putting together of stones.
Of all the great Greek poets Pindar is
Ion, who is represented as an eminent professional rhapsode, shares the current views of the “wisdom” of the poets; it is a matter of “skill” or “art” (τέχνη), and he assents at once to the inference that the professional reciter of poetry absorbs from his study of the poet’s works a special measure of their author’s “skill.” The interpreter of the poet to the audience is, like the poet himself, the possessor of a “craft” or “profession.” Yet he has to admit that his own skill as an interpreter is confined to the poetry of Homer; he cannot succeed in declaiming any other poet or explaining the “beauties” of his work; in fact, his interest flags as soon as any poet but Homer is made the topic of conversation. This, as Socrates says, serves to show that the rhapsode’s accomplishment is not the result of specialist skill. All the poets, as Ion admits, treat of much the same topics—the conduct of men and women in the various occupations of life, the “things in the heavens and the underworld,” and the births and doings of “gods,” though Homer treats all these topics better than any one else, Hence if the exposition of a poet were a matter of professional expert knowledge, the same knowledge which makes a man able to appreciate and expound Homer, would equally make him a good critic and expositor of poetry in general. Consequently, Socrates suggests that the conception of the interpreter of the poet as a conscious “craftsman” is mistaken. The poets themselves are not self-conscious “artists”; they compose their works in a mood of “inspiration” in which they are “taken out of themselves” and are temporarily, like “seers” or Bacchanals, vehicles “possessed” by a higher power of which they are the unconscious mouthpieces. In the same way, the “rhapsode” with a special gift for reciting Homer is “inspired” by the poet at second-hand. He becomes
Ion falls back on the traditional view that at any rate Homer is a specialist in the art of warfare, and that a close student of Homer, such as he himself has been, learns from Homer the “art of the general.” The Iliad, in fact, is a first-rate manual of military science, and Ion professes, on the strength of his familiarity with it, to be a great general in posse. But how comes it, then, that he has never attempted to distinguish himself in so eminently honorable a profession? If there is no opening in his native city of Ephesus, which is now a subject-ally of Athens, why has he never, like some other aliens, entered the military service of Athens herself?
Nominally the little dialogue is concerned with the question whether rhapsodes and actors owe their success to professional or expert knowledge, or to some kind of “genius” or non-rational “inspiration.” But it is clear that the real points intended to be made are that the poet himself is not an “expert” in any kind of knowledge and, as poet, has not necessarily anything to teach us. These points are enforced more impressively in other Platonic works, notably in the Phaedrus, but the Ion has its value, both as a contribution to the psychology of the “rhapsode” (or, as we should say today, the actor), and as a particularly clear and simple refutation of the never-dying popular delusion that the function of the poet himself, and consequently of his exponent, is primarily didactic. The type of critic who conceives it to be his business to find
Menexenus
The Menexenus offers, in a way, a worse puzzle to the reader than any other work of the Platonic corpus, and it is not surprising that its authenticity should be doubted by students of Plato who are in general on the conservative side in questions of genuineness. Externally the evidence for it is good. It is twice cited by Aristotle,
It is idle to suggest that the whole affair is a mere Aristophanic jest, and that Plato only wants to show that he can rival the comedians on their own ground by putting ludicrous “topical allusions” into the mouth of his hero. We cannot reconcile such a use of Socrates, for purposes of pure burlesque, with the tone of reverence and devotion in which Plato continues to speak of Socrates in the letters written at the very end of his own life; even
It will not be necessary to insert here a full analysis, but there are certain points, well brought out in such a commentary as Stallbaum’s, which we have to bear in mind. The discourse is framed on the lines we can see from comparison with the extant examples to have been conventional on such occasions. It treats first of the glorious inheritance and traditions of the community into which the future warriors were born and in which they were brought up, then of their own achievements, by which they have approved themselves worthy of such an origin, and finally of the considerations which should moderate the grief of their surviving friends and relatives. In this respect it exhibits a close parallel with the discourse of Pericles in Thucydides, the “funeral speech” included in the works ascribed to Lysias, the Panegyricus of Isocrates, the discourse of Hyperides on Leosthenes and his companions in the Lamian war. There are direct verbal echoes of the speech of Lysias, perhaps of that of Pericles, and, I suspect, also of the Isocratean Panegyricus, a work of the year 380. The diction again has clearly been modelled on that actually adopted in real encomia (eulogies) of the fallen, and it is this which makes it impossible to use evidence from style to date the dialogue. “Funeral orations” belong to the type of oratory called by the Greeks “epideictic,” and demand an artificial elevation of diction and use of verbal ornament avoided in “forensic” pleading and political speaking. Hence all the extant specimens exhibit, to a greater or a less degree, the high-flown and semi-poetical character distinctive of the Sicilian “show declamation” introduced to Athens by Gorgias, and Plato
If Isocrates is the person against whom the satire of the Menexenus is largely directed, we can see an excellent reason why that satire should be so liberally mixed with sympathy. Isocrates was honorably distinguished by his real superiority to mere particularism and his real concern for the interests of Greek civilization as a whole, and in this he and Plato were wholly at one. But, unlike Plato, who regarded the hard and fast distinction between Greek and “barbarian” as unscientific superstition, Isocrates takes the antithesis seriously and tends to regard hate of the barbarian as equivalent to love for civilization. The combination of the two points of view in the Menexenus is a fair representation of his lifelong attitude towards affairs. So again the distortion of history by which the most aggressive exploits of Attic imperialism, such as the attempt of Pericles and his friends to dominate Boeotia, and the Archidamian War as a whole, are represented as “wars of liberation,” is no very violent parody of the methods of Isocrates when he is anxious, as in the Panegyricus, to gratify Athenian partiality for Athens or Athenian dislike of Sparta. One may suspect the same purpose of parody in the false emphasis which is laid in the Menexenus on the naval exploits of Athens in the Sicilian expedition as efforts for the “liberation” of the oppressed. Isocrates notoriously held the view that the naval ascendancy of Athens had been a national misfortune, since it had led to the lust for empire, and there are passages in the Laws which show that Plato sympathized with this conviction. But it would be a telling criticism of the Isocratean way of manipulating history to show that it could easily be employed for glorifying precisely the side of Athenian history which gave Isocrates himself least satisfaction. You have only to sit as loosely to facts as Isocrates habitually allows himself to do when he wishes to praise or to abuse some one, and you can make Alcibiades into a hero of chivalry who was only doing his duty by the oppressed when he lured Athens on to its ruin by the prospect of the conquest of Sicily!
See further:
Ritter, C. Platon, i. 297-308, Hippias II, 359-361; Hippias I, 485-496 Menexenus.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 92-94 (Ion), 94-95;
Raeder, H. Hippias II, 101-106; Hippias I, 125-127; Menexenus.
Apelt, O. Beitrdge zur Geschichte der griechischen Philosophic 1891, 369-390;
der Sophist Hippias von Elis; Platonische Aufädtze. 1912, 203-237, on Hippias I and II.
Kraus, O. Platons Hippias Minor. Prague, 1913.
Dittmar, H. Aeschines von Sphettus 1-59 (on the connexion of the Menexenus with the Aspasia
of Aeschines. The connexion is clearly made out, but I think it an exaggeration to find
Raeder, H. the purpose of Plato’s dialogue mainly in a “polemic” against Aeschines).
Chapter IV. Minor Dialogues: Charmides, Laches, and Lysis
We may group the three dialogues which form the subject of this chapter together for several reasons. From the dramatic point of view all show an advance upon what is likely to have been the earliest form of the Platonic dialogue, the direct presentation of Socrates in conversation with a single interlocutor. The Lysis and Charmides both profess to be reports of recently held conversations given by Socrates to an unnamed friend or friends, and thus conform to the type of such masterpieces of literary art as the Protagoras and Republic. The fiction that the dialogue is reported enables Socrates to draw a highly dramatic picture of the persons engaged in the conversation and the circumstances in which it is held. This device is not adopted in the Laches, where the method of direct reproduction of the conversation is maintained, but the same advantage is obtained by adding to the number of the interlocutors, so that we have a vivid characterization of three persons, two of them notabilities, besides Socrates himself. All three dialogues, again, are connected by the fact that they deal with Socrates in the special character of older friend and adviser of the very young, and two of them, the Charmides and Lysis give us an attractive picture of his personal manner as mentor to his young friends. In the cases of Charmides and Laches Plato has been careful to indicate approximately the period of life to which Socrates has attained, and we see that both are meant as pictures of the master as he was between the ages of forty and fifty, and thus take us back to a time when Plato himself was either an infant or not yet born. It is closely connected with this that both dialogues, and especially the Laches, are pervaded by the atmosphere of the Archidamian war and remind us of the fact that Socrates was, among other things, a fighting man. A further point of connexion between these two dialogues is, that they are both concerned at bottom with a difficulty arising directly out of the Socratic conception of virtue as identical with knowledge. Each deals with one of the great recognized virtues demanded from a Greek “good man”—the Charmides with “temperance” the Laches with “valour” or “fortitude”—and in both cases the discussion follows the same general lines. We are gradually led up to the point of identifying the virtue under consideration with knowledge of the good, and then
Charmides
Formally, like several of the dialogues, the Charmides has as its object the finding of a definition. To us it seems at first pedantic to attach importance, in morals at any rate, to mere definitions of the different virtues. A definition, we are inclined to think, is at best a matter of names, whereas ethical thinking should concern itself directly with “concrete realities.” If a man recognizes and practices a noble rule of life, it matters very little by what name he calls the right act, whether he looks at it as an exhibition of courage, or of justice, or of “temperance.” The “fine” deed can, in fact, easily be made to wear the semblance of any one of these “virtues.” This is true enough, but it would be out of place as a criticism on the Socratic demand for “definitions” in matters of conduct. From the Greek point of view, the problem of definition itself is not one of names, but of things. If our moral judgment is to be sound, and our moral practice good, we must approve and disapprove rightly. We must admire and imitate what is really noble, and must not be led into false theory and bad practice by confused thinking about good and evil. The problem of finding a definition of a “virtue” is at bottom the problem of formulating a moral ideal, and it is from this point of view that we ought to consider it. The important thing is that we should know quite definitely what we admire in conduct and that our admiration should be rightly given to the things which are really admirable. Failure in finding the definition means that we really do not know what we admire, and so long as we do not know this, our moral life is at the mercy of sentimental half-thinking.
The particular virtue selected for discussion is one which bulks very large in all Greek thought about the conduct of life—the beautiful characteristic called by the Greeks sophrosyne, and by the Romans temperantia. It is easier to indicate from the usage of the
153d). (This, we observe, implies that the interest of young men of promise in Socrates as a wise counsellor was already a reality, eight years before Aristophanes burlesqued these relations in the Clouds.) Critias, cousin of Plato’s mother, afterward to be unhappily known as a leader of the violently reactionary party in the “provisional government” set up after the capitulation of Athens to Lysander, but at present simply a young man of parts but with a touch of forwardness and self-confidence, thereupon promises to introduce Socrates to his own cousin Charmides (Plato’s uncle, subsequently associated with Critias and his party as the head of the commission set up to dominate the Piraeus), as a lad of exceptional promise.
Socrates leads up playfully to his real purpose, the examination of the boy’s spiritual state. Charmides has been complaining of headaches. Socrates professes to have brought back from his northern campaign a wonderful remedy which he has learned from a Thracian.
“You cannot treat the body successfully without treating the soul,
which is the real seat of health and disease.”
Charmides next makes a suggestion which shows a real attempt to get behind the externals of behavior to the spirit and temper they reveal. sophrosyne makes a man quick to feel shame, and perhaps it is the same thing as modesty (αἰδώς, {aidōs} 160e). The boy is still clearly thinking of the form in which sophrosyne would be most familiar to a well-bred boy—the sense of being “on one’s best behavior” in the presence of one’s parents, one’s elders, and in general of those to whom respect is due. (We may compare Kant’s well-known comparison of the reverence for the moral law which is, according to him, the specific ethical feeling, with the sense of restraint
This leads to a third suggestion which is more important than any we have yet met. Charmides has heard someone—it is hinted that this someone is Critias say—that sophrosyne means “attending to one’s own matters” (τὸ τὰ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν, 161b,
In the Republic, as
“Sophrosyne arises from being master of one’s soul.”
The defense of the proposed definition is now taken up by Critias. He replies to the objection of Socrates by making a distinction between “doing” (τὸ πράττειν, τὸ ἐργάζεσθαι) and “making” (τὸ ποιεϊν). The shoemaker “makes” shoes for his customers, but in “making” their shoes he is “doing” his own work. The shoes he makes are not his own shoes, but the making of them is his “own” trade or work. Here again we are dealing with a real and important distinction; in the Republic we shall learn the true significance of the conception of a “work” or “vocation” which is a man’s “own” not because the products of it are to be his “own” property for his own exclusive use, but because it is the contribution he and no one else can make to the “good life.” Critias has not, however, thought out the implications of his own distinction, and goes wrong from the start by an elementary confusion of ideas. He appeals in support of the distinction to the saying of Hesiod that “no work is disgraceful”
We might expect that Socrates would fasten at once on the obvious weakness of this definition; it presupposes that we already know what we mean by “good and useful.” We should then be led direct to the conclusion which it is part of Plato’s purpose to drive home, that we cannot really know the character of sophrosyne
According to the explanation of Critias, a physician who cures his patient is doing something good and useful for both himself and the patient and is therefore acting with sophrosyne. But he need not know that he is doing what is “good and useful.” (The physician cannot be sure that he will really be the better, or that his patient will be the better, for his services. It might be better for the patient that he should die, or for the physician that he should not make the income he does make.) Thus it would seem that a man may have sophrosyne without being aware that he has it (164a-c). This would not only seem inconsistent with the assumption Socrates had made at the beginning of his conversation with Charmides, but also flatly contradicts the generally accepted view, with which Critias agrees, that sophrosyne actually is the same thing as “self-knowledge.” (The thought, of course, is that “sanity of mind” is precisely a true understanding of yourself, your strength and your weaknesses, your real situation in relation to gods and men, the kind of self-knowledge which was inculcated by the Nosce teipsum
The second question is met by Critias with the reply that self-knowledge, like such “sciences” or “arts” as arithmetic and geometry, and unlike such “sciences” or “arts” as building or weaving, has no “product.” This is, in untechnical language, the distinction which is more clearly drawn in the Politicus and finally takes technical form in Aristotle as the distinction between “speculative” knowledge, which has no further end than the perfecting of itself, and “practical” knowledge, which has always an ulterior end, the making of some thing or the doing of some act. Critias is unconsciously assuming first that self-knowledge is ἐπιστήμη or τέχνη (epistêmê or technê), knowledge of universal rules or principles of some kind, and next that it is “speculative,” not “practical” science. The result is that he is virtually confusing the direct acquaintance with one’s own individual strength and weaknesses really meant in the Delphian inscription with the “science” of the psychologist. He is taking it for granted, as too many among ourselves still do, that to know psychology and to have a profound acquaintance with your own “heart” are the same thing (Charmides 165d-e.)
Socrates lets this
We proceed to test this thesis in the true Socratic way by asking what consequences would follow from it. It would follow that the man who has sophrosyne would know what he knows and what he does not know but merely “fancies” (οἴεται), and also what other men know and what they only “fancy.” Let us once more put our double question, Is such knowledge as this possible, and if it is, is it of any benefit to us?
There is a grave difficulty even about its possibility. For, in all other cases, we find that a mental activity is always directed on some object other than itself. Sight and hearing do not see or hear sight or hearing; they see colours and hear sounds. Desire is never “desire of desire” but always desire of a pleasant object; we do not wish for “wishing” but for good. What we love is not “loving” but a beloved person, what we fear, not fear but some formidable thing, and so forth. That is, it is characteristic of mental activities of all kinds that they are directed upon an object other than themselves (167c-168a). It would be at least “singular” (ἄτοπον) if there should be a solitary exception to this principle, a “knowing” which is not the knowing of a science (μάθημα) of some kind, but the “knowing of itself and the other knowings” (168a). Knowing, in fact, is always a knowing of something, and so relative to an object known; its “faculty” is to be of something (168b), and so where there is knowing there must be a known object, just as where there is a “greater than” there must always be a “less” than which the greater is greater. Hence, if there is anything which is greater than itself, it must also be less than itself; if anything which is double of itself, it must also be half itself, and so on. If “seeing” can see itself, “seeing” itself must be coloured. Some of these consequences are patently absurd, e.g. that there should be a number which is greater than, and by consequence also less than
(So far then, the point of the argument has been the perfectly sound one that no mental activity is its own object. Manifestly this is true of the knowing of the epistemologist, as much as of any other activity. If there is such a science as the “theory of knowledge” its object will be “the conditions under which knowledge is possible.” But these conditions are not the same thing as anyone’s knowing about them. The doctrines of the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, are one thing and Kant’s knowing or believing these doctrines is another.)
We can now take a further step. Let us concede, for the purposes of argument, that there is such a thing as a “knowing of knowing.” Even if there is, it is not the same thing as “knowing what you know and what you do not know,” and therefore is not the self-knowledge with which Critias has been trying to identify sophrosyne. Critias does not readily take in the distinction, which has therefore to be made gradually clearer by illustrations. Suppose a man to “know about knowing,” what will this knowledge really tell him? It will tell him that “this is knowledge” and “that is not knowledge,” i.e. that this proposition is true, that proposition is not certainly true. But to know so much and no more would certainly not be enough for the purposes of the practitioner in medicine and statesmanship. The physician needs not merely to know that “I know such and such a proposition,” he needs to know that the true proposition in question is relevant to the treatment of his patients. In other words, it is not enough for him to know what knowledge is, he needs to know what health is, and the statesman similarly must know not merely what knowledge is, but what right is. Ex hypothesi they will not learn this from a science which has knowledge as its object, but from medicine, of which the object is health in the body, or from politics, which knows about “right.” Thus we must not say that the man who has only “knowledge of knowledge” will know what he knows and what he does not; we may only say that that he will know the bare fact that he knows or does not know. (The meaning is, for example, that a man who was a mere epistemologist and nothing more might be aware that when he says, “So many grains of arsenic are fatal,” he is saying something which satisfies all the conditions required for genuine scientific knowledge; but, if he only knew epistemology and nothing else, he would not even know that he must not administer fatal doses of arsenic to his fellow-men.) Thus if sophrosyne is the same thing as
The point to which all this leads us up is manifestly that though sophrosyne is a knowledge of something, it cannot be a “knowledge about knowledge,” nor can this be what was really meant by those who have insisted on self-knowledge as the one thing needful for a happy life. It is clearly indicated that the sort of knowledge of ourselves really needed as a guide to practice is knowledge of good and evil and of the state of our souls in respect of them, a view which would immediately lead to the further result that all the genuine virtues are at bottom one and the same thing, knowledge of the good, and the distinctions commonly made between the different types of virtue at best conventional. (It is incidentally a further valuable result of the argument that it has vindicated the autonomy of the various sciences by exposing the pretensions of the “theory of knowledge” to judge of scientific truths on a priori grounds, and making it clear that in every case there is no appeal from the verdict of the expert in a specific science, so long as he claims to be the final authority in his own specialty.)
“All the genuine virtues are at bottom one and the same thing,
knowledge of the good.”
The main purpose of the discussion becomes apparent when we reach its final section. Even if we waive all the difficulties we have raised, and admit that sophrosyne really is a “knowledge of knowledge,” and that such a knowledge is, (as we just said that it is not,) “knowing what we do know and what we do not,” would this supposed knowledge be of any value for the direction of life? It is clear, of course, that if we had such a knowledge, and directed our actions by it, everything would be done “scientifically” (κατὰ τὰς ἐπιστήμας, ἐπιστημόνως). Our medical men, our soldiers, our sailors, all our craftsmen in fact, would be real experts; lives would not be lost by the blunders of the incompetent physician or strategist or navigator, clothes would not be spoiled by the bungling of their makers; we may even imagine that “prophecy” might be made “scientific,” and that we could thus have confident anticipations of the future, and, if you like, we may suppose ourselves equally
Laches
The Laches, which we may now treat more briefly, aims at reaching these same results by starting with the current conceptions of the great fighting-man’s virtue—courage or valour or fortitude. As in the Charmides, the discussion is accompanied by an interesting introduction which enables us to refer it to a definite period in the life of Socrates. Lysimachus and Melesias, the undistinguished sons of two of the greatest Athenians of the early fifth century, Aristides “the just” and Thucydides, the rival of Pericles, are both anxious that their own sons should rise to distinction, and therefore that they should receive the careful education which
Socrates also has been present at the display, and at the recommendation of Laches, who witnessed and highly admired his presence of mind and courage in the disastrous retreat of the Athenian forces from Delium (424 BC), he is taken into consultation (Laches, 180a-b). It now comes out that Sophroniscus, the father of Socrates, had been a lifelong friend of Lysimachus, and that Socrates himself is a person of whom Lysimachus has heard the boys speak as an object of great interest to themselves and their young companions (180d-e). Laches, as it comes out later, knows nothing of him except his admirable behavior on the field of Delium (188e), but Nicias is perfectly familiar with him and his habit of turning every conversation into a searching examination of the state of his interlocutor’s soul (187e-188b). These allusions enable us to date the supposed conversation pretty accurately. It falls after Delium in 424, but not long after, since it is assumed that Laches, who fell at Mantinea in 418, is still burdened by the cares of public office (187a-b). The references to the comparative poverty of Socrates—it is not said to be more than comparative (186c)—may remind us that Aristophanes and Amipsias both made this a prominent feature in their burlesques of him (the Clouds of Aristophanes and the Connus of Amipsias), produced in 423. It points to the same general date that the two old men should be thinking of the speciality of Stesilaus as the thing most desirable to be acquired by their sons. After the peace of Nicias, which was expected to put an end to the struggle between Athens and the Peloponnesian Confederation, it would not be likely that fathers anxious to educate their sons well should think at once of ὁπλομαχία as the most promising branch of education. We thus have to think of the conversation as occurring just about the time when Aristophanes produced his delightful caricature of Socrates as a guide of youth; Socrates is a man of rather under fifty; Nicias and Laches, as Plato is careful to remind us (181d), are older men, and Lysimachus and Melesias quite old and “out of the world.”
The two military experts, as it happens, are of different minds
In this disagreement of the experts, Socrates is now called upon to give the decisive opinion. But, as he says, a question of this kind is not to be settled by a majority of votes. The deciding voice should be left to the expert, the man who really knows, even if he were found to be in a minority of one. But who is the expert to whom we ought to appeal in the present case? Not the mere expert or connoisseur in ὁπλομαχία (hoplomachia, fighting in heavy armor). The problem is really concerned with the “tendance” of the young people’s souls, and the expert to whom we must appeal is therefore the expert in “tending” his own soul, the man who can achieve “goodness” in himself and, by his influence, produce it in others (185a-e). Now, if a man really is an expert, he may take either of two ways of convincing us of his claims. If he has learned his skill from others, he can tell us who his teachers were, and convince us that they were competent.
We may, however, contrive to avoid the demand for direct evidence that there is an expert among us. For if a man really knows what, e.g., good sight is, and how to produce it in a patient, he can tell us what sight is; if he cannot, he is manifestly not a specialist in the treatment of the eye. So, in the present case, the man whose judgment we need is the expert in “goodness,” which makes our souls better souls. If a man cannot even say what goodness is, it would be waste of time to take his advice on the kind of education which will produce it. Thus the original question whose judgment is authoritative in the problem of education may be replaced by the question who knows what goodness is. And this question may be, for convenience, further narrowed down. For our present purpose, judging of the worth of the art of the professional teacher of skill with shield and spear, it will be sufficient to consider only one “part” of goodness—courage or valour. A competent judge on the question whether the accomplishment makes its possessor a better soldier must at least be able to say what courage is (189d-190e). We have now got our ethical question fairly posed: What is it that we really mean to be talking about when we speak of ἀνδρεία—manliness, valour, courage—as one of the indispensable points of manhood? Laches, the less thoughtful of the two professional soldiers, thinks that any man can answer so simple a question off-hand. “A man who keeps his place in the ranks in the presence of the enemy, does his best to repel them, and never turns his back—there is a brave man for you” (190e). Thus, just as in the Charmides, we start with a proposed definition of an interior state of soul which confuses the state itself with one of its common and customary outward expressions. The further course of the discussion will reveal the double defectiveness of this formula. It is not even adequate as a description of the conduct of the fighting-man himself, and fighting is far from being the only business in life which demands the same qualities as those we expect from the good soldier. As usual, Plato is anxious to insist upon the real identity of the spiritual state under the great apparent variety of its outward manifestations. To discover that other occupations than those of warfare also call for the “soldierly” virtues is a long step towards discovering the essential unity of the “virtues” themselves.
Even Laches is ready to admit at once that a feigned withdrawal is a proper maneuver in warfare, as is shown by the practice of the Scythians, the pretended retreat by which the Lacedaemonians drew the Persians from their defenses at Plataea, and other examples (191a-c). He is even ready to allow that fighting is not the only situation in which courage may be shown. A man may show himself a brave man or a coward by the way he faces danger at sea,
Now that he sees the point, Laches replies very readily that there is a certain spirit or temper which is to be found universally in all the examples of courageous behavior Socrates has produced. They are all cases in which a man “persists” in the face of opposition or risk of some kind. Hence he proposes as the definition of courage that it is in all cases a certain καρτερία, “persistence,” “endurance,” “sticking to one’s purpose” (192c). This definition clearly has some of the qualities of a good definition. When you speak of courage as a “persistence of soul” just as when we commonly use the word “resolution” as a synonym for it, you are really trying to indicate the spirit which underlies all the manifold expressions of the quality. And it is, of course, true that persistence or resolution is a characteristic of courage; the brave man is one who “sticks it out.” But, as a definition, the formula is still too wide. All courage may be persistence, but all persistence is not courage. In the technical logical language which makes its appearance in Plato’s later dialogues, we need to know the “difference”
When a
At this point Nicias comes into the discussion. He has “often” heard Socrates say that a man is “good” at the things he “knows” (ἄπερ σοφός, 194d) and “bad” at the things he does not know (ἃ ἀμαθής). If this is true, as Nicias believes it to be, courage, since it is always a good quality or activity, will be a σοφία or ἐπιστήμη, a knowledge of some kind. It is clearly not the same thing as any form of specialist technical knowledge, for the reasons we have already considered. But it may well be that it is “the knowledge of what is formidable and what is not” (ἡ των δεινων καὶ θαρραλέων ἐπιστήμη, 194e); i.e. the truly brave man may be the man who knows, in all the situations of life, what is and what is not a proper object of fear. This suggestion is plainly a step in the right direction, as it
Thus the dialogue has led us to the same result as the Charmides. If we try to explain what any one great typical moral virtue is, we find ourselves driven on to define it as “the knowledge of what is good.” Every virtue thus seems on examination to cover the whole field of the conduct of life, and none can be in principle distinguished from any other. Yet it is commonly thought, and we shall see in dealing with the Republic that there are facts of experience which strongly support the view, that the different virtues are so really distinct that a man may be eminent for one and yet no less eminent for the lack of another, (as the typical soldier is commonly thought to be at once braver and more licentious than the ordinary peaceable civilian). We are forced by our intellect to accept the Socratic “paradox” of the unity of virtue, but we have to explain how the “paradox” is to be reconciled with the facts upon which popular moral psychology is based. How the reconciliation is effected we shall be able to say when we have studied the Protagoras, Phaedo, and Republic. The all-important point, on which too many interpreters went wrong in the nineteenth century, is to understand that, to the end of his life, Plato never wavered in his adherence to the “paradox” itself.
Lysis
The dialogue is linked with the Charmides by its setting, which presents another charming picture of the manner of Socrates with promising boys; some of the problems of moral psychology it suggests point forward to one of the supreme achievements of Plato’s literary prime, the Symposium. It is specially interesting as the unnamed source from which Aristotle derives most of the questions discussed in a more systematic way in the lectures which make up the eighth and ninth books of the Nicomachean Ethics. (The extensive use of the Lysis in these books of itself disposes of the misguided attack made on its authenticity by some nineteenth-century scholars.)
The subject of the discussion is Friendship, a topic which plays a much more prominent part in ancient than in modern ethical
Plato’s interest in the Lysis is partly a psychological one. He is fascinated by the mystery of the attraction which can draw two human beings so close, that each is to the other as dear or dearer than himself, as modern philosophers have been by the mystery of the attraction of a particular woman for a particular man. What does A see in B rather than in C, to account for this attraction? But he has also a more specifically ethical purpose, as will appear from an analysis of his argument.
As usual, we shall find the fundamental conceptions of the Socratic morality, the doctrine
The introduction of the dialogue closely resembles that of the Charmides. Socrates is taking a walk outside the city wall from the suburb of the Academy on the N.W. to the Lyceum on the E., when he is accosted by some of his young friends and drawn into a palaestra to make the acquaintance of Lysis, a beautiful and modest boy passionately admired by Hippothales, one of the elder lads. Hippothales, in fact, as the others complain, makes a nuisance of himself by inflicting on them endless bad poems, in which he belauds the antiquity, wealth, and splendid renown of the family of Lysis. Socrates good-naturedly banters Hippothales on the maladroitness of attempting to make a “conquest” by flatteries which would be more likely to spoil the recipient, by making him arrogant, conceited, and domineering, and is then invited to enter the palaestra and give a practical example of the kind of conversation really appropriate to a “lover” (Lysis, 203a-207c).
(The tone which Socrates adopts in his conversation with Lysis discloses quietly but unmistakably the difference between his own conception of a romantic attachment and that of his fashionable young companions. The tacit presupposition is that the “true lover’s” desire is for the real felicity of the beloved; his passion is thus an entirely pure and disinterested thing, a form of φιλία, “affection” not of selfish lust; and this, no doubt, is why Socrates can open the argument by examples drawn from wise parental affection.)
Lysis has parents who love him dearly. Since they love him so well they are, of course, anxious for his “happiness.” Now a man cannot be happy if he is not his own master and cannot “do what he desires,” “have his own way.” Yet the very parents who are so devoted to the boy’s happiness will hardly let him have his own way about anything. He is not allowed to drive his father’s horses or mules, though a hired coachman or a groom who is a slave is allowed to do as he thinks good with them. He is even made to go to school under the conduct of a paedagogus and, though the man is a slave, has to do what he tells him. When he comes back from school, he may not do as he pleases with his mother’s wools and implements for spinning and weaving; he would even be whipped if he meddled with them. This does not look like being happy or being one’s own master (207e-209a).
Lysis gives the boyish explanation that he is not yet old enough to meddle with such matters. But the real reason cannot be one of age. There are things in which he is allowed to have his own way. When his parents want him to read aloud, to write or to sing, he is allowed to have his own way about the order in which he reads or
Some by-play follows here, and when the argument is resumed it is with a different interlocutor. This is a device for calling our attention to the fact that the main issues of the dialogue have not yet been raised; they are to be looked for, not in the example of the right way of conversing with an ἐρώμενος, but in the apparently more desultory talk which is to follow. Socrates remarks that though he has always thought a good friend the most precious possession a man can have, he himself does not so much as understand how a friend is acquired. Young people who have had the good fortune to form a passionate friendship in their earliest days could, no doubt, enlighten him out of their experience. In this way we make the transition to the main problem of the dialogue, the question: What is the foundation of the personal attraction of one man for another?
“If one man loves another, which is the friend of the other—the lover of the loved, or the loved of the lover, or does this make no difference?” I.e., where there is a one-sided affection of A for B, does this entitle us to say that A and B are “friends”? If not, does it entitle us to call one of them a “friend,” and, if so, which is the friend? Are my friends the persons who love me or the persons whom I love? The difficulty lies in the existence of unrequited affection. A may be strongly attracted to B, while B is indifferent to A, or even repelled by him. Can we talk of friendship in cases of this kind? Or should we say that there is not friendship unless the attraction is reciprocal? It seems most reasonable to hold that
But a difficulty arises when we remember that, by parity of reasoning, it should follow that it is being hated which makes a man an enemy: (if you hate me, I am your enemy, though my heart may be full of nothing but goodwill to you, or though I may not know of your existence). This leads to the paradox that when A feels love to B, but B hates A, A is being hated by a friend and B loved by an enemy, and thus the same couple may be said to be at once friends and enemies, a contradiction in terms (213b).
If we revise our view and say that it is not being loved but loving that makes a friend, so that he who loves me is my friend, whatever my attitude to him may be, the same paradox equally follows, since I may love a person who cannot abide me. Since we began by setting aside the view that reciprocal affection is necessary for friendship, we seem thus to have exhausted all the possibilities, and to have shown that there is no such relation as friendship (213c).
The absurdity of this shows that we must have made a false start. We must go over the ground again, and we may take a hint from the poets, who talk of friendships as “made in heaven,” God, they say, “draws like to its like.” The scientific men who write cosmologies also make use of this principle of “like to like” to account for the distribution of bodies in the universe. Perhaps this may be the secret of friendship; the drawing of A to B may be one case of a great universal principle which underlies the structure of the universe. Yet, on closer examination, we see that unfortunately, so far as the relations of men are concerned, the principle of “like to like” cannot be, at best, more than half the truth. Bad men are not made friends by being “drawn together.” The more closely they are drawn together, the more each tries to exploit the other, and the more hostile they become. Perhaps the poets knew this, and really meant to say that a bad man, being without principle, is an unstable and chameleon-like being. He is a “shifty” fellow, who is perpetually “unlike” and at variance with himself, and a fortiori unlike and at variance with every one else. Hence the poets perhaps meant to hint that only men of
Yet, when we come to think of it, there is a worse difficulty to be faced. If one thing can act on another and influence it in any way, can the two be exactly alike? Must there not be some unlikeness, if there is to be any interaction? And if one party is wholly unaffected by the other, how can the one “care for” (ἀγαπαν) the other? What “comfort” (ἐπικουρία) can the one bring to the other? And how can you feel friendship for that which you do not care for? If good men are friends, the reason must be in their goodness, not in their “likeness” (i.e. they must be good in different ways, so that their respective goodnesses supplement each other, 214e-215a). And this, again, seems impossible. For the good man is “sufficient for himself” in proportion as he is good. He therefore feels no need of anything but himself. But he who feels no need does not “care for” anything, and he who does not care for a thing can have no affection for it. By this account there can be no friendships between the good; being “self-sufficient” they will not miss one another in absence or have any occasion for one another’s offices when they are together. On what ground, then, should they “set a value” on one another (215a-b).
Again we have gone off on a false track. Socrates once heard someone say that likeness is the source of the keenest rivalry and opposition, but extreme unlikeness the source of friendship. There is poetic authority for this in the Hesiodic saying about “two of a trade,” and, in fact, we see that it is so. The rich and the poor, the feeble and the strong, the ailing man and the physician, are brought into friendly association precisely because they are unlike; each needs the services of the other (e.g. the rich man needs industrious and honest servants, the poor need an employer who has wherewithal to pay for their industry; the sick man needs the physician’s skill, the physician needs the fee for it). In fact, said this speaker, the attraction of unlikes is the key to cosmology.
Everything in nature needs to be tempered by its opposite: the
“So long as a thing is not yet itself evil, the ‘presence’ of evil makes it desire
the corresponding good; when the thing itself has become evil,
it has lost both desire and affection for good.”
It is assumed that
The theory, then, works out thus. So long as a thing is not yet itself evil, the “presence” of evil makes it desire the corresponding good; when the thing itself has become evil, it has lost both desire and affection for good. This explains why neither those who are already wise, like the gods, nor those who are simply ignorant are “lovers of wisdom” (φιλόσοφοι). “Philosophers” as we are also told by Diotima in the Symposium, are between the two extremes on the way to wisdom, but only on the way. They are aware of their ignorance and anxious to get rid of it. The theory naturally appeals to the lads, since a boy’s enthusiastic devotions are regularly attachments of this kind to someone older than himself whom he admires and wants to grow like (216c-218b).
Still, on reflection, Socrates finds a fatal flaw in this attractive solution of his problem. If we revert to our illustration, we observe that the patient is attached to his physician “because of something” and “for the sake of something.” He values the doctor because he is afraid of illness and for the sake of health, and of these disease is bad and “hateful” to him, health is dear or welcome (φιλον) and good. Thus, if we generalize the principle, we must state it more exactly than we did at first. We must say, “That which is neither good nor bad is friendly to that which is good because of that which is bad and hateful, and for the sake of that which is good and welcome.” Now, passing by all merely verbal points to which exception might be taken, this statement implies that whatever is dear, or welcome, or friendly (φίλον) to us, is welcome as a means to something else, just as the physician’s skill is welcome as a means to keeping or recovering health. But health itself is surely also welcome (φίλον). Are we to say that it too is only welcome as a means to something? Even if we say this, sooner or later we are bound to come upon something which is dear to us simply on its own account, and is that for the sake of which all other “dear” things are dear. A father whose son has swallowed hemlock will be eager to put his hand on a jar of wine. But he only cares for the jar because it holds the wine, and he only cares about the wine because it will counteract the poison. It is his son, not a sample of Attic pottery or of a particular vintage, about whom he is really concerned. So long as a thing or person is only “dear” to us for the sake of something else, it is only a façon de parler to call it “dear.” What is really “dear” to us is “just that upon which all our so-called affections terminate” (ἐκεινο αὐτὸ εἰς ὃ πασαι αὑται λεγόμεναι φιλίαι τελευτωσιν, 220b). (Thus the question about the secret sources
We have thus eliminated from our last statement the clause “for the sake of that which is good and welcome.” Will the rest of the formula stand criticism? Is it true that what we “care for” is “good” and that we care for it “because of” (to escape from) evil? If the second of these statements is sound, it should follow that in a world where there were no evils, we should no longer care about anything good, any more than we should value medicine in a world where there was no disease. If this is so, then our attitude to the supreme object of all our affections is unique. We care about the secondary objects of affection “for the sake of something welcome to us” (φίλον), i.e. because they are means to this primary object; but we must say of the primary object of all affection itself that we care for it “for the sake of the unwelcome” (ἐχθρόν), if we should really value it no longer in a world where there were no evils. Perhaps the question, as we put it, is a foolish one, for who can tell what might or might not happen in such a world? But our experience of the world we live in teaches us as much as this. To feel hungry is sometimes good for us, sometimes harmful. Suppose we could eliminate all the circumstances in which being hungry is harmful, hunger would still exist, and so long as hunger existed we should “care for” the food which satisfies it. (Even in a socialist Utopia where every one was sure of sufficient food, and every one too healthy and virtuous to be greedy, men would still have “wholesome appetite” and care about their dinners.) This is enough to dispose of the theory that we only care about good as an escape from evil (220b-221c).
Thus our formula seems to have gone completely by the board, and the course of the argument has suggested a new one. It seems now that the cause of all attachment (φιλία) is desire (ἐπιθυμία), and that we must say “what a man desires is dear to him and when he is desiring it.” (Thus we arrive at a purely relative definition of τὸ φίλον, probably intentionally modelled on the famous relativist doctrine of Protagoras that “what a man thinks true is true—for him, and so long as he thinks it so”) We may proceed to develop this thought a little farther. A creature which desires regularly desires that of which it is “deficient” (ἐνδεές). So we may say that “the deficient” (τὸ ἐνδεές) is “attached” (φίλον) to that of which it is “deficient.” And deficiency means being “deprived” of something. (The “deficient” creature is “defective”; it is without something it must have in order to be fully itself.) “Passion” (ἔρως = eros), friendship, desire, then, are all felt for something which “belongs to one’s self” (τὸ οἰκειον). Friends or lovers, thus, if they really are what they profess to be, are οἰκειοι to one another; they “belong to” one another; each is, as we might say, a “part of the other” in “soul, or temper or body” (κατὰ τὸ της ψυχης ήθος ἢ τρόπους ἢ είδος). A thing for which we feel affection
Formally the dialogue has ended in a circle, or seems to have done so. If τὸ οἰκειον, “what belongs to one’s self” is also τὸ ὅμοιον, “what is like” one’s self, we have contradicted our earlier conclusion that friendship is not based on “likeness” If we try to escape from the contradiction by distinguishing between τὸ οἰκειον and τὸ ὅμοιον, it is attractive to say that all good things are οἰκεια to one another (in virtue of their common goodness), all bad things οἰκεια in virtue of their badness, and all “neutral” things again οἰκεια. But this would contradict our decision that friendship is impossible between the bad. Or if we identify τὸ οἰκειον, what is one’s own, with the good = τὸ ἀγαθόν, one’s good, we should have to say that friendship is only possible between two men who are both good, and this again would contradict another of our results (222b-e).
In ending in this apparently hopeless result, the Lysis resembles a much more famous dialogue, the Parmenides. In neither case need we suppose that Plato’s real intention is to leave us merely befogged. The way in which the thought that what is most near and intimate to each of us (τὸ οἰκειον) is the good is kept back to the very end of the conversation suggests that this—that man as such has such a “natural good,” and that it is the one thing worth caring for in life—is the thought he means the discussion to leave in our minds. If we go back to the various proposed explanations of the secret of friendship with this thought in our minds, it may occur to us that they do not, after all, formally contradict one another. The common bond between the parties to associations which are all correctly called “friendships” may be different in different cases. Or rather, the bond between the “friends” may in every case be association in the pursuit of some “good,” but goods are of very different levels of value, and “friendships” may exhibit the same variety of levels. Thus it may be that the full and perfect type of friendship can only be based on common pursuit of the true supreme good, and in that case friendship in the fullest sense will only be possible between “the good.” Yet there may be associations between men founded on the common pursuit of some good inferior to the highest (e.g. the common pursuit of the “business advantage” of both parties, or the common pursuit of amusement or recreation). These would be “friendships” but of a lower type, and it may quite well be the case, e.g., that a good man and a bad one, or even two bad men may be associated in this
“The full and perfect type of friendship can only be based on common pursuit
of the true supreme good, and in that case friendship in the fullest sense
will only be possible between ‘the good.’”
See further:
Ritter, C. Platon, i. 284-297 Laches; 343-359 Charmides; 497-504 Lysis.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 95-99 Laches, Charmides; 153-158 Lysis.
Stock, St. George. “Friendship (Greek and Roman)” in Hastings’
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 1908-1921, vol. vi.
Chapter V. Minor Socratic Dialogues: Cratylus and Euthydemus
Both the dialogues to be considered in this chapter have something of the character of “occasional works.” Both are strongly marked by a broad farcical humor, which is apparently rather Socratic than Platonic; we meet it again, e.g., in the comic fury of the satire in some parts of the Republic, but it is quite unlike the grave and gentle malice of such works as the Parmenides and Sophistes. The mirth, especially in the Euthydemus, has something of the rollicking extravagance of Aristophanes, and, according to the Symposium, there really was a side to Socrates which made him congenial company for the great comic poet. (Both men could relish wild fun, and both could enjoy a laugh at themselves.) In neither of our two dialogues is the professed main purpose directly ethical, though the Socratic convictions about the conduct of life incidentally receive an impressive exposition in the Euthydemus. It seems impossible to say anything more precise about the date of composition of either than that stylistic considerations show that both must be earlier than the great dramatic dialogues, Protagoras, Symposium, Phaedo, Republic. Since the Cratylus is a directly enacted drama with only three personages, while the Euthydemus is a reported dialogue with numerous personages and a vigorously delineated “background,” this second is presumably the more mature work of the two.
Cratylus
The personages of the dialogue other than Socrates are two, Hermogenes and Cratylus. Hermogenes is well known to us as a member of Socrates’ entourage. Both he and Cratylus figured in the Telauges of Aeschines,
As Callias was connected by marriage with Pericles, the appearance of him and his brother among the associates of Socrates is one of the many
It is not clear whether Aristotle means to place this connexion of Plato with Cratylus before or after the death of Socrates, but presumably he means that it was before that event, since he says that it belonged to Plato’s youth. The fact is likely enough, since Cratylus seems to have been one of Socrates’ associates. (We must not suppose Aristotle to mean that when Plato associated with him he had not yet met Socrates; the close relations of Socrates with Critias, Charmides, Adimantus, Glaucon, show that Plato must have been acquainted with him from early childhood.) We need not believe, and we can hardly believe, that the influence of Cratylus really counted for much in determining Plato’s own thought; he would not need any special master to inform him that sensible things are mutable. Most probably Aristotle, who only knew Plato in Plato’s old age, has exaggerated the importance of an acquaintance which had really no great significance. In any case, the tone of the whole dialogue requires us to suppose that both Cratylus and Hermogenes are youngish men, decidedly younger than Socrates.
The ostensible subject of discussion is the origin of language. Are names significant by “nature” (φύσει), in virtue of some intrinsic appropriateness of the verbal sign to the thing signified, or only significant “by convention” (νόμῳ), i.e. arbitrary imposition? Cratylus takes the first view; there is a natural “Rightness” of names which is one and the same for every one, Greek or barbarian (383b). If you call a thing by any other name than its own intrinsically “right” name, you are not naming it at all, even though you are using for it the word which every one else uses. Hermogenes is on the side of “convention” or arbitrary imposition; he holds that whatever we are accustomed to call anything is, for that reason, the name of the thing. The dispute is referred to Socrates, who is careful to explain that he cannot decide the question with expert knowledge, as he has never attended the expensive fifty-drachma lecture of Prodicus on the right use of language; he can only contribute the suggestions of his native mother-wit (384b).
It is
The real purpose of the dialogue, so far as it has any purpose beyond the preservation of a picture of Socrates in one of his more whimsical moods, is to consider not the origin of language, but its use and functions. If we consider the purposes which spoken language subserves, we shall see that if it is to be adequate for those purposes, it must conform to certain structural principles. Hence the formula of the partisans of “convention” that the “right name” of anything is just whatever we agree to call it, makes language a much more arbitrary thing than it really is. A “right name” will be a name which adequately fulfills all the uses for which a name is required, and thus one man’s or one city’s vocabulary may name things more rightly, because more adequately, than that of another. But so long as the purpose for which names are required is adequately discharged by any vocabulary, things will be rightly “named” in the vocabulary. The names for things will not have the same syllables and letters in Greek and in a “barbarian” language, but if the purposes for which speech is required are equally well achieved in both languages, both names will be equally “true” names for things. So the partisans of ϕύσις, who hold, like Cratylus, that there is one particular combination of sounds which is the one and only “right name” of a given thing, are also only partly right. They are right in thinking that the right assignment of names is not arbitrary, but depends on principles of some kind, and that a nomenclature which “every one agrees in using” may, for all that, be a bad one; they are wrong in thinking that if a given succession of sounds is a “right name” for a certain thing, no other such combination can be its “right name.” The Cratylus is thus not so much concerned with the “origin” of language, as with the principles of philosophical and scientific nomenclature, though it contains many incidental sound observations about those analogies between the different movements of articulation and natural processes which seem to underlie the “onomatopoeic” element in language, as well as about the various influences which lead to linguistic change.
Hermogenes, at the outset, adopts an extreme form of the view that language is wholly arbitrary. If I like to call a thing by a
This disposes of the suggestion of a purely “private” language peculiar to the individual, but still it may be reasonably maintained that at any rate though the names “barbarians” give to things are not the same as those used by Greeks, they are just as much the “true names” of things as the Greek words (385e). I.e. we may urge that the plurality of languages shows that language is an arbitrary thing, though it depends on the arbitrium of a group, not of a single man. But if names are arbitrary, is the reality (οὐσία) of the things named equally arbitrary? If a thing’s name is just whatever some one likes to call it, is the thing itself just whatever some one thinks it to be? Protagoras actually held that everything really is for any one just what he thinks it to be, so long as he thinks it to be so, and Hermogenes reluctantly admits that he sometimes feels driven to accept the view, strange as it is. However, we may perhaps dismiss it with the remark that it leaves no room for distinguishing wiser and less wise men, since it says that everyone’s beliefs are true—for him and no one else, and just as long as he holds them. But it seems the most patent of facts that some men are good, and therefore wise, and some wicked and therefore unwise. Yet we can hardly go to the opposite extreme with Euthydemus, who says that all statements whatever are true, always and “for every one.” This would equally lead to the view that there is no distinction between the virtuous and the vicious, and consequently none between wisdom and the lack of it
Now if neither of these doctrines can be true, “objects” (τὰ πράγμασα) clearly have some determinate real character of their own (οὐσίαν τίνα βέβαιον) which is independent of our “fancy”; and if this is so “activities” (πράξεις = praxis) will also have a “nature” or “reality” (φύσιν) of their own, since “activities” are one form of “object” (ἔν τι εἰδος τὼν ὄντων, 386e). Hence, if we want to perform an act, we cannot do it in any way and with any instrument we please. We must do it in the way prescribed by the nature of the object we are acting on, and with the “naturally proper” instrument (ᾦ πέφυκε). For example, in cleaving wood, if we are to succeed, we must split the wood “with the grain” and we must use a naturally suitable implement. Speaking of things and naming them is an activity (πράξεις), and what we have just said applies therefore to naming. If we want to name things we must name them not just as the fancy takes us, but “as the nature of the objects permits and with the instrument it permits.” The instrument or tool for naming things is, of course, the name itself. We may define a name as “an instrument by which we inform one another about realities and discriminate between them” (388b-c, ὄνομα ἄρα διδασκαλικόν τί ἐστιν ὄργανον καὶ διακριτικὸν της οὐσίας). In all the crafts (weaving, for example) one craftsman (e.g. the weaver) has to make a proper use of some implement which has been properly made by some other craftsman (e.g. the carpenter, who makes the wooden implements which the weaver uses). Now from our definition of a name we see at once who is the expert craftsman who “uses” names as his tools; he is the “teacher” or “instructor” (ὁ διδασκαλικός. But who is the other expert who makes the tools which the teacher uses? According to the very theory from which we started, they are made by νόμος, “social usage.” Hence we may say that they are the manufacture of the “legislator,” the institutor of social usage. And legislation is not work that anyone can do, “unskilled labour”; it is “skilled labour,” work for an expert, or professor of a τέχνη. Clearly then, it is not correct to say that anyone whatever can arbitrarily give names to things (386d-389a). (Thus the result so far is that, since the function of language is the accurate communication of knowledge about things, the vocabulary of “social usage” will only be satisfactory when it supplies a nomenclature which corresponds to the real agreements and differences between the things named.)
Well, what would the expert in establishing usages have before his mind’s eye in assigning names? We may see the answer by considering the way in which the carpenter works when he makes a κερκίς (model) for the weaver. He “keeps his eyes on” the work the κερκίς is meant to do in weaving—its function. If one of his articles breaks while he is making it, of course he makes a fresh one, and in making it he does not “fix his eye” on the spoilt and broken κερκίς but on the form (εῖδος) with an eye to which he had been
There are three points to be got hold of here, (1) The carpenter cannot give the tools he makes for the weaver just any shape he pleases; the shape or form of the κερκίς is determined, independently of anyone’s fancy, by the work it is meant to do. (2) Strictly speaking, when the carpenter is said in common parlance to make a κερκίς, what he does is to put the form, which is the “natural” or “real” κερκίς, into the wood on which he is working.
Who, then, decides whether a given piece of wood has really received the “form of κερκίς,” as it should have done? Not the expert who makes the implement (the carpenter), but the expert who will have to use it (the weaver). And this is a general rule. The man who makes an implement must “take his specifications” from the man who is to use it.
Thus we arrive at a distinction
Cratylus, then, is right in thinking that language depends on “nature,” and that names can only rightly be given by a man who “fixes his eye on the real (φύσει) name and can put its form into letters and syllables” (389a-390e).
And,
Once started on this trail, Socrates proceeds to propound a host of derivations of names—proper names of heroes and gods, and common nouns—with the general purpose of showing that in their original form, often widely different from that to which we are accustomed, they have a “connotation” which makes them specially appropriate. There is no need to follow this part of the conversation in any detail, all the more since Socrates professes to be surprised by his own readiness and suggests that he must have been infected by an abnormal “possession” from having just left the company of the “inspired” Euthyphro (396d). We could hardly be told more plainly that the extravagances which are to follow are meant as a caricature of the guesses of “etymologists” working in the dark without any scientific foundation.
We come back to seriousness at 422a with the reflection that, after all, the process of derivation cannot go on for ever. We must, in the end, arrive at a stock of primitive names, the ABC (στοιχεια) of all the rest. How are we to account for the appropriation of each of these to its signification? We may do so if we reflect that language is a form of gesture.
If we were all deaf and dumb we
Hitherto the conversation has been a dialogue between Socrates and Hermogenes; Cratylus now replaces the latter as interlocutor. He is delighted with all that Socrates has said—no doubt because Socrates has professed to find Heracliteanism embodied in the very structure of language—and thinks it could hardly be bettered. But Socrates himself has misgivings, and would like to consult his second thoughts. (What the by-play here really hints is that we are now to come to a discussion to which Plato attaches greater importance than he does to the entertaining etymological speculations on which so much time has been spent.)
We said that name-giving is a trade, and that the workman (δημιουργός, demiurgos) who makes names is the “legislator.” Now in general there are better and worse workmen in any trade; we should expect, then, that there are degrees of goodness and badness in the names made by different legislators (i.e. linguistic tradition, of which the νομοθέτης is a personification, approximates more or less nearly, in the case of different idioms, to the ideal of a “philosophical” language). Cratylus denies this, on the ground that a word either
Though this issue of the possibility of significant false statement has been raised, we need not go to the bottom of it for our present purposes. (In fact, Plato’s own logical studies had presumably not yet led him to the complete solution.) It is enough to remember that we have already agreed that a name is a “representation” (μίμημα) of that which it names. It is like a portrait, except that the portrait is a visible, the name an audible, representation. Now we might take the portrait of a woman for a portrait of a man; we should then be connecting the portrait with the wrong original, but still it would be a portrait of some original. We do the same thing when we misapply a name; it does not cease to be a name because we apply it to the wrong thing. Again, a portrait is not an exact replica. One artist seizes points which another misses, and thus there may be a better and a worse portrait, and yet both are portraits of the same original. Why may not the same thing be true of the primitive names in language? Why may not a name be an imperfect but real “representation” of that for which it stands? (This would explain why the primitive names in different languages may all be genuine “vocal gestures,” denoting the same thing, in spite of the differences between them.) Cratylus suggests that the analogy with portraiture does not hold. A bad portrait may leave out some characteristic of its original, or put in something not present in the original, and yet be a recognizable portrait of the man. But in the case of a name, if, for example, we put in or leave out a single letter, we have not written that name at all.
If we are agreed so far, we may now say that a well-made name must contain the “letters” which are “appropriate” to its signification; i.e. those which are “like” what is signified (i.e. the vocal gestures which compose the name must have a natural resemblance to some feature in that which it names; a name which contains inappropriate sounds may be still a recognizable name if some of its components are appropriate, but it will not be a well-made one). The only way of escaping our conclusions would be to fall back on the view that names are purely conventional and arbitrary. This is impossible, since in any case there must be some sort of natural appropriateness about the elementary components of vocal gesture to lead the imposers of names in the making of their first conventions, just as there must be in nature colouring materials appropriate for the reproduction of the tints of a face if there is to be such an art as portraiture. But we can see that “convention” and the arbitrary play their part in language too. Thus there is a “roughness” about the sound of the letter r which makes it appropriate in the name of anything hard and rough, while there is a smoothness of articulation about l which makes it inappropriate for the same purpose. Yet this letter actually occurs in the very word σκληρός itself, and even Cratylus must admit that “thanks to custom” he knows what the word means. It discharges its function as a name none the worse for containing an inappropriate sound (433b-435b). In particular we should find it quite impossible to show that the names of the numerals are made up of gestures naturally appropriate to signify those particular numbers. The principle of natural significance, however sound, is a most uncertain guide in etymological studies (435b-c).
We revert to a position we had laid down at the outset. The “faculty” (δύναμις) or function of a name is to convey instruction (διδάσκειν). Does this imply that a man who has knowledge of names will also have a corresponding knowledge of the realities (πράγματα) for which the names stand? Cratylus is inclined to think so, and even to hold that the knowledge of names is the only way to the knowledge of things. Not only is the understanding (τὸ μανθάνειν) of words the one way to the understanding of
In any case, the view Cratylus is maintaining is self-contradictory. He holds that the inventors of the first names must have known the truth about things in order to give each its “true” name, and also that the truth about things can only be discovered by the study of names. How then did the original makers of names discover it? Perhaps, says Cratylus, the first names were of a superhuman origin; language began as a divine revelation, and its divine origin guarantees the “rightness” of the primitive names. If that is so, then both our sets of derivations cannot be sound, or, as Cratylus says, one set of words cannot be real “names” at all (438c). But the question is, which set—those which suggest the “flux” or those which suggest that movement is an illusion—are real names? We cannot decide the issue by appeal to other words, for there are no other words than those employed in language. The appeal will have to be to the realities words signify, and we shall have to learn what these realities are, not from words, but “from one another and from themselves” (438e). Besides, even if we admit that the truth about things can be learned by studying their names, since well-made names, as we have said, are “likenesses”
Socrates keeps the point on which he wishes to insist most until the end. Whatever the opinion of the framers of language may have been, the Heraclitean doctrine of universal impermanence cannot be true. There are such things as “Beauty” and “Goodness” (αὐτὸ καλὸν καὶ αγαθόν) and other realities of that kind. Even Cratylus admits this at once. He does not extend his doctrine of impermanence to the realm of “values.” Now they cannot be everlastingly mutable; they are what they are once for all and always. You could not call anything “the so-and-so” (αὐτὸ, 439d), if it had no determinate character but were merely mutable. And the merely mutable could not be known. What is known is known as having this or that determinate character, but if the doctrine of “flux” is true, nothing ever has such determinate character. Not to mention that knowing as a subjective activity also has a determinate character, so that in a world where everything is incessantly becoming something else, there could be neither objects to be known nor the activity of knowing. But if knower (τὸ γιγνωσκον), object known (τὸ γιγνωσκόμενον), Beauty, Good, are real, the Heraclitean doctrine cannot be true. We will not now ask which of these alternatives is the right one, but we may say that it does not look a sensible procedure for a man to have such confidence in names and their givers that he hands over his soul to “names” for “tendance” and asserts dogmatically that all men and all things are sick of a universal “defluxion” and as leaky as a cracked pitcher (440a-d). This is the issue which young men like Cratylus and Hermogenes should face seriously and courageously and not decide in a hurry (440d). Thus the dialogue leaves with us as the great problem, or rather the two aspects of the same great problem of all philosophy, the metaphysical problem of the reality of the forms and the moral problem of the right “tendance of the soul.”
Euthydemus
The dialogue, as we have said, has more of the spirit of broad farce than any other work of Plato; it would be possible to see in it nothing more than an entertaining satire on “eristics” who think it a fine thing to reduce every one who opens his mouth in their company to silence by taking advantage of the
In form, the Euthydemus is a narrated drama. Socrates describes to his old friend Crito, with a great deal of humor, a mirthful scene in his favourite haunt, the palaestra near the Lyceum, at which he had been present the day before. The supposed date can only be fixed by consideration of a number of bits of internal evidence. It is, as we see from Euthydemus, 271c, “many years” after the foundation of Thurii (444 BC), and must be before the year of the great scandal about the “profanation of the mysteries,” just before the sailing of the Athenian Armada for Sicily (416-5), since Axiochus of Scambonidae, father of the lad Clinias who figures as respondent, was one of the principal persons ruined by the affair.
The first question—from its recurrence elsewhere we may infer that it was a “stock” puzzle—turns on the double sense of the word μανθάνειν, which means primarily to “learn”; but derivatively, in colloquial language, to “understand,” “take the
A new puzzle is now started. When a man learns something, does he learn what he knows or what he does not know? (This again is a standing catch, intended to prove the paradox that it is impossible to learn anything, to get new knowledge.) The natural answer is that a man learns what he does not already know, since learning means getting fresh knowledge. But when a schoolmaster dictates something to you, you “learn” the sense of the passage (you take in its meaning). What he dictated is a series of “letters,” but you must have “known” your letters before you could do dictation. Thus when you “learn,” you must already “know” the thing you are learning. Yet, per contra, to learn means to get knowledge, and no one can get what he already has. Ergo, after all, it is what you do not know that you learn (276e-277c).
It is clear, of course, what the origin of “eristic” of this kind is. Euthydemus and his brother are borrowing and degrading the logical method of Zeno.
There follows at once a simple statement, in clear language such as a mere boy can follow, of the root ideas of Socratic ethics. Of course every one of us wants εὖ πράττειν, to “fare well” to “make a success of life.” And equally, of course, making a success of life means having “abundance of good” (πολλὰ ἀγαθά). Now what things is it good to have? “The first man you meet” will mention some of them: wealth, health, beauty, bodily advantages in general, good birth, a position of influence and respect. But there are other good things than these, or at least other things which Socrates and Clinias regard as good: sophrosyne, justice, courage, wisdom. Is the list of goods now complete? Perhaps we have left out the most important of all, “good luck” (εὐτυχία), without which any other advantages may turn out to be disguised curses. And yet, on second thoughts, we have not forgotten it. For wisdom is itself εὐτυχία. Who have the best “luck” or “good fortune in playing musical instruments, in reading and writing, in navigation, warfare, medicine? The men who know how to do these things—expert musicians, sailors, soldiers, physicians. One would, e.g., think it a great piece of luck in war to be serving under a competent and not under an incompetent commander. In general, wisdom or knowledge (σοφία) leads to efficient achievement (εὐπραγία) and so to “good fortune.” If we have wisdom, then
On reviewing these results, we see ground to criticise one of them, the statement that we shall be happy and “make life a success” (εὐδαιμονειν καὶ εὐ πράττειν) if we “have abundance of good things.” To have them will not benefit us unless we also use them, any more than it would benefit an artisan to have the materials and tools of his trade if he never used them. So, e.g., “wealth” is of no benefit unless we use it. And it would not be enough to say that we must not only have the various good things but use them. We must add that, to be happy, we must use them right. They are, in fact, dangerous tools; if you use them in the wrong way you do yourself a harm; it would be better to leave them alone than to use them wrongly. Now in all crafts and businesses it is the expert’s knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) of his craft which enables him to use his materials and implements in the right way, and the same thing holds good of health and wealth and the goods in popular esteem generally. Knowledge enables us to use wealth, health, and all other “advantages” rightly, and to achieve success (εὐπραγία). If a man had all other possessions besides wisdom and were not directed by “sense” (νους) in his undertakings, the less he undertook the fewer blunders he would make, and the happier he would be. It would be happier for him to be poor than rich, timid than courageous, sluggish and dull rather than of active temper and quick perception, since the less he undertook the less mischief he would do. In fact, none of the things we began by calling good can be called unconditionally (αὐτὰ καθ̉ αὐτά) good. They are better than their opposites when they are conjoined with the wisdom to make a right use of them (φρόνησίς τε καὶ σοφία), but worse when they are disjoined from it. It follows that, properly speaking, there is just one thing good, wisdom, and just one bad thing, ἀμαθία, “dullness,” stupidity (280b-281e). (Compare the precisely similar line of reasoning by which Kant reaches the conclusion that the good will is the only thing which is unconditionally good, because it is the only good which cannot be misused.)
We may draw a final conclusion. We now see that since happiness depends on wisdom and knowledge, the one end after which every man should strive is to become “as wise as possible.” Hence what we should crave to get from our parents, friends, fellow-citizens, alien acquaintances, before everything else, is just wisdom. One should be ready to “serve and slave” and render “any service that is comely”
Socrates has really given us so far only half of a “protreptic discourse” such as would be to his mind. He has led up to the conclusion that happiness depends on the direction of life and conduct by knowledge, but has not so far told us what knowledge in particular it is of which we cannot make an ill use. It is fundamental for his purpose that we should distinguish such knowledge from every recognized form of expert professional knowledge, and the distinction will be made later. For the present we return to the “comic relief” of the fooleries of Euthydemus and his brother, which become increasingly absurd, precisely in order that the heightened contrast of tone shall mark the second part of Socrates’ discourse, when we reach it, as the most important thing in the whole dialogue. For the present he proposes that the “professionals” shall now take up the argument at this point, and decide the question whether one needs to learn every kind of “knowledge” or whether there is one special knowledge which conducts to happiness. Or, if they prefer, they may go over the ground he has already covered and do so in a less amateurish fashion. Of course they do neither; their object is simply épater les bourgeois, and Dionysodorus, the older of the two, sets to work at once to administer a thoroughly sensational shock. Can Socrates and the others, who profess to feel so much affection for Clinias, be serious in saying that they are anxious that he should become “wise”? For their language implies that he is not yet what they wish him to become. They say they want him to “be no longer what he now is”; but to wish a man to “be no longer” is to wish that he may perish—a pretty wish on the part of one’s “affectionate friends” (283a-d). (Here again we are on Eleatic ground, and we see that it is not for nothing that Plato reminds us repeatedly that his two sophists had lived at Thurii. The argument that nothing can change, because that which “becomes different” is becoming “what it is not” and therefore becoming nothing at all, derives directly from Parmenides as soon as his physics are converted into logic, and, like the rest of the puzzles connected with it, only gets its solution when we come to the distinction between absolute and relative not-being introduced in the Sophistes. In our dialogue Plato is not seriously concerned with the solution of these difficulties; what he is concerned with is the futility of regarding them as a preparation for the conduct of life, and the moral levity of the professors who make a parade of them.) The immediate effect of the sally of Dionysodorus is to call forth from Ctesippus, an older lad deeply attached to Clinias, an angry complaint of the “falsity” of the accusation, and this gives Euthydemus an opening for airing his principal piece of “wisdom” which we have already met in the Cratylus—the doctrine that all statements are true, or, as he puts it now, that “it is impossible to speak falsely” for the reason that
It is characteristic of Socrates that he insists at once on calling attention to the practical bearings of this piece of logical paradox. It implies that two men cannot even think contradictory propositions; if a false statement is impossible, mental error is impossible too, and from this it follows that no one can commit an error in practice (ἐξαμαρτάνειν ὅταν τι πράττη), and the claim of the brothers to be able to teach goodness must therefore be an empty one, for their teaching is superfluous.
This gives him an excuse
We saw that the one thing needful for the conduct of life is knowledge. But what kind of “knowledge”? Of course, the knowledge which will “profit” us, “useful knowledge.” Now what kind of knowledge is that? It cannot be any kind of knowledge which merely teaches us how to produce something without also teaching us how to use the thing we have produced. This enables us to dismiss at once all the specialized industrial arts, like that of the maker of musical instruments, none of which teach a man how to use the thing they have taught him to make. In particular, this consideration applies to the art of the λογοποιός, which looks so imposing. We might think that this art of composing effective speeches is just the kind of knowledge we need for the conduct of life, since it teaches us how to make the “charm” or “spell” which is potent against those most deadly of enemies, angry and prejudiced dicasteries and ecclesiae. Yet, after all, the important thing is to know how to use the “spell” but the logopoiόs only teaches you how to make it.
Incidentally we note that the claim of any of the purely speculative branches of knowledge, the mathematical sciences, has been disposed of by this criticism. The mathematicians also are, in their way, “hunters” on the trail of “realities” (τὰ ὄντα).
But though their διαγράμματα (here again the word means “proofs”
The serious positive purpose of the argument, which has incidentally slipped into becoming a direct conversation between Socrates and Crito, is not hard to discover. The knowledge on which the right conduct of life and the right government of men alike depend is not knowledge of the way to meet any one particular type of situation or to discharge any one particular calling or function; it is knowledge of good, or, to put the point in more modern phraseology, knowledge of absolute moral values. On the Socratic assumption that knowledge of this kind is always followed by corresponding action, and is therefore the only knowledge which is guaranteed against all possible misuse, the question for what we are to use it becomes superfluous; we do not “use” it as a means to some ulterior end at all, we simply act it out. To put the matter in the Greek way, every “art” is an “art of opposites”; that is, may be used for a bad as well as for a good end. The special knowledge of toxicology which makes a man a medical specialist may also make him a dangerous secret poisoner. The intimate knowledge of the Stock Exchange and share market which makes a man an excellent trustee for the fortune of his ward will also make him a particularly dangerous “fraudulent trustee” if he applies it for dishonest ends. But “knowledge of the good” is in a unique position which distinguishes it from all special professional or technical knowledge, the thing with which the “sophists” and their pupils regularly confuse it. It too, in a sense, is “of opposites,” since to know what is good involves knowing that what is incompatible with good must be evil. But, on Socratic principles, this knowledge is not a knowledge of opposites in the sense that it can be put to either of two opposite uses, a good one and a bad one. The possession of the knowledge carries along with it the possession of the “good will.” We thus recover the fundamental positions of the Socratic ethics from the apparently fruitless argument. The reason why the positive result is not stated is simply that the object of Socrates’ “protreptic” is not to do another man’s thinking for him and present him with ready-made “results,” but to stimulate him to think along the right lines for himself, so that when the “result” emerges, it comes as a personal conviction won by a genuine personal exercise of intelligence. Hence Socrates is represented as breaking off at the point we have reached, and appealing to the two distinguished strangers to help him out of the “squall” in which he seems to be threatened with shipwreck. As we should expect, they do nothing of the kind, but fall to their old trick. Socrates does not need any help, for they will prove to him that he already has the knowledge for which he is seeking. He knows some things, ergo he has knowledge; but one cannot both have knowledge and not have it, ergo he knows everything. And so, for the matter of that, does every one else (293a-e). Euthydemus and his brother have, in fact, a sort of universal infallibility; they know all trades and the answers to all the most trifling speculative questions. This, says Socrates,
From this point onwards the dialogue becomes increasingly farcical as the two brothers go on to develop one absurdity after another, until Socrates, the only member of the company who has preserved his gravity, takes his leave of them with many ironical compliments and the advice to take care, in their own interests, not to cheapen the price of their wisdom by too many public exhibitions. There is no need to follow in detail the whole series of ludicrous paralogisms which precedes this finale. Aristotle found good material in it for his own study of fallacies, but Plato’s object is ethical rather than logical, as has been already said.
At the end of Socrates’ narrative, Plato adds a sort of appendix, a page or two of direct conversation between Socrates and Crito. Crito observes that the remark had already been made to him by a certain writer of speeches for the law-courts who fancied himself a “great wit” (πάνυ σοφς), that the disgraceful scene in the Lyceum was enough to show that “philosophy” is “mere waste of time” (οὐδὲν πραγμα), for the professionals who had just been making egregious fools of themselves were actually among its most eminent living representatives.
It has naturally been suspected that there is some personal allusion underlying these remarks, and the view has often been taken that Plato is aiming a shaft on his own account at his rival Isocrates. It is true, of course, that during the lifetime of Socrates, Isocrates was known only as a λογογράφος or composer of speeches for the courts, but that some time early in the fourth century he gave up this profession for that of presiding over a regular institution for the preparation of young men of promise for a political career. It is true also that Isocrates called the kind of education he bestowed on his pupils his “philosophy,” and that he affected to look down on the severely scientific studies of Plato’s Academy as “useless” and unpractical. From Plato’s point of view, it would be highly à propos to speak of Isocrates as “on the border line” between a politician and a philosopher, and inferior to each in his own department—except that one might doubt whether Plato did really think Isocrates inferior in statesmanship to the commonplace Athenian men of affairs of his own time.
Yet I think the identification quite impossible. At the date indicated by all the allusions of the Euthydemus, Isocrates would still be no more than a lad, whereas the person spoken of by Crito is already a λογογράφος of established repute. Still less could Socrates, at this date, be supposed to anticipate that Isocrates would some day lay claim to the reputation of a philosopher. (The case is rather different with the express references of the Phaedrus to Isocrates, since, as we shall see, the date of that dialogue is supposed to be later.) We must suppose Socrates to be alluding rather to some well-known figure of the time of the Archidamian war. There is no reason why there should not have been more than one personage of the age to which Callicles and Thrasymachus belong who fancied himself as a blend of the philosophical thinker and the practical “statesman.” The remains of Antiphon “the sophist,” for example, suggest by their character that he might perfectly well be the person intended, and we know from a notice preserved by Xenophon
See further:
Ritter, C. Platon, i. 450-462 Euthydemus; 462-496 Cratylus.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 137-153.
Stewart, J. A. Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 34-39, Cratylus.
Warburg, M. Zwei Fragen zum Kratylos. Berlin, 1929.
Chapter VI. Socratic Dialogues: Gorgias, Meno
The Gorgias is a much longer work than any we have yet considered, and presents us with an exposition of the Socratic morality so charged with passionate feeling and expressed with such moving eloquence that it has always been a prime favourite with all lovers of great ethical literature. The moral fervour and splendour of the dialogue, however, ought not to blind us, as it has blinded most writers on Platonic chronology, to certain obvious indications that it is a youthful work, earlier in composition, perhaps, than some of those with which we have been concerned. We might have inferred as much from the mere fact that Plato has adopted the form of the direct dialogue for so considerable a work, and thus missed the chance of giving us a description of the personality of Gorgias to compare with his elaborate portrait of Protagoras. Personally, I cannot also help feeling that, with all its moral splendour, the dialogue is too long: it “drags.” The Plato of the Protagoras or Republic, as I feel, would have known how to secure the same effect with less expenditure of words; there is a diffuseness about our dialogue which betrays the hand of the prentice, though the prentice in this case is a Plato. For this reason I think it a mistake in principle to look, as some have done, for an ethical advance in doctrine as we pass from the Protagoras to the Gorgias. As we shall see when we come to deal with the Protagoras, the ethical doctrine of the dialogues is identical, and it is inconceivable to me that any reader of literary sensibility can doubt which of the two is the product of a riper mastery of dramatic art. Beyond this general statement that the Gorgias must be an early work, and probably a work dating not many years after the death of Socrates, I do not think it safe to hazard any conjecture as to the date of composition.
Possibly, too, the date
The characters of the dialogue besides Socrates are four—Gorgias, the famous “orator” of Leontini, whose well-known rhetorical devices for adding pomp and glitter to language represent the first stage in the development of a literary prose style rising above colloquialism or bald narration of matter of fact and yet remaining prose; Polus of Agrigentum, his enthusiastic disciple and admirer; Callicles of Acharnae, of whom we only know what Plato has thought fit to tell us; and Chaerephon, the lean, impetuous, and apparently rather superstitious companion of Socrates, whom
Formally the dialogue opens in a familiar way. Socrates is anxious to discover the precise character of the art or “speciality” (τέχνη) professed by Gorgias, the art of “rhetoric.” It is, as Gorgias says (449d), an art of “speech” or “discourse” (λόγουςπερὶ ), and as such it makes those who possess it skilled in “speaking” and therefore, since speech is the expression of thought or intelligence, makes them intelligent (δυνατοὺς φρονειν, 450a) about something. But this is far from an adequate definition. We may say that “arts” are of two kinds: the operations of the one kind are wholly or chiefly manual, those of the other kind are purely or principally effected by λόγοι, “discourses” (450d), a first intimation of the distinction, which becomes fundamental in Plato’s later dialogues and in the philosophy of Aristotle, between “theoretical” and “practical” sciences. Now rhetoric is not the only “art” of the second kind; there are many others, such as theoretical and practical arithmetic (ἀριθμητική and λογιστική), geometry, medicine, and others, in which manual operations play no part or a subordinate one; but Gorgias certainly does not mean to say that he teaches medicine or mathematics. To complete the definition we need to know what is the subject-matter with which the “discourse” of the rhetorician is concerned, as the “discourse” of the arithmetician is concerned with “the odd and even” (i.e. with the properties of the integer-series (451a-b)). Gorgias thinks it enough to say that the subject-matter is “the most important of human concerns” (τὰ μέγιστα των ἀνθρωείων πραγμάτων), “the supreme interests of mankind.” But a statement of this kind, which attempts to define by means of a mere formula of laudation, is ambiguous, since there are different opinions on the question what is the “great concern” of man. A physician might say that it is health, an economist or a business man that it is wealth. Hence, though Gorgias may be right in his estimate of his art, the estimate itself presupposes an answer to the ethical question what is the chief good for man (452d). Gorgias replies that the chief good for man is ἐλυθερία, freedom, in the sense of having his own way and being able to impose his will on his fellow-citizens, and that it is rhetoric, the art of persuasive or plausible speech which produces this good (452d). Thus the thought is that “power” is the chief good and that rhetoric, the art of persuasion, is the supreme art, because, in the life of a city like Athens, persuasive eloquence is the great weapon by which the statesman acquires power; the persuasive speaker gets his policy adopted by the ecclesia, his financial schemes by the βουλή and successfully impeaches his opponents and defends his partisans before the dicasteria. The secret of a Pericles, for example, is simply his command over the resources of persuasive eloquence. Gorgias holds that he can teach this secret to a pupil, and that is why he regards his own τέχνη as the supreme achievement of the human
We know now what Gorgias means by “rhetoric”: he means an “art” of persuasion. It is an “art” because it is, or claims to be, reducible to intelligible principles; its end or aim is to “persuade” men to accept the views of the practitioner, and so to make them consenting instruments of his will. But the definition has the fault of being too wide: it does not, in fact, state the specific differentia of the orator’s accomplishment. There are other “arts,” including that of the arithmetician, of which we might equally say that they are arts by which men are persuaded to accept the specialist’s opinion, since they “teach” us certain truths, and he who is taught is certainly persuaded of the things taught him. We must ask then, further, what kind of persuasion does rhetoric employ, and about what matters does it produce persuasion? (454a). Gorgias replies that rhetoric is the kind of persuasion employed “before dicasts and mobs in general,” and that it persuades about “matters of right and wrong,” i.e. it is the art of effective public speaking on questions of morality (454b). This at once suggests an important distinction. Persuasion or conviction (τὸ πιστεύειν) may be produced by instruction or without it. In the first case, a man is not only persuaded to hold an opinion, he is led to knowledge; in the second, he is convinced but does not really know that his conviction is true. Now obviously a “mob” cannot be conducted to knowledge on grave and complicated issues in the short time required for the delivery of an effective speech. The orator, therefore, must be a practitioner of the mere persuasion which does not produce real knowledge.
We must expect, then,
There is an obvious weak point in this commendation of the orator’s art, and Socrates fastens on it at once. The “orator,” by Gorgias’ own account, is no “expert,” and the “mob” or “crowd” before whom he succeeds in silencing the real expert are not experts either. Thus, on the showing of Gorgias himself, oratory is a device by which an ignorant man persuades an audience equally ignorant with himself that he understands a question better than the expert who really knows about it. Does this apply to the moral issues with which the “orator” will be largely concerned? Does he need to know no more about right and wrong, honor and dishonor, than about, e.g., naval engineering or medicine? If he does need knowledge of this kind, where is he to get it, since Gorgias has explained that it is not his own business to impart it? Gorgias, rather inconsistently, suggests that, in case of need, a pupil might incidentally get the knowledge of right and wrong from himself; in any case, he needs to have it. The “orator” must be δίκαιος, “a moral man” (If he were not, of course, he might make the
So far our results have come to this: it has at least been suggested that a statesman, who owes his power in a democracy to skill in persuasion, need not be an expert in any of the technical arts, but does require sound moral principles, though it is not quite clear how he is to come by them. Here Gorgias retires from the argument, and his place is taken by his younger disciple and admirer Polus, who is prepared to break with conventional views about morality, as the respectable Gorgias is not. According to Polus, Socrates has taken an unfair advantage of the conventional modesty which had led Gorgias to disclaim the status of a professional teacher of right and wrong. The disclaimer was a mere piece of good manners, and Socrates has himself committed a breach of manners in pretending to take it seriously. Polus also insists that Socrates shall play the part of “respondent” and submit his own definition of rhetoric for examination, as Socrates, in fact, is quite willing to do. According to this definition, which opens the second of the three sections of the dialogue, rhetoric is not an “art,” a matter of expert knowledge, at all. It is a mere empirical “knack” (ἐμπειρία, τριβή), and more precisely, a “knack of giving pleasure” (462c). In this respect it is like confectionery. The confectioner pleases the palates of his customers by a clever combination of flavours, and the “orator” in the same way “tickles the ears of the groundlings” by attractive combinations of words and phrases. It is meant that neither confectionery nor oratory is really an application of rational principles; you cannot lay down rules for either, since both are mere tricks of gratifying the tastes of a body of patrons, and in each case the trick depends on nothing more scientific than a tact which cannot be taught but only picked up by long personal experience of successes and failures. There is thus nothing “fine” about either; they are both branches of a “knack” for which the proper name is κολακεία, “humoring the moods of a patron,”
We may, in fact, distinguish four species of this κολακεία, each of which is a spurious counterfeit or “ghost” (εἴδωλον) of a real science or art. We start from the now familiar Socratic conception
In the same way, κομμωτική, the “art,” if you could call it so, of bodily adornment (the calling of the friseur, the professional beautifier, the jeweler, and many others), is a parody of the genuine art of the trainer. “Gymnastic” makes the body inherently attractive and graceful by training it in the exercises which produce genuine grace, agility, and vigour; κομμωτική mimics this real art by producing a sham grace and charm effected by the artifice of cosmetics, fashionable clothes, and the like. (Here, again, there is no real standard, nothing but the caprice of the passing “fashion.”) So with the arts which have to do with the health of the soul. The sophist professes to teach goodness, but what he teaches as goodness is merely the kind of life which is likely to recommend itself to his auditors; the “orator” claims to be the physician of the disorders of the body politic, but the measures he recommends only persuade his audience because he is careful to recommend what is agreeable to their mood of the moment. Thus we may define rhetoric by saying that it is the counterfeit of one part of “politics” namely, of justice (463a-466a).
Polus urges in reply that rhetoric cannot be a form of κολακεία,
We now pass to the direct enunciation of the main ethical doctrine of the dialogue. This is elicited by the unmannerly remark of Polus that, whatever Socrates may be pleased to profess, he would certainly envy the man who could forfeit, imprison, or kill anyone he pleased. Socrates replies that he would not. The man who inflicts such things on another, even when they are righteously deserved, is not to be envied; the man who inflicts them undeservedly is miserable and pitiable. What is more, he is more pitiable and miserable than the unfortunate innocent victim, since to commit injustice is much worse than to have to suffer it.
Socrates himself would, of course, like Candide in a similar case,
Polus treats this view as a ridiculous paradox. He admits that any man with a knife under his cloak might claim to be “powerful” in the sense that he can, like the autocrat, kill any one he has a mind to kill, but for one thing, the certainty of punishment. Impunity must be stipulated for as one of the conditions of “power” but a child could refute Socrates’ view that it is only “better” to kill, banish, and confiscate at will when these acts are done “justly.” One has only to consider the very latest example from contemporary life, that of Archelaus, who has made himself king in Macedonia. His whole career has been one of rebellion and murder, but he has gained a throne by it. By Socrates’ theory he ought to be the most wretched of men, but he is, in fact, the happiest, and there is not a man in Athens, not even Socrates, who would not dearly like to change places with Archelaus (469c-471d). An appeal of this kind is, however, an ignoratio elenchi in the most literal sense. Even if every one but Socrates would be willing to go into the witness-box on behalf of Polus, it is possible that a solitary witness may be a witness to truth, and the testimony of numbers on the other side erroneous. Socrates will not consider his own case as established unless he can produce one solitary witness to it, the antagonist himself (472b). In other words, the appeal must be to argument and not to authority. The first step we must take is to define the issue at stake as precisely as we can. It is, in fact, the most important of all practical issues, the solution of the question, “Who is the truly happy man?” Polus maintains that a man may be happy but wicked; Socrates denies this. As a corollary, there is a secondary disagreement. Polus holds that the wicked man, to be happy, must go unpunished; Socrates, that such a man is in any case unhappy, but more unhappy if he escapes punishment than if he suffers it, and he must try to convince Polus on both points (472d-474c).
The precise point of disagreement between the opposing views now receives a still more exact definition. Polus is still so far under the influence of current moral conventions that he admits at once that to commit a wrong is more “ugly” or “disgraceful” (αἴσχιον) than to suffer one, but he declines to draw the further inference that the “uglier” thing must also be the greater evil. He distinguishes, as Socrates refuses to do, between the good (ἀγαθόν) and the “fine” or “noble” (kaλόn), and consequently also between the “ugly” (αἰσχρόν) and the evil (κακόν). The task of Socrates is to show that these distinctions are unreal The argument runs as follows. When we distinguish between “fine” bodies, colour, sounds, callings (ἐπιτηδεύματα) and others which are “ugly” or “base,” our standard is always either “benefit” or “pleasure.” By a “fine” shape or colour or sound, we mean one which is either serviceable or immediately agreeable in contemplation or both. The same thing holds good when we speak of “fine” or “noble”
We begin with a consideration of general logic. Wherever there is an agent (ποιων) there is a correlative “patient” (πάσχων), a thing or person which is acted upon. Also the modality of the activity gives rise to strictly correlated qualifications (πάθη) in agent and patient. If the agent, e.g., strikes a sudden, or a severe, or a painful blow, the patient is suddenly, severely, or painfully struck. If the agent “cuts deep” the patient is “deeply cut” and so forth. Now to be punished for a crime is to be the patient in a relation in which the inflictor of the penalty is the agent. Hence, if the agent inflicts the penalty deservedly or justly, the patient undergoes it deservedly or justly.
Goods and evils may be classed under three heads: good or bad
One further step remains to be taken. There is an “art” which covers each of the three kinds of evil. Business (χρηματιστική) releases us from poverty, medicine from physical disease, “justice” administered by a competent judge from wickedness. The judge who passes sentence on the criminal is thus a physician of the soul, and his calling is a “finer” one than that of the healer of the body, because he cures a graver disease. In both cases the process of treatment is disagreeable but salutary for us. And again, in both cases, the happiest condition is to be in bodily or spiritual health, and so not to need the physician. But in both also, the man who is cured of a grave disease by a sharp treatment is much less badly off than the man who has the disease without receiving the cure. Thus a man like Archelaus who lifts himself by successful crime above all possibility of correction is like a man with a deadly disease who refuses to submit to the surgeon. The claim advanced for rhetoric, then, that it enables its possessor to “get off” when he is called to account for his misdeeds, is wholly vain. The best use a man who has fallen into crime could make of eloquence would be to expend it in denouncing himself and ensuring that he shall receive from the judge whatever chastisement may be needed to restore his soul to health. If eloquence is to be used to enable the criminal to “get off” the penalties of his misdeeds, it would be appropriate to reserve this employment of it for the case of our mortal enemies, as the deadliest injury we can inflict (477e-481b).
So far we have been concerned simply with an emphatic statement of the thesis that to do wrong is always worse than to suffer it, with the inevitable corollary that it is worse to do wrong with impunity than to be punished. With the opening of the third scene of Plato’s drama we proceed to the application of these moral principles to the theory of statesmanship and government. That this application is the principal theme of the dialogue is indicated both by the fact that this part of the work is longer than both the others together, and by the introduction of a new spokesman whose case is presented with an unmistakable gusto quite absent from all that has gone before. The new speaker is a certain Callicles of Acharnae, of whom we learn little more than that he has recently begun to aspire to a prominent place in Athenian public life.
He is
If Socrates is in earnest and his theory is true, Callicles says, the whole of our actual social life is organized on wrong lines; our whole conduct is “topsy-turvy.” Socrates does not deny this, but replies that he and Callicles are lovers of two very different mistresses, “philosophy” and the Athenian democracy. Socrates’ mistress, “philosophy,” has taught him to speak her language, and, unlike the mistress of Callicles, she always holds the same language. It is she, not her lover, whom Callicles will have to refute.
Callicles
As for what Socrates has said about the lessons of philosophy, philosophy is a graceful accomplishment in a young man, but to take it in earnest in mature life is ruin. It unfits a man for the life of action, leaves him ignorant of the laws of the community, the principles of public and private business, and the real passions of his fellow-men, like Amphion in the Antiope of Euripides. One should cultivate philosophy up to a certain point, when one is a lad, but a grown man should lay it aside with the toys of his boyhood. It is unmanly in a man of ability and ripe years to take no part in affairs and sit whispering “with a parcel of lads in a corner.”
But what exactly may this mean? If food and drink are to be distributed to a company of men of varying physique, and there is just one physician among them, he is certainly the “wisest” in matters of diet, and it may be reasonable that he should regulate the distribution by his orders; but is he to get the biggest ration, even if he should be the greatest invalid of the party? Should the weaver always have the biggest and finest clothes or the maker of shoes the biggest shoes and most of them? Naturally not; Callicles really means that the “strong” are men with the intelligence to know how a city may be “well administered,” and the daring to carry out their designs (οἳ ἂν εἰς τὰ της πόλεως πράγματα φρόνιμοι ωσι, ὅντινα ᾂν τρόπον εύ οἰκοιτο, καὶ μή μόνον φρόνιμοι ἀλλὰ καὶ ἀνδρειοι, ἱκανοὶ ὄντες ἃἄν νοήσωσιν ἐπιτελειν, 491b). It is right that such men should be sovereign in the State and “have the advantage” (πλέον ἔχειν) of their subjects.
Should we add that the best men are also sovereigns over themselves in the popular phrase, i.e. can govern their own passions? No; for in the nature of things the great man is one who has great passions and is intelligent and daring enough to secure them full gratification. The popular commendation of temperance is a mere trick by which the weaklings of the “herd” who have not manhood enough to live the best kind of life themselves, enslave their “natural superiors” (492a). If a man is born to a throne, or has the manhood to win his way to a throne, it would be base and bad in him not to rise above the conventional “temperance” and “justice” of the herd, and reap the full benefit of his capacity for himself and his friends. In the capable, lawless self-will (τρφὴ καὶ ἀκολασία καὶ ἐλευθερία) are virtue and happiness; regard for the “unreal catchwords” (τὰ παρὰ φύσιν συνθήματα) of the vulgar is contemptible. Thus the ideal of Callicles, like that of Nietzsche, is the successful cultivation of the Wille zur Macht, and his “strong man,” like Nietzsche’s, is a being of the type of Caesar Borgia as conceived in popular legend.
The thesis of Callicles and the moralists of the “will to power” then is that one “ought” (δεῖ) to have violent desire and gratify it to the full; to “want nothing” is the condition of a stone. But perhaps, as Euripides said, what we call life is really death. There is a rival view, developed by a certain wise man of Italy, that the tale of those who are condemned in the underworld to draw water in leaky pitchers is an apologue descriptive of the death-in-life
The immediate assumption of Callicles that ἡδονή and πλήρωσις may
Obviously, if happiness depends on such a process of unending “filling-up,” it demands a similarly unending process of “depletion.” If water is always to be running into the pitcher, it must also be always running out at the cracks. Would it then be intense happiness to have a continual itch, provided one could go on endlessly getting the gratification of chafing the itching place? You must admit this if you mean to be serious with the theory.
We proceed next to consider the identification of good and bad with pleasure and pain on its merits. Two difficulties occur to us at the very outset, (a) Good and bad are “contraries”; you cannot predicate both at once of the same subject, nor can you deny both at once. A man cannot have both predicates at once, nor “get rid” of both at once. Pleasure and pain are not opposed in this way. E.g., when a hungry man is satisfying his hunger by a square meal, he feels at once the pleasure of appeasing the hunger and the painfulness of the still unappeased hunger which urges him to eat more. When his hunger is sated and he leaves off, the pleasure and the pain are both at an end. But it is just at this point, where both the pleasure and the pain are over, that the man reaches the good to which eating ministers, the restoration of normal equilibrium in his organism.
But he cannot deny that fools and cowards feel pleasure and pain at least as keenly as the
Callicles extricates himself for the moment in the only way possible to a Hedonist in a “fix.” Like Mill, he declares it obvious that “pleasures differ in quality”; there are better pleasures and worse pleasures, and it is unfair in Socrates, as Mill said it was in his opponents, to neglect the distinction. For example, a pleasure which contributes to bodily health is good, one which is detrimental to health is bad, and the same thing is true of pains. The rule for choice is that we should choose the good pleasures and pains and avoid the bad ones. In fact, Callicles is prepared to admit now that pleasure is a means to good (500a). But the right selection of pleasures will demand a “competent expert”; not every one can be trusted to make it.
We are thus brought face to face with the final problem raised by our dialogue. Socrates and Callicles stand respectively for two antithetical ideals in life, the one for the “life of philosophy,” the other for the "life of action" as followed by a man of affairs in the Athenian democracy. The choice between these competing ideals is the ultimate practical problem, and it is this issue which is to be decided by the "competent judge." The distinction we have been forced to make between the pleasant and the good shows that the qualifications of the competent judge must not be based (as Mill tries to base them) on an empirical acquaintance with the flavours of pleasure (a thing of which the empiric understands neither the character nor the cause, 501a), but on a true τέχνη, which knows about the good of the soul as medicine does about the good of the body; in fact, Socrates means, moral science is to prescribe the soul’s regimen as medicine prescribes the regimen of the body (501b-c).
Now there is certainly one class of “rhetoricians,” i.e. practitioners of the use of language to work on men’s feelings and imaginations, who are empirics of the type of the confectioner, namely, the poets. Their standard is always simply the “taste” of their public. They aim at pleasing this taste, and incidentally gaining their own advantage by doing so, without troubling themselves in the least whether their productions will make any one a better man. And what is poetry, when you divest it of the addition of tune, rhythm, and metre, but rhetoric—the effective use of language? Has the rhetoric of an Athenian politician any saner basis? Does the politician aim at the improvement of his public, or merely at gratifying their moods (501d-502e)?
Callicles thinks that, though the suggestion of Socrates may be true about some statesmen, there are others who really are guided by regard for the good of their fellow-citizens. He could not say so much for any living man of affairs, but it is true of the great men of the past, from Themistocles to the recently dead Pericles. They did make Athenians “better” by their careers. Socrates will not admit this. Themistocles and the rest made Athens great, if it is greatness to gratify all your cravings and passions, good and bad alike. But the scientific practitioner in any department must have an ideal before him into accord with which he sets himself to bring the material on which he works, as, e.g., the physician has an ideal standard of health which he tries to reproduce in his patients. Has there ever been a statesman in Athens who, in the same way, has had an ideal of character, “goodness of soul,” and set himself to promote it in the citizens? The physician, unlike his counterfeit the confectioner, aims at producing in a human body a definite “order and regulation” (τάξις καὶ κόσμος); the statesman, if he is more than a mere unprincipled empiric, should aim at doing the same thing for the human soul. This is to say that his purpose should be to produce “temperance and justice” (σωφροσύνη καὶ δικαιοσύνη) in the souls of his public. The object of a statesman and orator secundum artem is the production of national character. If the ἐπιθυμίαι of the citizens, the “national” aspirations and ambitions, are unhealthy and evil, the public man who is not a mere “toady” will aim at repressing them, and so making the national soul “better” by “chastisement” (505b-c).
“The ‘wise’ (the Pythagorean men of science) say that ‘communication’ or ‘reciprocity’ is the basis not only of all human affections and moral virtues, but of the whole physical order of heaven and earth.”
Callicles is so disgusted with this return of the argument to the apparent paradox which had led to his intervention in the discussion, that Socrates is left to act as respondent to his own questions as he draws to his formal conclusion. Good is not the same thing as pleasure; it depends universally on “order and rightness and art” and shows itself in a condition of “regulation and orderliness.” This means that the temperate or “disciplined” soul is the good soul, the “unchastened” (ἀκόλαστος), “undisciplined” soul is bad. The former acts “appropriately to the situation” in all the situations of life, and consequently acts well, does well, and is “happy”; the latter, not meeting the situations of life with the appropriate responses, is not merely bad but unhappy, especially if it is not held in check by “chastisement. These are the principles on which public no less than private conduct should be organized; the life of the “superman” or of the “superstate” is simply that of a bandit, and a bandit has the hand of gods and men against him. He does not know how to “communicate” or “go shares” (κοινωνειν), but all social life depends on “communication.”
To commit wrong, then, is the worst evil which can befall a man; to have to submit to it, though a lesser evil, is also an evil. In neither case will the mere purpose to avoid the evil avail of itself to secure its end. To avoid being wronged you also need “power” or “strength.” And, since we long ago agreed on the principle that wrong-doing is “involuntary,” a consequence of error, you need to secure yourself against it by acquiring some “power or τήχνη, organized knowledge” (510a).
But swimming
“The important thing is not to live long, but to live well.”
“Impressive, but not convincing” is the verdict of Callicles on all this. Convincing or not, however, it is plain that if we aim at a statesmanship which is more than successful “parasitism”
No one would give an appointment
You may say that, after all, these must have been great men, for their “public works” (e.g. the creation of the Athenian navy, the building of the walls, docks, and the like) speak for them. And this really proves that they were, so to say, good “domestics” or “personal servants” of Demus; they knew how to provide their master with the things he desired. But what they did not know—and true statesmanship consists in knowing just this—was how to get him to desire what is really good (517b).
Callicles is making
What, then, did Callicles mean when he recommended Socrates to take up “public life”? Did he mean that Socrates should be a physician to the public or merely a “toady” and “body-servant”? The truth is that Socrates himself is the only real statesman of his time, for he is the only Athenian who aims in his use of speech not at giving pleasure but at doing real good to those with whom he speaks. He may very possibly be dragged into court as a “corrupter of youth” and if that should happen, his condemnation is certain, for he would be the physician pleading against the confectioner before a jury of children of whom he had already spoken.
The argument of the dialogue is now complete. We reach the climax of the Socratic ethics of the “tendance of the soul” with the declarations that statesmanship is nothing but the practice of this same “art” on the large scale, that its indispensable basis is knowledge of moral values, and that the apparent “mugwump” Socrates is in fact the one man of his age and city who is leading the real “active life,” because he has himself, and tries to communicate to every one else, a moral faith and moral ideals. He alone, in a world of “opportunist” careerists, is doing work which will last, because he alone is building on a rock. What makes the Gorgias so important in spite of its longueurs, is that, more fully than any other dialogue, and with an intenser πάθος, it works out the application of the conception of “tendance of the soul” to the whole complicated business of life. Formally, the conversation is prolonged for a few pages, to give Socrates the opportunity to drive home the exceeding horror of sin by an imaginative myth of judgment after death, the earliest in order of composition of Plato’s masterpieces in this kind. The basis of the story, in this case, seems more strictly Orphic and less Pythagorean than in the companion pictures of the Republic and Phaedo. The scenery, “the meadow where the three ways meet,”
The main thought of the myth is the impossibility of escaping the scrutiny of the eye of the divine judge. In the old days, men were judged while still in the body, and the stains and sores of the soul often escaped notice, especially when the party to be judged was a great man, who appeared with all the splendours of external pomp and circumstance. To prevent such mistakes, the judgment has now been placed after death, that the soul may appear at the tribunal naked, without the “tunic” of the body. This ensures that its destiny shall be decided by its worth, not by the station it has held on earth.
We shall find Plato preaching the same doctrine of a divine judgment which neglects nothing and can make no
The Meno
There are points of contact between the Meno and the Gorgias which make it convenient to consider them together, though the main purpose of the Meno connects it rather with two more mature dialogues, the Phaedo and the Protagoras, as well as with the Apology. The dramatic setting of the dialogue is of the simplest. It is a conversation between Socrates and the young Thessalian Meno, who is attended by at least one slave, broken by an interlude which brings on the scene the prominent politician Anytus, afterward the instigator of the proceedings against Socrates. Where the conversation takes place we are not told, except that it is, of course, somewhere in Athens. The dramatic date can be readily fixed by reference to the facts about Meno recorded in Xenophon’s Anabasis. Meno joined the expedition of Cyrus the younger against his brother Artaxerxes II at Colossae in the middle of March 401 BC (Anabasis i. 2, 6), rendered the important service of being the first of the Greek adventurers to declare for Cyrus openly when the army had reached the Euphrates and its real objective became clear (ibid. i. 4, 13), and was present with
The question raised by Meno (70a) is one directly suggested by the activity of Protagoras and the other “teachers of goodness” (ἀῤετή). Can “goodness” be taught, or, if not, can it be acquired
To return to the Meno. Meno’s question, flung out in an airy way as though it could be disposed of in a sentence, cannot really be answered without facing one still more fundamental. We cannot expect to know how “goodness” is produced until we know what it is. And this is more than anyone at Athens, and most of all Socrates, professes to know. We are thus brought back to the problem of definition which has met us already in other dialogues (71c-d). According to Meno, this problem is no real problem at
We may note that this position, which arises at once from the application of the theory of forms to human conduct, is of first-
Meno is inclined at first to deny the position. But he has to admit that both what he regards as man’s work and what he calls woman’s work are only well done if they are performed with sophrosyne and justice, and similarly that willfulness (ἀκολασία) and unfairness are faults alike in children and in elderly men. Thus sophrosyne and justice emerge as characteristic of human goodness, irrespective of age, sex, or status. There is then such a thing as a “goodness in virtue of which all human beings are good”; can Meno remember what Gorgias supposed this goodness to be? He suggests that it may be “capacity to command” (ἄρχειν οἱόν τ̉ εἰναι των ἀνθρώπων, 73d). But what then about a child or a slave (who, of course, show their “goodness” not by giving orders, but by obeying them)? And again, one may give unjust commands, and this can hardly be goodness, since it is not disputed by Meno that justice is a virtue and injustice a vice.
We must at least qualify the statement by saying that goodness in man is the capacity
Perhaps we may get a hint of the kind of statement we really want if we go back to our illustration of the circle. There are many figures (σχήματα = schêmata) of which the circle is only one, just as there are many colours, of which, e.g., white is one among others. But we might try to define figure in a way which would express what is common to all figures, by saying, for example, that “figure is the one thing which always accompanies colour” “the sole inseparable concomitant of colour” (ὃ μόνον των ὄντων τυγχάνει χρώματιἀεὶ ἑπόμενον, 75c). It is true, as Meno remarks, that such a “definition” would involve the undefined term “colour.” A pugnacious eristic would ignore this criticism; he would retort that he had done his part in giving his own definition and that any amendment of it was the business of his antagonist. But we are not disputing for victory, and Socrates is ready to meet the criticism by attempting a better definition. Meno will admit that he knows what mathematicians mean by a “boundary”; if we say then that “figure is the boundary of a solid” (στερεου πέρας), the statement will hold good universally and exclusively, and not be open to the criticism that it introduces a second “unknown” (76a).
Meno should now attempt a similar definition of goodness, but irrelevantly insists that Socrates shall go on to define colour. This, as Socrates says, is the mere whim of a capricious “beauty” but he will comply with it. Meno at any rate will be satisfied by a definition based on the doctrine of Gorgias, which is derived from the “efflux” theory of Empedocles.
Meno at last makes an attempt at the definition of goodness. It is “to desire the fine things and to be able to secure them” (ἐπιθυμουντα των καλων δυνατὸν εἰναι πορίζεσθαι, 77b). But the Statement is doubly open to criticism, (a) It implies that it is possible to desire what is not “fine,” that is, to “desire evil.” But, in fact, no one can or does desire what he knows to be evil, for that would be equivalent to the impossibility of desiring to be unhappy (77c-78b). The first clause of Meno’s definition is thus superfluous, and it reduces to the statement that goodness is “ability to secure goods.” (b) By “goods” he means, as he explains, such things as wealth, health, and high civic and social distinction (the ends, be it noted, of the “body-loving” and “distinction-loving” lives). But we cannot call ability to get these things by any means, fair or foul, goodness; it would be truer to say that the virtuous man is incapable of gaining fortune or position by foul means. So we have to introduce the qualification that goodness is capacity to secure good things “by righteous” or “honest” means, or something to that effect. Now righteousness, honesty, or whatever other qualifications we introduce, have already been admitted to be “parts” of goodness, so that we are in effect saying that goodness or virtue is attaining certain ends by the practice of some specific virtue (i.e. we introduce one or more of the determinants of a given determinable into a proposed definition of that determinable itself, and thus commit a vicious “circle,” 77b-79e). We are thus no nearer to a satisfactory definition than we were before.
Meno is half inclined to lay the blame for the collapse of the argument on Socrates, who, he says, has the reputation of always being bepuzzled himself and communicating his bewilderment to others. He benumbs men’s wits as the fish called νάρκη benumbs their muscles if they touch it. In any other company Meno would have plenty to say about “goodness,” but in the presence of Socrates he is “paralysed.” In any foreign city Socrates would run a real risk of being arrested for sorcery. Socrates has to admit the accusation, with the reservation that the comparison with the νάρκη is only apt on the assumption that the creature itself is as “numb” as its victims. The difficulties his conversation creates in others are only the reflection of those he finds in his own thinking. But if Meno will adventure on the definition of “goodness” over again, he will do his best to examine the new result (80a-d). At this point Meno again tries to run off on an irrelevant issue.
He brings up the “sophistic” puzzle which we have already met in
But for this “suggestiveness” of sense-experience the ignava ratio of the eristic, “you cannot learn the truth from any teacher, because unless you know it already, you will not recognize it for the truth when he utters it,” would be valid. We see, then, why both Socrates and Plato hold that “knowledge” can only be won by
“Learning is really being reminded of something.”
An illustration of the principle that “learning” is really “being reminded of something” i.e. is the following up by personal effort of the suggestions of sense-experience, may now be given. Socrates calls forward the lad who is attending on Meno, after satisfying himself that the boy can understand a question in plain Greek, but has never been taught any mathematics, and undertakes to show how he can be brought to see geometrical truths for himself by merely asking appropriate questions which enable the answerer to correct his own first hasty thoughts. The point to be established is that the areas of squares are proportional to the second powers of the lengths of their sides, and in particular that the area of a square described on the diagonal of one previously described is double the area of the original figure.
Yet undeniably
We have wandered away far from our original question about the teachability of goodness, and Meno is anxious to have that answered without further digression. The humor of the situation is that this is impossible. We cannot really expect to know whether goodness or anything else can be taught unless we first know what the thing in question is, as we have admitted that we do not. But we may give a tentative and provisional answer to the question ἐξ ὑποθέσεως, subject to an initial postulate, sous condition. Only we must make another digression to explain what we mean by this restriction. If you ask a geometer whether a certain problem is soluble, he may often have to say that he does not know whether the problem has a perfectly general solution or not, but that he can give a solution for it, subject to a specified restriction. This is illustrated for us by the example of a problem about the inscription of a triangle of given area in a circle of given diameter. The geometer may be unable to say whether the inscription can be effected unless the data are further specified by some restricting condition. He will then answer that “I cannot solve your problem as it stands, but if the area in question satisfies the condition X, the inscription is possible.”
For a correct solution see A.S.L. Farquharson in C.Q., xvii. I, Jan. 1923.
So we, in our present state of uncertainty
>Goodness, then, can be taught, if goodness is knowledge and not otherwise, and we are thrown back on the antecedent question whether goodness is or is not knowledge. (Thus we conform to the rule of order laid down at Phaedo 101c-e. We first consider what are the “consequences,” συμβαίνοντα, of a “postulate”; only when we are clear on this preliminary question do we go on to ask whether the “postulate” itself can be “justified.”) To answer our new question, we have again to start with an unproved “postulate,” the ὑπόθεσις hypόthesis that ἀρετή = virtue is a good thing. (No question arises of a “justification” of this ὑπόθεσις, because both Socrates and Meno accept it as common ground; it is an ἱκανόν τι such as is spoken of in the passage of the Phaedo about logical method.) It follows at once that if knowledge is the only good, “goodness” or “virtue” (ἀρετή) must be knowledge; if there are other goods besides knowledge, it is possible that ἀρετή may be one of these other goods (87d). Thus we find ourselves driven in the end to face the ultimate question whether knowledge is not the only good, or at any rate an indispensable constituent of all good. This question is now treated in the way already familiar to us. Whatever is good is “beneficial” (ὠφελιμόν), i.e. does us good. Now the commonly recognized goods are such things as health, physical strength, comeliness, and we may add, wealth. But none of these is “unconditionally” good; all may “harm” their possessor; they benefit him when they are rightly used but harm him when they are misused. So with the commonly recognized good characters of the “soul,” of which Socrates proceeds to give a list. Courage, in the popular sense, covers “daring” or “venturesomeness” (θάρρος) of every kind. But though venturesomeness combined with sound sense (νους) is beneficial, senseless daring is harmful to its possessor, and the same thing is true of σωφρούνη, “appetitive coldness,” retentive memory, and qualities of soul generally. To
This last inference admits at once of empirical verification, for if goodness were congenital endowment, we could detect its presence in early life, and so we could secure a succession of true statesmen by merely selecting the properly endowed natures in early life and bringing them up “under guard” carefully isolated from all risks of contamination.
(Why does Plato introduce Anytus at this particular point? Note that he is not supposed to have heard the preceding discussion, which he would have been quite incapable of appreciating. He comes up to the bench on which Socrates and Meno are sitting, and joins them just in the nick of time, as they are beginning to consider the problem about the professional teachers of goodness. Nor is there any appearance of “irony” in what is said about him; unlike Xenophon, Plato never suggests that Anytus had any discreditable private motives for supporting the prosecution of Socrates.
The irony of the passage only concerns Anytus to the same degree
If you wish a young man to learn a science such as medicine or an accomplishment such as flute-playing, to whom do you send him? You always select a teacher who claims to be a professional expert, and for that very reason charges a fee for his instructions; you would never think of putting him under a mere “amateur” who does not make a profession of imparting his own skill. It should seem, then, that statesmanship, the science of the right conduct of affairs and the right manage of life must, by parity of reasoning, be learned from the specialists who claim to have made a profession of teaching its principles, and consequently, like all professionals, charge a fee—that is, from the “sophists, as men call them.” Anytus has the profoundest horror of the whole profession; they are, he says, as every one can see, mere depravers and corrupters of all who frequent their lectures. Yet it is difficult to accept this view of them. It would be a unique fact that any class should make a paying profession of visibly spoiling the materials entrusted to it.
Anytus is quite sure, though he is thankful he has never in his life had to do with a sophist, that the sophist is a designing scoundrel,
Socrates does not deny that there are and have been at Athens men who are “good at citizenship” (ἀγαθοὶ τὰ πολιτικά),
—a plain hint, on Plato’s part, that
The sophists may, in any case, be dismissed from the discussion, since Meno, on the whole, agrees with Anytus that they cannot teach goodness and thinks it a point in favour of Gorgias that he disclaimed the pretension. In fact, most men, like the poet Theognis, find themselves unable to make up their minds whether goodness is teachable or not. They say “Yes” and “No” according to their moods. Goodness is thus in a uniquely unfortunate position. The claims of the professional teachers are generally disbelieved, and the persons whose practice is generally admired cannot make up their own minds whether their specialty can be taught. It looks as though there were neither teachers nor learners of goodness, and consequently that it is not a thing which can be taught. But how, then, is it ever produced, as we must admit that it is? On second thoughts, we see a way out of the difficulty. Knowledge is not the only thing which is beneficial in practice. A right belief (ὀρθὴ δόξα, orthê dόxa) will direct practice as satisfactorily as genuine knowledge. A guide who had a right belief about the road to Larissa would take you there as successfully as one who really knew the way. For practical purposes, then, a right belief is as good as knowledge—but for one trifling drawback. There would be no practical difference, if you could make sure that a man will always retain his right belief. But beliefs are like the fabled statues of Daedalus, which can walk away if they are not fastened to their place. The statues are fine pieces of work, but their price is naturally low if they are loose. So a correct belief is a fine thing, if it will only stay with you, but it will not stay long unless you fasten it down αἰτίας λογισμῳ “by thinking out the reason why” of it, and this process is what we have already called “being reminded” (ἀνάμνησις). When we have thought out the “reason why,” the belief becomes knowledge and is abiding. We may apply this distinction to the solution of our problem.
The “eminently good men” of Athens plainly do not owe their usefulness as political leaders to knowledge, for if they did, they could teach “statesmanship” to others. Themistocles and the rest were therefore not “scientific statesmen” not σοφοί (99b)—the conclusion also reached in the Gorgias—and it is absurd to think they owed all their achievements to accident. Their successes must have been due to “correct opinions” (εὐδοξία, 99b). They were much on a level with givers of oracles and diviners, who often say very true things without knowing it (since the responses are delivered in a sort of temporary “frenzy”). Thus we may class together “seers” poets, and statesmen, as beings who all say and
The full meaning of these last remarks only comes out when we read them in the light of the Republic and Phaedo. The “statesman who can make another a statesman” is just the philosopher-king of the Republic, where the crowning achievement of the “ideal state” is to make provision for the permanent teaching of a statesmanship which is science, clear intellectual insight into fundamental moral principles, not a succession of “inspired” adventures, and the provision takes the form of a system of thorough education in hard scientific thinking which culminates in the direct apprehension of “the good.” In the light of this educational scheme, we can see that the main object of the concluding argument in the Meno is to distinguish between a higher and a lower kind of goodness. The higher kind is that which the Republic calls the goodness of the philosopher, and it is based upon certain and assured personal knowledge of the true scale of goods, and is therefore “abiding.” The lower kind, which is at best a “shadow” of true goodness, is based on “opinions” which are true, but are not knowledge, and therefore not to be counted on as permanent; in fact, it rests on acceptance of a sound tradition of living which has not been converted into personal insight into the scale of goods. This is all which is demanded in the Republic even of the soldiers of the State; their goodness is loyalty to a tradition of noble living in which they have been brought up, but of which they have never even asked the reason why, life by an exalted standard of “honor.” Since there are sound elements in the moral tradition of any civilized community, it is possible for an Athenian statesman in whom the best traditions of his city are inbred to “profit” the State by goodness of this inferior kind, “popular goodness,” as the Phaedo calls it.
But security for permanent continuance in well-doing i
See further:
Ritter, C. Platon, i. 391-449 Gorgias; 476-484 Meno.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 111-125 Gorgias; 130-137 Meno.
Thompson, W. H. The Gorgias of Plato.
Nettleship, R. L. Plato’s Conception of Goodness and the Good.
Lectures and Remains, i. 238-394.
Dies, A. Autour de Platon, ii. 414-418, 462-469.
Stewart, J. A. Myths of Plato, 1-76 (Introduction), 114-132.
(The Gorgias Myth); Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 24-29 Meno; 29-34 Gorgias.
Stenzel, J. Platon der Erzieher, 147-178.
Chapter VII. Socratic Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito
I have reserved these well-known dialogues for consideration at this point for the simple reason that it is difficult to separate them from the Phaedo; thus it is natural to make the treatment of them the immediate prelude to a study of the four great works in which Plato’s dramatic genius shows itself most perfect. I do not mean to imply that I regard the whole series of dialogues which center round the trial and death of Socrates as uninterruptedly following one another in order of composition. As I have already explained, I do not feel satisfied that we are safe in saying more on the question than that the slighter works we are considering must, at least in the main, be regarded as earlier than the four great dramatic dialogues. It is possible, perhaps even probable, that at any rate the Apology may have been written before several of the works we have already dealt with, but the probability need not affect our treatment if it is true, as the present analysis tries to show, that there is no serious variation in the doctrine of Plato’s dialogues until we come to the series unmistakably shown by style to be later than the Republic. In treating of the whole series of these “dialogues of the trial and imprisonment” I shall avail myself fully of the commentaries of Professor Burnet (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, 1924; Phaedo, 1911); this will make it possible to aim at a brevity which I should have been only too glad to secure for some other parts of this book.
Euthyphro
On all questions connected with the scene and personages of the dialogue, see Burnet’s Introductory Note, to which I would only append the following remarks. It is not certain that the Euthyphro of our dialogue is the person of the same name whom we have encountered in the Cratylus, though this is possible. If the two men are one and the same, we shall clearly have to think of Euthyphro as now in middle age and his father as a man of some seventy-five or more. To my own mind, the tone of the conversation is consistent with these suppositions and inconsistent with regarding Euthyphro as in any sense young. (He is a familiar figure in the ecclesia which he often addresses.) I fully agree with Burnet that the supposed proceedings by Euthyphro against his father as a murderer must be historical fact; the situation is too bizarre to be a natural fiction. Also I think it clear that legally Euthyphro had no case and was probably
Ostensibly the problem of the dialogue is to determine the real character of ὁσιότης, “piety,” or as we should probably say now, “religion,” that part of right conduct which is concerned with man’s duty to God. As usual, no final result is expressly arrived at, but the interest lies in the comparison of two different conceptions of what “religion” is. The conclusion to which we seem to be coming, but for an unexpected difficulty, is that religion is the “art of traffic between man and gods,” or the art of receiving from the gods and giving to them (Euthyphro, 14d, e). On the face of it, this is a view of religion thoroughly in keeping with the more sordid side of the ancient State cultus, which was very much regulated
A very brief analysis of the argument will enable us to
The act for which Euthyphro is arraigning his father, we must remember, is specifically an offence against religious law, not a civil wrong, and Euthyphro does not profess to be in any way actuated by motives of humanity or regard for civil right. He is afraid of incurring religious “pollution” by living in household relations with a “sacrilegious person,” and wishes to safeguard himself. It is implied that, the average Athenian, who is shocked at his procedure, is ignorant of or indifferent to the religious law in which Euthyphro considers himself an expert. Obviously, then, as a “doctor in theology” he may be presumed to know what we might call “canon law” in its entirety, not merely the paragraphs of it which deal with homicide. Hence Socrates, as a person shortly to be accused of irreligion, appeals to him as an expert for an answer to the question what “piety” (τὸ εὐσεβές) or “religious duty” (τὸ ὅσιον) is in its genuine character. There must be some one character which belongs to all action which is “religiously right” (ὅσιον), and an opposite character which is shown in all action which is religiously wrong. There must be a definition of “religious obligation” and we want to know what it is. It is noticeable that this common character of the “religiously right” is at the outset spoken of as a single ἰδέα (Euthyphro, 5d) and subsequently as an εῖδος (appearance) (6d) and an οὐσία (physical being) (11a). This is the language familiar to us as technical in the so-called Platonic “theory of Forms,” but it is represented as understood at once by Euthyphro without any kind of explanation. It seems quite impossible to escape the conclusion that from the very first Plato represented Socrates as habitually using language of this kind and being readily understood by his contemporaries.
Like so many of the interlocutors in these early dialogues of Plato, Euthyphro at first confuses definition with the enumeration of examples. “Religious duty” is to proceed against the party guilty of an offence against religion, whether it be a homicide or a sacrilegious theft, or any other such crime, without being deterred by any regard for the ties of blood; to neglect this duty is “irreligious” (5d-e). We have the best of examples for this, that of Zeus himself who “chained” his own father. Of course, if this statement is taken to be more than a production of instances, it would be delightfully “circular” since it makes religious duty amount to active opposition to irreligion. Socrates prefers to regard the statement as a mere illustration and simply repeats his request for an account of the “one form” in virtue of which
Euthyphro’s way of meeting the difficulty is to commit in an undisguised form the circle already implied in his original statement. There are points, he urges, on which all the gods would agree; they would all agree, for example, that wrongful homicide ought not to go unpunished. (Thus he suggests that the definition might run that religious acts are those which the gods approve unanimously, with the explanation that the class “acts unanimously approved by the gods” is identical with the class of rightful acts.) But the suggestion makes matters no better. No one, not even the defendant in a prosecution for homicide, ever denies that wrongful homicide, or any other wrongful act, ought to be punished. The issue at stake is always which of the two parties is in the wrong and what is the precise character of the wrong committed. If the
(The question is one which has played a prominent part in ethical controversy in later days. It amounts to asking whether acts of piety, or more generally virtuous acts, derive their character of being right from the mere fact of being commanded, or are commanded because they are antecedently intrinsically right. Are the “commandments of God” arbitrary? Is moral obligation created by the imposition of a command? This is, in effect, the thesis of both Hobbes and Locke, and is what Cudworth is denying in his treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality, when he sets himself to argue that acts are good or bad “by nature” and not by “mere will.” The same issue reappears in a different terminology in the objection taken against Hutcheson’s doctrine of an “implanted moral sense” by those who urged that on the theory in question our Creator might have given us an inverted “moral sense,” and then the promotion of human misery would have been our highest duty.)
(It must be remembered that
The principle to be laid down is that when something happens to, or is done to, a thing there is always a correlated person or thing who is the doer. Thus if a thing is carried, or is seen, there is someone or something who carries or sees that thing. And when we use a “passive” participle or adjective to characterize anything, we do so because something is being done to the thing by something else. (Thus, it is meant, if a thing is being seen by some one it is a “thing seen” or visible (ὁρώμενον), but you could not argue that because a thing is visible someone must actually be seeing it.
Thus we have to begin the work of looking for a definition of the “religious” over again. Our definitions keep running away from us, like the mythical statues of Daedalus, the reputed ancestor
At this point (12a) the discussion makes a fresh start—a start, we may note, due to the direct suggestion of Socrates, whose part in the dialogues is by no means so exclusively that of a mere critic of others as is sometimes fancied. What is the relation of τὸ ὅσιον (religion) to δικαιοσύνη (duty, obligation, morality in general)? We both admit that whatever is religious (ὅσιον) is “dutiful” or “right” (δίκαιον); can we convert the proposition simpliciter (unconditionally) and say that whatever is right is religious? I.e. is all duty duty to God? Euthyphro has the difficulty which seems to beset all beginners in logic in seeing that the universal affirmative proposition does not admit of simple conversion, and the point has to be made clear to him by examples. All reverence (αἰδώς) is fear, but it is not true that all fear (e.g. fear of illness) is reverence. All odd integers are numbers, but all numbers are not odd. Reverence is a “part” of fear as “odd number” is of number. In the more developed logical terminology of Aristotle, the thing would, of course, be expressed by saying that reverence and odd number are species (εἴδη) of the genera fear and number, but Plato, who sits loose to terminology, except when it is needed for the purpose immediately in hand, habitually uses the word “part” (μόριον, μέρος) for what we still call the membra dividentia (dividing members) of a logical “division.” When the point has been explained to him, Euthyphro at once answers that τὸ ὅσιον is only one part of τὸ δίκαιον—that is, in modern language, that duty to God is not the whole of the duty of man, but one specific branch of it. Thus, like the mass of mankind, he believes in a plurality of distinct “virtues.” Man has, e.g., a certain set of “duties to God,” and another distinct set of duties to his fellow-men, and it would follow that you might specialize in one of these branches of duty but neglect the others. You might be strong in “religion” but weak, e.g., in honesty, like the legendary Welshman who “had a wonderful gift in prayer but was an awful liar.” From the Socratic point of view, this would be impossible. All virtue is knowledge of good, and consequently any one real virtue, if you live up to it, will prove to cover the whole of human conduct. The “content” of morality and that of religion would thus alike be the whole sphere of human conduct, and it would be quite impossible in principle to distinguish a man’s “religious” from his “moral” duties. At bottom, the reason why the Euthyphro ends negatively is the same as that which accounts for the formally negative result of the Laches or Charmides, the fact that genuine “goodness” is a unity.
To follow the argument to which this third attempt at a definition gives rise, we have to remember that the word θεραπεία was in use in two special connexions. It was used of the cult of a deity by his worshiper (cp. our objectionable use of the phrases “divine service” “Sunday services”), or of a great man by his courtiers, and of the “tending” of men or animals by professionals such as physicians and grooms (the sense of the word from which Socrates developed his conception of the “tending of one’s soul” as the supreme business of life). The problem is to determine in which, if either of these senses, religion is to be called the “service” of God. If we start with the second sense, that in which the professional trainer of hounds or oxherd may be said to “tend” or “serve” the hounds or oxen, we see that the aim of such tendance is always to make the “tended” better, to get the dogs or oxen into the pink of condition and keep them so. But we cannot suppose that religion is the service of God in this sense. No one would say that by performing his “religious duties” he “makes his gods better” (13a-c). We must mean “service” in the very different sense in which slaves are said to “serve” or “tend” their owner. Now the “service” of a slave consists in acting as an instrument or “understrapper” in carrying out his owner’s business; it is a form of ὑπηρετική, “cooperating as a subordinate with a superior for the achievement of some result” (13d).
Now we can say at once what the result to which the slave of a medical man contributes under his master’s direction is; it is the curing of the master’s patients. So the slave of a builder contributes as a subordinate to the construction of a ship or a house. If, then, “serving God” means contributing as an underworker contributes to the business of his superior, if it is “cooperation as an instrument,” what is the great work to which we contribute “under the gods”? (13e). (No answer is given to the question in our dialogue. None could be given by a man like Euthyphro who keeps his morality and his religion in separate “water-tight compartments,” and Socrates naturally does not answer his own question. But it is not hard to discover from other dialogues what the Socratic answer would be. The great business of man, we know, is to “tend”
Euthyphro’s inability to follow the thought of Socrates throws him back on what had all along been his implied position, the position of the fanatic who divorces religion from morality. “If a man knows how to please the gods by his words of prayer and his acts of sacrifice—that is religion, and that is what makes private families and public commonwealths prosperous” (14b). In briefer phrase, religion is “a science of sacrificing and praying” (14c). (Euthyphro, of course, takes the word “science” employed by Socrates to mean simply correct knowledge of the ritual to be observed.) Now in sacrificing we give something to the gods and in prayer we ask something from them. So we may finally put Euthyphro’s thought into this definition (the fourth and last of the dialogue), “Religion is the science of asking the gods for things and giving things to them” (14d). Now the right way of asking will be to ask for what we really need, and the right way of giving will be to give the gods what they want of us, and thus religion turns out to be “an art of traffic between men and gods” (ἐμπορικὴ τέχνη θεοις καὶ ἀνθρώποις παρ̉ ἀλλήλων, 14e). But traffic is, of course, a transaction between two parties for mutual advantages; one “cannot be buyer and seller too.” What one party to the traffic between gods and men gets out of the transaction is obvious; the gods send us all the good things we enjoy. But what “advantage” (ὠφελία) do they get from us? No “profit,” says Euthyphro, but “honor and thanks and gratitude” (τιμή τε καὶ γέρα καὶ χάρις, 15a). “The religious act” thus turns out to be “that which is grateful (κεχαρισμένον) to the gods,” and this brings us back to the very definition we have already had to reject, that “the religious” is τὸ τοις θεοις φίλονn, “what the gods approve” (15e); so that we are no nearer knowing what religion is than when we began our discussion.
As I have said, the gentle satire on the unworthy conception of religion as a trade-enterprise carried on by God and man for their mutual benefit ought not to blind us to the fact that the definition of it as knowing how to ask from God and how to make a return to Him is capable of being understood in a genuinely Socratic sense. The very introduction into this formula of ἐπιστήμη as the genus of religion should indicate that it contains a suggestion we are
Apology
The Apology is too well known to require any elaborate analysis, though it must not be passed over without some remarks on points of general interest. Apart from its strictly historical interest as a professed faithful reproduction of the actual language of Socrates at the memorable trial, it has a philosophical interest as a picture of the life of “tendance of the soul” adopted with full consciousness and led at all costs to its appropriate and glorious end. What is depicted is the life of a “martyr” of the best type as seen from within by the martyr himself; the object of the picture is to make us understand why the martyr chooses such a life and why the completion of his career by the martyr’s death is a corona and not a “disaster.” In our more commonplace moods we are accustomed to think of martyrdom as a highly disagreeable duty; perhaps it must not be shirked, but we feel that, to be made tolerable to our imagination, it must be “made up” to the martyr by an “exaltation” to follow it. Plato means us rather to feel that the martyrdom is itself the “exaltation”: in cruce gaudium spiritus; ambula ubi vis…non invenies altiorem mam supra, nee securiorem viam infra, nisi viam sanctae crucis. The Apology is the Hellenic counterpart of the second book of the Imitatio (Chapter 12).
For the considerations which make it certain that in substance Plato has preserved the actual speech of Socrates (which, as he lets us know, he himself heard), see Burnet’s Introductory Note and the works referred to there. We must, of course, understand that, like all the circulated versions of celebrated speeches (those of Aeschines and Demosthenes in the matter of the “Crown,” for example), the published speech is supposed to have been “revised” in accord with the canons of prose-writing. Plato has, no doubt, done for the defense of Socrates what men like Demosthenes did for their own speeches before they gave them to the world. At the same time we clearly have no right to assume that the process of revision and polishing involves any falsification of fundamental facts. That what we possess is in substance a record of what Socrates actually said is sufficiently proved by the single consideration that, though we cannot date the circulation of the Apology exactly, we can at least be sure that it must have been given to the world within a few years of the actual trial, and would thus be read by numbers of persons, including both devoted admirers of the philosopher and hostile critics (and presumably even some of the judges who had sat upon the case), who would at once detect any
It should also be added that even the subtle art by which Socrates, while professing to be a mere “layman” in forensic oratory, actually makes his speech conform to precedent in its general structure, an art most readily appreciated by following Burnet’s careful analysis, is certainly not a mere stylistic “improvement” by Plato. The Gorgias and Phaedrus would be mere mystifications if it were not the fact that, for all his contempt for the ideals of contemporary “rhetoric” Socrates was quite familiar with its recognized methods and principles. Indeed, the Apology might be said to afford an ironical illustration of the paradox of the Gorgias about the uses which may legitimately be made of rhetorical devices. Socrates is in the position of an accused party, and he makes a “defense” which has been felt from the time of Xenophon onward to be something very much like an avowal of guilt. This is exactly in accord with the principles of the Gorgias. Socrates is accused of an offence, and in the eyes of an average Athenian, though not in his own, he has done what amounts to the commission of that offence. Consequently he uses impressive eloquence, not to veil the facts but to put their reality in the clearest light. He is, and for many years has been, a “suspected character,” and the whole “defense” consists in insisting on the point and explaining that the suspicion has been inevitable. Even the act of which an ordinary advocate would have made the most as evidence of “sound democratic sentiments” Socrates’ defiance of the order of the “Thirty” in the affair of Leon (Apology, 32c-d), is deliberately introduced by a previous narrative of an event of which such an advocate would have been careful to say nothing, or as little as possible, Socrates’ opposition to the δημος at the trial of the Arginusae generals. Thus what might have been used by a man like Lysias to make an acquittal morally certain is actually employed by Socrates as an opportunity to warn the court that they must expect from him no sacrifice of conviction to “democratic sentiments.” From the point of view of a Lysias, Socrates must have been “throwing away the ace of trumps” by using the story of his defiance of the Thirty as he does.
The very singular historical circumstances of the trial of Socrates have been better explained in Professor Burnet’s notes to his edition of the Apology and the chapter on the “Trial” in Greek Philosophy, Part I, than anywhere else. I shall therefore refer the reader to those works for full discussion, contenting myself with an indication of the points which seem most important.
Though the actual prosecutor was Meletus, every one knew that the real instigator of the whole business was Anytus, one of the two
We cannot well acquit Anytus of having stooped to instigate a proceeding in which he was ashamed to take the principal part, and of having used a tool whom he must have despised. But this is no more than has often been done by politicians who, as the world goes, are counted high-minded. His object was simply to frighten away from Athens a person whose influence he believed to be undesirable, much as Dutch William resorted to trickery to frighten King James out of England—an act for which he is eulogized by Macaulay. Socrates might have preserved his life by going away before trial, as it was customary to do when there was any doubt about acquittal. Indeed Plato is careful to let us see that even when the case came into court, escape would have been easy. The verdict of guilty, even after the uncompromising speech of the accused had been delivered, was only obtained by a small majority. We may safely infer that an opposite verdict could pretty certainly have been secured by a little deference to popular opinion, a little adroit silence about one or two incidents and stress on others—such as the excellent military record of the accused—with a few words of regret for the past and promise of cautious behavior in future. Even without any of this, it is clear that if Socrates had chosen to propose a moderate fine as a sufficient penalty, the offer
In dealing with the analysis of the Apology we have to start by understanding that the real and serious defense of Socrates, which is made to rest on his conviction of a special divine mission to his fellow-countrymen, does not begin until we reach page 28a. What goes before (Apology, 17a-27e) is introductory matter, and is concerned with two preliminary points, the explanation of the prejudices which have grown up about Socrates (18a-24b), and a proof that the accuser himself cannot say, or at any rate dares not say, what he really means by his charges (24b-27e). Throughout the whole of the preliminary pages we must expect to find abundant traces of the whimsical humor which the enemies of Socrates in Plato call his “irony”; at every turn we have to allow for the patent fact that he is “not wholly serious”; the actual defense of his conduct through life, when we reach it, is pure earnest. (It is important to call attention to this, since the well-known narrative of the part played by the Delphic oracle in the life of the philosopher belongs to the preliminary account of the causes of the popular misconceptions about him, and has to be taken with the same allowance for his native humor as the account of the burlesques on him by the comic poets. The claim to be conscious of a special mission, imposed not by “the gods,” nor by “Apollo” but “by God,” comes from the actual defense. The two things have very little to do with one another, and are treated in very different tones; nothing but misconception can come of the attempt to confuse them. Similarly the point of the “cross-examination” of Meletus has repeatedly been missed by commentators who have not seen that the whole passage is humorous, though with a humor which is deadly for its victim.)
(a) Plea for an Impartial Hearing and Explanation of the Existing Prejudices unfavourable to the Speaker.—The speech opens in a very usual way with an apology, mainly playful, for the speaker’s
The sufficient answer to all this is that Socrates is not responsible for the nonsense he is made to talk in the Clouds. His judges themselves must know whether they ever heard him discourse on such topics. But he is careful to add that he means no disparagement to knowledge of this kind; if it exists.
How then has he got the name for being “clever” or “wise”? Here comes in the well-known tale of the Delphic oracle and its response to Chaerephon, that no man living was wiser than Socrates. Socrates says that he was at first staggered by this pronouncement, and set to work to prove Apollo of Delphi—never a persona grata at Athens, for excellent reasons—a liar. With this view he went round looking for a wiser man than himself in the various sections of society. He began with the “statesmen” but soon found that though they fancied themselves very wise, they certainly had no
Naturally enough, the victims of this experiment did not take it any too kindly, and the matter was made worse by the young folk, sons of wealthy and leisured citizens, who accompanied Socrates, “without any pressing on his part” (αὐτόματοι, 23c; i.e., they were not in any sense “pupils”), for the sport to be got out of the thing, and even tried to practice the trick themselves. Their victims, of course, complain that Socrates is the ruin of the young people. When they are asked how he ruins them, shame prevents the reply, “By exposing the ignorance of us older men,” and so they fall back on the old charges against scientific men in general, the accusation of irreligion and “making the weaker case the stronger.” The present prosecutors are the mere mouthpieces of this idle talk (23c-24b).
(b) Direct Reply to Meletus.—Socrates now turns to the charges actually brought against him by the prosecution, with which he deals very curtly. The humor of the situation is that the prosecutor cannot venture to say what he means by either of his charges without betraying the fact that, owing to the “amnesty,” the matters complained of are outside the competency of the court. What he really means by the “corruption of the young” is the supposed influence of Socrates on Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides, and others who have been false to the democracy; the charge of irreligion is connected with the scandals of the year 415. But to admit this would be to invite the court to dismiss the case. Hence, when Meletus is pressed to explain what he means, he has to take refuge in puerile nonsense. The judges could understand the situation and, no doubt, enjoy it amazingly; many modern commentators have been badly perplexed by the “sophistical” character of Socrates’ reasoning simply because they have not set themselves
Meletus professes to have detected Socrates depraving the young. If he has, clearly he must be able to say who improve them. Under pressure, Meletus has to fall back on the view that any good Athenian improves the young by his association with them (because his influence is exerted in favour of the moral tradition of society, exactly as we have found Anytus maintaining in the Meno, and shall find Protagoras explaining more at length in the dialogue called after him). Socrates stands alone in making young people worse by his influence on them (25e). Now this is contrary to all analogy; if you consider the case of horses or other domestic animals, you find that they are improved by only a few, the professionals who understand the art of training them; they are spoiled when entrusted to anyone else. Moreover, a man must be very dull not to see that he would be acting very much against his own good by depraving the very persons among whom he has to live. No one would do such a thing on purpose (the Socratic doctrine that “no one does evil voluntarily). If a man makes so grave an error involuntarily, the proper course is not to prosecute him but to open his eyes to his mistake. But Meletus, by prosecuting Socrates, makes it clear that he thinks him capable of the absurdity of purposely trying to deprave the very persons whose depravity would expose him to risk of harm at their hands (25c-26b).
Again, in what particular way does Socrates “deprave” his young friends? No open allusion to the facts really meant being permissible, Meletus has to fall back on the reply that the depravation consists in incitement to the religious offence alleged in the indictment. Socrates sets the example of irreligion (26b). This brings us to the consideration of this accusation on its own account. Socrates professes to be quite unable to understand what can be meant by the statement that he “does not worship the gods of the city but practices a strange religion.”
If Meletus means anything,
(c) The Vindication of Socrates’ Life and Conduct (28a-35d).—We come at last to Socrates’ serious defense of his character, not against the frivolous charges on which he is being ostensibly tried but against grave misconceptions of old standing. He is well aware that his life is at stake, a thing which has happened to many a good man in the past and will happen again. But there is nothing dishonorable in such a situation. A man’s part is to stand loyally, in the face of all risks, to the part which he has judged to be the best for himself, or to which his commander has ordered him. Socrates himself has acted on this principle in his military career, when his superior officers have commanded him to face dangers. Still more is it his duty to be loyal to the command of God which, as he is persuaded, has enjoined him to “spend his life in devotion to wisdom and in examining himself and his fellows” (28e). The real atheism would be to disobey the divine command. Disobedience would be a known evil, but the death with which he is threatened if he does not disobey may, for all he knows, be the greatest of good. Hence if he were offered acquittal on the condition of abandoning “philosophy,” with certain death as the alternative, he would refuse acquittal. For God is more to be obeyed than any human law-court. For that reason, so long as life is in him, Socrates will never cease urging on every man the duty of “care for wisdom and truth and the good of his soul” and the relative unimportance of care for health or fortune. That is God’s commission to him, and if Athens only knew it, his “service” (ὑπηρεσία)
of God is the greatest blessing that could befall the
It may be asked why a man with such a mission has never attempted to act as a public monitor and adviser.
The defense is now, in substance, concluded, and we have reached the point at which it was customary to make an appeal
The object of the pages which follow (36a-38b) is to explain why Socrates did not, after conviction, secure his life by proposing a moderate fine as an alternative penalty, as he clearly could have done. This must have been felt as a real difficulty by commonplace persons even among the philosopher’s friends, as we see from the absurd explanation given by Xenophon (Apology, 1-8) that Socrates deliberately provoked his own execution in order to escape the infirmities of old age. It has to be explained that his real motive was a worthy one. To propose any penalty whatever would amount to admitting guilt, and Socrates has already told the court that he regards himself as a minister of God for good to his countrymen. Hence he cannot in consistency propose any treatment for himself but that of a distinguished public benefactor, a place at the public table (σίτησις ἐν πρυτανείῳ). It should be noted that, strictly speaking, this is the τίμησις which Socrates offers as an alternative to the death-penalty demanded by the accusers. The whimsical mood has returned on him after the intense earnestness of the defense of his life and character. He urges that as he regards himself as a benefactor he can only propose the treatment of a benefactor for himself. The subsequent offer to pay the trifling sum of a mina (only raised to one of thirty minae at the urgent instance of friends) is made with the full certainty that the court, which has just heard Socrates’ real opinion of his deserts, will reject it. The real issue is not whether a prophet of righteousness is a major or a minor offender, but whether he is. a capital traitor or the one true “patriot,” and Socrates is determined that the court shall not shirk that issue, as it would like to do. As to the sum of thirty minae which Socrates’ friends offer to pay for him, one should note (a) that in Epistle xiii. Plato, writing a generation later, mentions it to Dionysius II as a good dowry for anyone but a very rich man to give his daughter and that this estimate is borne out by a careful examination of all the references to dowries in the fourth-century orators, (b) that, though Plato and Apollodorus are joined with Crito as “security,” the main burden of payment would, no doubt, fall on the wealthy Crito. The family of Plato are not likely to have been particularly well off just after the failure of the revolution in which its most prominent members had taken the losing side.
As we see from the speeches of Lysias belonging to this
In the concluding remarks of the speech made after the voting on the penalty, note in the first place how clearly it is recognized that Socrates has forced the issue, and that he could have secured his acquittal by simply “asking for quarter” (38d-39b). This is, of course, true of every typical martyr. Martyrdom is dying when you could escape if you would compromise a little with your conscience; in this sense every martyr forces the issue. Anytus would rather not have killed Socrates, just as the average Roman proconsul would rather not have condemned Christians, or as Bonner (as appears even from the partial accounts of his enemies) would much rather not have sent Protestants to the stake. But it is not the business of the martyr to make things easy for the forcer of consciences.
In the impressive words of encouragement directed to his supporters (39e-41c), the important thing to note is that, contrary to the absurd opinion of many nineteenth-century writers, Socrates makes his own belief in a blessed life to come for the good perfectly plain. The best proof of this is that to which Burnet has appealed, comparison of his language with the brief and hesitating phrases in which the Attic orators are accustomed to allude to the state of the departed. In this respect the Apology agrees completely with the Phaedo, when we allow for the fact that in the former Socrates is speaking to a large audience, most of whom would not share his personal faith. No one but a convinced believer would have said half what he is made to say about his “hope” (not to mention that the “divinity” of the soul is at bottom the reason why the “tendance” of it is so much more important than that of the body, and, as Rohde long ago observed, to the Greek mind “immortality” and “divinity” are equivalents). The specific allusions of 41a. to Hesiod, Musaeus, Orpheus and the Orphic judges of the dead, also make it clear that Socrates’ convictions are not meant as simply inferences from “natural theology”; we have to see in them the influence of the Orphic religion, though the Euthyphro and the second book of the Republic show that Socrates thought very poorly of the ordinary run of “professing” Orphics in his own time.
Crito
The Euthyphro and Apology between them have made us understand what Socrates meant by religion, and why his sense of duty to God forbade him either to evade prosecution or to purchase his life by any concessions. There is still one question connected with his death to which the answer remains to be given. Owing to unexpected circumstances, a month elapsed between
Even so, there is a further point to be considered. We have seen that, strictly speaking, the court was not competent to take account of the offences which the prosecutors really had in mind, and that Socrates shows himself aware of this in the Apology when he cross-examines Meletus. It might, then, be urged that if Socrates had escaped he would not have been disregarding the decision of a competent court; is it wrong to disrespect the sentence of an incompetent one? Two things need to be remembered: (a) the court thought itself competent, and Athenian law made no provision for the quashing of its findings as ultra vires; (b) this being so, for an individual man who had all his life set the example of strict and complete compliance with the νόμοι of the city to follow his private judgment on the question of the competency of the court would have been to stultify the professions of a lifetime. Plato himself, in the same situation, Adam says, would probably have chosen to escape. This may be, but the second consideration just mentioned would not have applied to Plato in 399. A young man of under thirty, whose most important relatives had just four years before lost their lives in the cause of “oligarchy” could not be considered as having thrown in his lot definitely with the democracy and its νόμοι = laws; his position would have been really different from that of an old man of the Periclean age. The argument, used by Socrates, that to have neglected the opportunity to settle elsewhere
The dramatic mise-en-scene is necessarily exceedingly simple. The conversation is tete-a-tete between Socrates in his apartment in the prison of the Eleven and Crito, unless we count the “Laws” into whose mouths the last word of the argument is put as an unseen third party to the talk. The time is in the “small hours” before dawn, while it is still dark. Crito, who brings the news that the “sacred vessel” on whose return Socrates will have to die has just been sighted off Sunium, has been some time watching Socrates as he sleeps, when Socrates wakes from a strange dream and the conversation ensues. Crito fears that Socrates, whose sentence will be executed the day after the vessel reaches port, has only one more night to live; Socrates, on the strength of his dream, expects, as turned out to be the fact, that the boat will not make so quick a voyage and that his death will be deferred another day. (In his interpretation he evidently takes the “fair and comely woman” of 44a for the “fetch” of the approaching vessel, and her “white garments” for its gay white sails.) This brief introduction leads straight to the conversation in which Crito puts the case for escape, to which Socrates replies point for point. (a) The friends of Socrates will suffer in reputation if he persists in dying. It will be supposed that they were too mean to find the money necessary for corrupting his jailers. The answer is that “decent folk” will know better than to think anything of the sort, and what the “many” think does not matter (44c). (b) Unfortunately it does matter what the “many” think. The power of popular prejudice is shown only too plainly by the present position of Socrates himself. Answer: the “many” are powerless to do much in the way of either good or ill, for they can neither make a man wise nor make him a fool; hence it matters very little what they do to him (44d). (c) Perhaps Socrates is really thinking of the interests of his friends, who will be exposed to “blackmailers” (συκοφάνται = sycophants)
He need not consider that point; his friends are in duty bound to take the risk and, besides, these worthies
Socrates begins his formal reply by saying that all through life it has been his principle to act on his deliberate judgment of good. He cannot feel that the judgments he expressed in his defense before the court are in any way affected by the result of the trial. If he is to take Crito’s advice, he must first be convinced that there is something unsound in these principles; it is useless to work on his imagination by setting up bugbears. The strength of Crito’s case all through has lain in the appeal to “what will be thought of us.” Now formerly we both held that it is not every opinion nor the opinions of every man which matter. Socrates is still of the same mind about this, and so, as he has to confess, is Crito. We should attach weight to the opinion of those who know (the φρόνιμοι), and disregard the opinion of those who do not. For example, in the matter of bodily regimen the physician and the trainer are the experts who know, and their approval or disapproval ought to count, whereas a man who followed by preference the approvals and disapprovals of the “many,” who are laymen in such matters, would certainly suffer for it in bodily health. The same principle applies to matters of right and wrong, good and bad, such as the question we are now considering, whether it will be right or good for Socrates to break prison. We have not to take into account the opinions of the “many,” but those of the one expert, if there is such a man, by neglecting whose advice we shall injure “that which is made better by right but depraved by wrong.” (That is, the soul; the argument is from the standing analogy between health in the body and moral goodness in the soul.)
Further, we agree that if a man has ruined his physical constitution by following the opinions of the “many” and disregarding those of the medical expert, life with a ruined physique
Again, we both still retain our old conviction that to commit a wrong is, in all conditions, a bad thing for the man who commits it (the thesis of the Gorgias). It follows that we must hold, contrary to the opinion of the “many” that a man must never repay wrong by retaliatory wrong (ἀνταδικειν), and therefore that we must never repay ill-treatment by ill-treatment (ἀνωικακουργειν καικως ωάσχοντα). In a word, no treatment received from another ever justifies wronging him or treating him ill, though this is a conviction so opposed to the code of the “many” that those who accept and those who reject it cannot even discuss a problem of practice with one another (οὐκ ἔστι κοινή βουλή, 49d). Socrates and Crito can only discuss the course Socrates is to adopt because they agree about this initial principle (49a-e).
Next, ought a man, on these principles, to keep his word when he has given it (assuming that what he has promised to do is in se morally right),
Artistically the function of the picture is to evoke a mood of ideal feeling adequate to the elevation of the ethical demands of
The Laws might complain that Socrates would by an evasion be breaking his own “compact,” and that without the excuse that the compact had been made under duress, or obtained by false representation or without sufficient time for consideration.
He has had a life of seventy years for reflection and in all this time has never attempted to adopt a new domicile, but has absented himself less than almost any other citizen from Athens. Thus he cannot plead any of the recognized excuses for regarding his assent to live under the laws of the city as anything but free and deliberate. (Of course the meaning is not that Socrates could have been “naturalized” in some other community; but he might have chosen to live as a resident alien under the protection of another society, or as a colonist at e.g. Amphipolis or Thurii.) The whole course of his life bears silent witness that he has accepted the system of institutions into which he had been born, and it is an integral part of the system that an Athenian citizen shall respect the decisions of the duly constituted courts. He is not at liberty to reject the jurisdiction because in his own opinion the decision of a court does him a material wrong (50c). To run away to escape the execution of the court’s sentence would be following up the exalted speeches he made before the judges by the conduct of the paltriest of eloping slaves. If he does break his “compact,” what good can he expect to accrue to his connexions or himself? His family and friends will certainly run the risk of
See further:
Burnett. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito. Oxford, 1924.
Riddell. Apology of Plato. Oxford, 1867.
Burnet. Early Greek Philosophy, Part I, Chapter IX. 180-192.
Ritter, C. Platon, i. 363-390.
Ritter, C. Sokrates.(Tubingen, 1931.
Taylor, A. E. Socrates. London, 1932.
Chapter VIII. Phaedo
We are now to consider the group of four great dialogues which exhibit Plato’s dramatic art at its ripest perfection. It may fairly be presumed that they all belong to one and the same period of his development as a writer, a view borne out by a cautious and sane use of the available “stylometric” evidence. Outwardly they have all the same form, that of a conversation supposed to have taken place before a numerous audience and subsequently described either by Socrates himself (Protagoras, Republic), or by one of the original auditors (Phaedo, Symposium). We have already found Plato using this difficult literary form for comparatively short dialogues (e.g. Charmides, Euthydemus), but it is a more arduous task to keep it up successfully throughout a work of considerable compass; as we have seen, in the dialogues which there is other reason for thinking later than the Republic, it is only adopted once (in the Parmenides), and there is a formal explanation of its abandonment in the Theaetetus. This is good reason for thinking that Plato’s great achievements in this kind belong neither to his more youthful nor to his later period of literary activity, but to his prime of maturity as a writer (which need not, of course, coincide with his ripest maturity as a thinker). I do not think there is any satisfactory method of dating the four dialogues themselves in the order of their composition. We may reasonably presume that the Republic, as the work of greatest range and compass among them, must have taken longest to write, and was the last to be completed. It also contains what looks like a concealed reference to the Phaedo (Republic 611b 10), though the fact is by no means certain.
Now there is one consideration which perhaps allows us to fix an approximate date in Plato’s life for the writing of the Republic. In Epinomis vii. 326b, where Plato is describing the state of mind in which he paid his first visit to Italy and Sicily, he says that he had been driven to state, in a eulogy of genuine philosophy (ἐπαινων τὴν ὀρθὴν φιλοσοϕίαν), that humanity will never escape its sufferings until either true philosophers occupy political office
As in the case of these three dialogues, I must be content to a considerable extent to refer my reader to Professor Burnet’s commentary for treatment of details. The scene of the conversation is laid at Phlius, where Phaedo of Elis, apparently on his way home from Athens, relates the story of the last hours of Socrates to a party of Phliasian admirers of the philosopher who have not yet had any account of the details. The one member of this party who is named is Echecrates, independently known to us as a Pythagorean. Hence Burnet is probably not far wrong in supposing the story to be told in the “meeting-house” of the local Pythagoreans. The surroundings will thus harmonize with the general tone of the conversation, in which the two principal interlocutors are also pupils of an eminent Pythagorean, Philolaus. It should be noted that these two speakers, Simmias and Cebes, are both represented as young, and that they evidently belong to the group of Pythagoreans in whom the religious side of the original movement has been completely overshadowed by the scientific. It is Socrates who has to recall them to the very conceptions which are at the root of Pythagorean religion, and persuade them that their scientific “developments” are inconsistent with the foundations of that religion. We need also to be alive in reading the Phaedo to two important facts which are sometimes forgotten. One is that Socrates himself is very careful to qualify his assent to the main tenet of the Orphic and Pythagorean faith, the deathlessness of the soul, by cautious reserve as to the details of the eschatology in which that faith has found expression. He is sure that he will leave this world to be with God; he is very far from sure about the rest of the Orphic scheme of rewards and punishments. The other is that we must not take the Phaedo by itself for a complete expression of the whole spirit of Socraticism. It sets Socrates before us in the last hours of his life, and dwells on just the side of his thought and character which would be sure to be most prominent in the given situation,
There can be no doubt that Plato intends the reader to take the dialogue as an accurate record of the way in which Socrates spent his last hours on earth, and the topics on which he spoke with his intimate friends in the face of imminent death. This is indicated, for example, by the care shown to give a full list of the names of the persons present. Most of these were probably still living when the Phaedo was circulated; it is quite certain that this was the case with some of them, e.g. Euclides and Terpsion, who, as we see from the Theaetetus, were still alive and active thirty years later; Phaedo, the actual narrator, who is represented in the dialogue as still a mere lad; Aeschines of Sphettus, and others. Though Plato is careful to mention and account for his own absence, it is quite certain that he must have been fully informed of the facts, since the statement that he spent some time after the death of Socrates with Euclides and Terpsion at Megara comes to us on the excellent authority of his own pupil Hermodorus. We are therefore bound to accept his account of Socrates’ conduct and conversation on the last day of his life as in all essentials historical, unless we are willing to suppose him capable of a conscious and deliberate misrepresentation recognizable as such by the very persons whom he indicates as the sources of his narrative. This supposition is to my own mind quite incredible, and I shall therefore simply dismiss it, referring the reader who wishes for discussion of it to the full Introduction to Burnet’s edition of the dialogue.
“The Phaedo is a discourse on Tending the Soul.”
The purpose of the dialogue is not quite accurately described by calling it a discourse on the “immortality of the soul.” To us this suggests that the main object of the reasoning is to prove the soul’s endless survival, and nothing more. But to the Greek mind ἀθανασία (immortality) or ἀφθαρσία (incorruptibility) regularly signified much the same thing as “divinity,” and included the conception of ingenerability as well as of indestructibility. Accordingly, the arguments of the dialogue, whatever their worth may be, aim at showing that our souls never began to be quite as much as at proving that they will never cease to be. But neither of these positions is the main point of the reasoning. The subject of the dialogue is better indicated by the
A possible misconception which would be fatal to a real understanding of the dialogue is to look upon the members of the series of arguments for immortality as so many independent substantive “proofs,” given by the author or the speaker as all having the same inherent value. Any careful study will show that they are meant to form a series of “aggressions” to the solution of a problem, each requiring and leading up to the completer answer which follows it. In particular, Plato is careful, by skillful use of dramatic by-play and pauses in the conversation, to let us see what he regards as the critical points in the argument. These pauses are principally two, that which occurs at 88c-89a, where the narrative is interrupted by a short dialogue between Phaedo and Echecrates, and 95e-100a, where Socrates relates the story of his early difficulties with the physical “philosophy” of Empedocles, Diogenes, and others. It is evidently meant that the two outstanding difficulties which must be faced by the philosophical defender of the doctrine of immortality are the “epiphenomenalist” theory of consciousness {“body (matter) over mind”} and the “mechanical theory of nature” the one represented for us in the Phaedo by the “objection” of Simmias, and the other by that of Cebes.
As I shall point out later on, Plato himself in the Laws specifies just these theories as being at the root of all irreligious philosophizing, and it would still be true to say that today they constitute the speculative basis for most of the current denials of human immortality. We are thus directed to find in the Phaedo a statement of the position of Socrates on these two perennial issues; for Plato’s own personal attitude towards them we need to look primarily to the express refutation of the “unbeliever” in the tenth book of the Laws. The background presupposed in one refutation is the science of the fifth century, that of the other is the Academic science of the fourth, but both agree in the assertions (a) that mental life is not the effect of bodily causes, and that (b) physical reality itself—“coming into being and passing out of being”—is not explicable in purely mechanical terms. This—apart from the impressive picture of the fortitude of the true philosopher in the moment of death—is the main lesson of the Phaedo.
The immortal narrative must be passed over in the present
The Argument of the Dialogue
I. Statement of the Main Thesis (60b-70b) The main issue of the dialogue is made to emerge in a simple and natural way from the remark of Socrates that the genuine “philosopher” is one who is ready and willing to die, though he would regard it as “criminal” to put an end to his own life (61c). (That is, he trusts that death is the entrance on a better state, but holds that we may not force the door; we must wait for it to be opened to us in God’s good time. The Pythagorean origin of the absolute veto on suicide is indicated by the allusion to Philolaus at 61d.) This may seem a paradox, but it is intelligible if we conceive of man as a “chattel” (κτημα, property) of God, just as a slave is a (κτημα) “chattel” of his owner, and therefore has no right to dispose of his own life, as it does not belong to him. Socrates would not like to commit himself entirely to the Orphic dogma that while we are in the body we are “in ward” i.e. undergoing penal servitude for ante-natal sin, but he thinks it at least adumbrates this truth that “we men are chattels of the gods” (62b),
(The kind of κτημα (chattel) meant is clearly a δουλος (slave), who is, as Roman lawyers put it, in the
Possibly, indeed, the “world” would say that it does know this well enough; it knows very well that “philosophers” are “morbid” creatures who are only half alive, and that it serves them right to eliminate them (a plain allusion to the Aristophanic caricature of the φροντισταί {invisible chorus} as
To put the matter quite simply, death, as every one understands, is the “release” of the soul from the body; in other words, it is the achievement of the soul’s independence. Now we can see that what the philosopher has been aiming at all his life long is just to make the soul, as completely as he can, independent of the fortunes of the body. We can see this from the following considerations: (a) The philosopher sets no great store on the gratifications of physical appetite, and disregards the “tendance of the body” in general (fine clothes and foppery) “beyond what is needful.”
What he “tends” is the soul, and that is why the “mass of men“” think him as good as a ghost or corpse (64c-65a). (b) In his pursuit of knowledge he finds the limitations of the body a hindrance to him in more ways than one, and is always doing his best to escape them. He soon discovers the grossness and untrustworthiness of our senses, even of the two most acute of them, sight and hearing, and tries to arrive at truth more accurate and certain than any which the evidence of sense could furnish. This is why he trusts to thinking rather than to sense; but in thinking, the soul is independent of the body in a way in which she is not independent in sensation. (This is, of course, strictly true. Socrates would probably be thinking primarily of the danger of trusting to a “figure” in mathematics, a danger which will be mentioned a little further on. It is equally true that, even in our own times, when the scientific man is so abundantly supplied with “instruments of precision,” we have always to allow for a margin of unknown error in all conclusions depending on data derived from sense-perception; absolute accuracy and certainty can only be obtained, if at all, in “pure” science which makes no appeal to sense, even for its data.) So pleasurable or painful excitement derived from the body also gravely interferes with the prosecution of truth. (One is hampered in one’s scientific work when one’s head aches or one’s liver is out of order.) (c) The supreme objects of our studies, “the right,” “the good,” “the beautiful,” “figure,” “health,” in short, “the reality” (οὐσία)
Having all these considerations in mind, we may fairly take a “short cut” (ἀτραπός) to the conclusion that so long as we have the body with us it will always be a hindrance to the apprehension of “reality” (τὸ ἀληθές (the true)) as it is. At the best we lose much valuable time by being obliged to take care of the body. If it gets out of condition, our quest of “the real” (τὸ ὄν, the real) is even more hindered. Bodily wants and the passions connected with them—which, incidentally, are the causes of business and war, the two great occupations of the “active life”—leave us hardly any opportunity or leisure for the pursuit of knowledge. And even in the scanty time we are able to devote to the things of the mind, the body and its needs are constantly “turning up” and diverting our attention. Thus the man who is really “in love with knowledge” must confess that his heart’s desire is either only to be won after death, when the soul has achieved her independence of her troublesome partner, or not at all. While we are in the body, we make the nearest approach to our supreme good just in proportion as we accomplish the concentration of the soul on herself and the detachment of her attention from the body, waiting patiently until God sees fit to complete the deliverance for us. When that happens, we may hope, having become unmixed and undiluted intelligence, to apprehend undiluted reality. Meanwhile, the life of thinking itself is a progressive purifying of intelligence from the alien element and a concentration of it on itself. The philosopher is the only type of man who makes it the business of his life to accomplish this purgation and concentration and so to win spiritual independence. This is why we may call his life a “rehearsal of death,” and why unwillingness to complete the process would be ridiculous in him (66c-68b). The conception set before us in these pages is manifestly the Hellenic counterpart of the “mystical way” of Christianity. The underlying ideas of both conceptions are
“Plato’s conception of the soul is manifestly the Hellenic counterpart of the ‘mystical way’ of Christianity.”
The whole point of the insistence on unremitting preoccupation with thinking as the philosophic form of “purgation” is that the object of the renunciation of the philosopher is to make his life richer; by “purification” from external preoccupations, his intelligence becomes more and more intense and concentrated, just as, e.g., alcohol becomes more potent the more nearly your specimen is “pure” alcohol. Nor must one suppose that the contemplative life, because it is not directed ultimately on action, is one of indolence or laziness. Socrates, who claims in our dialogue to have spent his whole life “in philosophy” was busy from morning to night with his “mission.” Probably, when we remember the way in which Plato in the seventh Epistle insists on the political character of his own original ambitions and on his lifelong conviction that the business of the philosopher among men is to be a statesman, we may infer that he would not himself at any time have subscribed to the doctrine of the vita contemplativa without a great deal of explanation and reservation. Even the Pythagoreans who formulated the doctrine had stood alone among the scientific schools in playing an important part, as a society, in the politics of the early fifth century. They only became a merely scientific society when their political activities had been crushed by revolution. But it may well be that the ablest men of action feel even more strongly than the rest of us that the “conduct of business,” the carrying on of commerce, governing, and fighting cannot be its own justification. To be everlastingly “meddling” seems an end not worthy the dignity of human nature; at bottom we all want not to do something but to be something. To make “doing things” your ultimate object is merely to take “Fidgety Phil who couldn’t keep still” as your model of manly excellence. It has been said with truth that the great “practical reforms” which
If a man, then, plays the craven when death comes, we may be sure he is no true “lover of wisdom,” but a “lover of the body” which is as much as to say a man whose heart is set on wealth (a φιλοχρήματος) or on “honors” (a φιλότιμος), or both at once (68c. This direct allusion to the Pythagorean “three lives” is, of course, intentional.) On the other hand, the philosopher will be marked by eminent courage and eminent “temperance” in the popular sense in which the word means control over one’s physical appetites. In fact, when we come to reflect, there is something paradoxical about the courage and temperance of the rest of mankind. They are courageous in the face of danger because courage serves to protect them against death, which they fear as the worst of evils. Thus their very valour is rooted in a sort of cowardice. (As an Indian says of the English in one of Kipling’s tales, “they are not afraid to be kicked, but they are afraid to die.”) And the decent (κόσμιοι) among them keep their lusts in hand because they think they will get more pleasure by doing so than by giving way, so that “slavery to pleasure” is the source of what they call their “temperance.” But the truth is that real virtue is not a business of exchanging pleasures and pains against one another. Wisdom is the true “coin of the realm” for which everything else must be exchanged, and it is only when accompanied by it that our so-called “virtues” are genuine goodness (ἀληθὴς ἀρετή). Without it, the kind of goodness which is based on the “calculus of pleasure and pain is no more than a painted showpainted show
II. The Arguments for Immortality.
In substance, what has gone before contains Socrates’ vindication of his attitude in the face of death. But, as Simmias remarks, the whole vindication has tacitly assumed that there is an hereafter. Now most men find it very hard to believe that the soul
(a) The First Argument (70c-77d)—This argument itself falls into two parts, α (70c-72e) and β (72e-77d); the two have to be considered in conjunction to make anything which can be called a proof, and what they go to prove is not “immortality” but merely that the soul continues to be “something” after death. It is not simply annihilated. This, of course, is only the first step to establishing what is really in question, the persistence of intelligence beyond the grave.
(α) First Reason for Holding that the Soul is not Simply Annihilated at Death (70c-72e)—There is an ancient doctrine (it is, in fact, Orphic) of rebirth, according to which a soul which is born into this world is one which has come back from “another world” to which men go at death. This, if true, would establish our point. To look at the matter from a more general point of view, we see that the world is made up of “opposites” (ἐναντία)—such as hot, cold; great, small; good, bad. Now if a thing “becomes bigger” it must have first been “smaller,” if it becomes hotter it must have been cooler, if it becomes “better” it must have been “worse” and so on. So we may say universally that whatever comes to be, comes to be “out of its opposite and that to correspond to each pair of opposites, there are two antithetical processes of “becoming.” Hot and cold are opposites, and similarly there are the two processes of contrasted sense, “becoming hotter,” “becoming
(It is easy to see that the reasoning is neither cogent nor, if it were, probative of what we want to prove. As Aristotle was afterward to explain more fully, the whole conception of the generation of opposite “out of” opposite is vitiated by an ambiguity in the phrase “out of.” A thing which grows cool has previously been warmer, but it is not true that “heat” is a stuff or matter out of which “cold” is made. In Aristotelian language, the thing which grows cool has lost the “form” of “the hot” and acquired the “form” of the cold; the original “form” has not itself been made into an “opposite” form. Again, it is simply assumed, without warrant, that cyclical alternation is the universal law of all processes. To us there is no absurdity in the view that living organisms should finally vanish, or that differences of temperature should cease to exist. If the “principle of Carnot” could be taken to be true without any restriction, we should have to regard these consequences as inevitable. For the purposes of Socrates, however, it is sufficient that the reasoning should be based on assumptions which would be granted as common ground by his audience; it is not necessary that they should be admitted by anyone else. Still, even when his assumptions are granted, nothing follows so far beyond the bare admission that the soul which has passed from this world to the other, and will, in turn, come back from the other world to this, has some sort of reality in the interval; it has not
(β) The Argument from the Doctrine of Reminiscence (72e-77d)—Cebes observes that we might have reached our conclusion, independently of the doctrine of recurrence, by arguing from Socrates’ habitual position that what we call “learning” a truth is really being “put in mind” of something we had forgotten. If this is true, we must at one time have known all that in this life we have to be “reminded” of. Our souls must have existed “before we were men” and presumably therefore may continue to exist when we have ceased to be men. (This argument, if sound, brings us nearer to the conclusion we want, since it goes to prove that the soul not only was “something” but was fully intelligent before it had been conjoined with the body.) The main argument for this doctrine of reminiscence, we are told, is the one already considered in the Meno, that a man can be made to give the true solution of a problem by merely asking him appropriate questions, as we see particularly in the case of problems of geometry.
Well, then, let us consider a precisely parallel case. In mathematics we are constantly talking about “equality”—not the equality of one stone to another stone, or of one wooden rod to another wooden rod, but of the “just equal” (αὐτὸ τὸ ἴσον), which is neither wood nor stone—and we know that we mean something by this talk. But what has put the thought of the “just equal” into our minds? The sight of equal or unequal sticks, or something of the kind. And we note two things, (a) The “just equal” is something different from a stick or a stone which is equal to another stick or stone; we see the sticks or stones, we do not see “mathematical equality.” (b) And the so-called equal sticks or stones we do see are not exactly, but only approximately, equal. (Even with instruments of precision we cannot measure a length without having to allow for a margin of error.) Thus plainly the objects about which the mathematician reasons are not perceived by the eye or the hand; the thought of them is suggested to him by the imperfect approximations he sees and touches, and this suggestion of B by A is exactly what we mean by “being reminded of B by A.” But A cannot remind us of B unless we have already been acquainted with B. Now from the dawn of our life here, our senses have always been thus “reminding us” of something which is not directly perceptible by sense (i.e. perception has always carried with it estimation by an “ideal” standard). Hence our acquaintance with the standards themselves must go back to a time before our sensations began, i.e. to a time before our birth. We have argued the case with special reference to the objects studied by the mathematician, but it applies equally to all other “ideal standards” like those of ethics, the good, the right; in fact, to everything which Socrates and his friends called a “form.” The only alternative to supposing that we had antenatal acquaintance with these “forms” would be to say that we acquired it at the moment of birth. But this is absurd, since we are quite agreed that we bring none of this knowledge into the world with us; we have to recover it slowly enough from the hints and suggestions of the senses. We conclude then that if “the kind of being we are always talking about,” that is the “forms,” exist, and if they are the standard by which we interpret all our
Simmias is particularly delighted with this argument precisely because, as he says, it proves the ante-natal existence of the soul to be a consequence of the doctrine of Forms, and that he regards as the most clear and evident of all truths (77a). (This delight, by the way, would be quite unintelligible on the theory that the doctrine was an invention of Plato.) But, as he goes on to say after a moment’s reflection, to prove that the soul “arose” before our birth is not to prove that it will survive death, and it is against the fear of death that Socrates has to provide an antidote. Formally, as Socrates says, the point would be established if we take arguments (α) and (β) together. (β) has proved the
(b) Second Argument for Immortality (78b-84b)—This argument goes much more to the root of the question, since it is based not on any current general philosophical formula, but on consideration of the intrinsic character of a soul. In Aristotelian language, the first proof has been “logical” the second is to be “physical.” The reasoning adopted lies at the bottom of all the familiar arguments of later metaphysicians who deduce the immortality of the soul from its alleged character as a “simple substance,” the “paralogism” attacked by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. The “proof,” as Kant knew it from the writings of men like Wolff and Moses Mendelssohn, is a mere ghost of that offered in the Phaedo. Socrates’ point is not that the soul is a “simple substance,”—he had not so much as the language in which to say such a thing—but that it is, as the Orphic religion had taught, something divine. Its “deiformity,” not its indivisibility, is what he is anxious to establish; the indivisibility is a mere consequence. Hence he is not affected by Kant’s true observation that discerption is not the only way in which a soul might perish. No doubt it might perish, as Kant said, by a steady diminution of the intensity of its vitality, if it were not divine,
Simmias had spoken of the possible “dissipation” of the soul at death. Now what sort of thing is liable to dissipation and what not? Obviously it is the composite which, by its own nature, is liable to be dissipated; the incomposite, if there is such a thing, should be safe from such a fate. And it is reasonable to hold that whatever maintains one and the same character in all circumstances is incomposite, what is perpetually changing its character is composite. Thus for the crude contrast between the “simple” and the composite, we substitute the more philosophical antithesis between the permanent and the mutable. (This takes us at once to ground where Kant’s criticism would not affect us. If the soul is, in any sense, immutable, it is so far secured against the lowering of intensity of which Kant speaks.) In the kind of being of which we speak in our scientific studies, the being we are always trying to define—the “forms,” in fact—we have a standard of the absolutely immutable. “Just straight,” “just right,” “just good,” are once and for all exactly what they are, and are invariable.
Again, in the partnership of soul and body, it is the soul which is rightly master and the body servant (the thought which the Academy crystallized in the definition of man as a soul using a human body as its instrument). Now it is for the divine to command and rule, for the mortal to serve and obey; hence it is the soul in us which plays the divine, the body which plays the mortal part. (This brings us at last to the point on which Socrates really means to insist, the “deiformity” or “kinship with God” of the
The soul, then, is relatively the permanent and divine thing in us, the body the merely human and mutable. We should therefore expect the body to be relatively perishable, the soul to be either wholly imperishable or nearly so. And yet we know that, with favourable circumstances,
Much more should we expect that a soul which has made itself as far as possible independent of the mutable body, and has escaped by death to the divine and invisible, will be lifted above mutability and corruption. But if a soul has all through life set its affections on bodily things and the gratifications of appetite, it may be expected to hanker after the body even when death has divorced them, and be dragged down into the cycle of births again by this hankering. We may suppose that the place in the animate system into which it is reborn is determined by the nature of its specific lusts, so that each soul’s own lusts provide it with its appropriate “hell,” the sensual being reborn as asses, the rapacious and unjust as beasts of prey, and so forth. The mildest fate will be that of the persons who have practiced the “popular goodness” misnamed temperance and justice without “philosophy” (i.e. of those who have simply shaped their conduct by a respectable moral tradition without true insight into the good, or, in Kantian phrase, have lived “according to duty,” though not “from duty”). These, we may suppose, are reborn as “social creatures,” like bees and ants, or as men again, and they make “decent bodies” as mankind goes. The attainment of “divinity” or “deiformity” is reserved for the man who has resolutely lived the highest of the three lives, that of the “lover of wisdom,” and subdued his lusts, not like the “lover of wealth” from fear of poverty, nor like the “lover of honor” from concern for his reputation, but from love of good. This explains the reason why the lover of wisdom lives hard. It is because he knows that what a man comes to feel pleasure and pain about becomes his engrossing interest. To find your joy and woe in the gratifications of the body means to come to be bound up with its fortunes, and this bars the way to deification and binds you down to the wheel of birth. It is for the sake of this supreme good, “deification,” that the lover of wisdom denies “the flesh.” To consent to its motions would be to act like Penelope, who unwove by night what she had spent the day in weaving. Now a man whose whole life has been an aspiration to rise above mutability to deiformity will be the last person to fear that the new and abiding
(I make no apology for having drawn freely on the characteristic language of Christian mysticism in expounding this argument. Under all the real differences due to the Christian’s belief in the historical reality of the God-man, the ideal of Socrates and the Christian ideal are fundamentally identical. The central thought in both cases is that man is born a creature of temporality and mutability into a temporal and mutable environment. But, in virtue of the fact that there is a something “divine” in him, he cannot but aspire to a good which is above time and mutability, and thus the right life is, from first to last, a process by which the merely secular and temporal self is re-made in the likeness of the eternal. If we understand this, we shall be in no danger of supposing that Socrates is merely anticipating the jejune argument from the indivisibility of a “simple substance” or that the Kantian polemic against Wolffian rationalism seriously affects his reasoning. The thought is that the real nature of the soul has to be learned from a consideration of the nature of the specific “good” to which it aspires. A creature whose well-being consists in living for an “eternal” good cannot be a mere thing of time and change. In this sense, the morality of the Platonic dialogues, like all morality which can command an intelligent man’s respect, is from first to last “other-worldly.”)
First Interlude (84c-85b)—At this point the thread of the argument is broken; a general silence ensues, but Simmias and Cebes are observed to be whispering together, as though they were not quite satisfied. Artistically the break serves the purpose of lowering the pitch of the conversation and relieving the emotional strain. It also has a logical function. Impressive as the moral argument for immortality is, there are scientific objections to it of which we have so far heard nothing, and these deserve to be carefully stated and adequately met, since we cannot be called on to accept any view of man’s destiny, however attractive, which contradicts known scientific truth, nor is Socrates the man to wish, even in the immediate presence of death, to acquiesce in a faith which is not a reasonable faith. That would be simple cowardice (84e). He has just broken out into his “swan-song,” and like the swans, his fellow-servants of the Delphic (? Delian) god, he sings for hope and joy, not in lamentation. He is therefore robust enough in his faith to be only too ready to hear and consider any objections.
Objections of Simmias and Cebes (85c-88c)—Simmias thinks, like a modern “agnostic” that certainty about our destiny may be unattainable. He would at heart like to be able to appeal to
Cebes has a different objection. He does not attach much importance to the epiphenomenalism of Simmias, but he complains that nothing has really been proved beyond “preexistence,” which has been all along regarded as guaranteed by the doctrine of “reminiscence.” Even if we grant that the soul, so far from being a mere resultant of bodily causes, actually makes its own body, this only shows it to be like a weaver who makes his own cloak. In the course of his life he makes and wears out a great many cloaks, but when he dies he leaves the last cloak he has made behind him, and it would be ridiculous to argue that he cannot be dead because the cloak which he made is still here, and a man lasts longer than a cloak. So the soul might make and wear out a whole succession of bodies—indeed, if it is true that the body is always being broken down by waste of tissue and built up again by the soul, something of this sort happens daily. But even if we go so far as to assume that the soul repeatedly makes itself a new body after the death of an old one, it may be that, like the weaver, it exhausts its vigour sooner or later, and so will make a last body, after the death of which the soul will no longer exist. And we can never be sure that the building up of our present body is not the last performance of such a worn-out soul, and consequently that the death we are now awaiting may not be a complete extinction (86e-88b).
These objections, Phaedo says, struck dismay into the whole company, with the single exception of Socrates. For they appeared to dispose of the whole case for immortality, and, what was worse, they made the hearers, who had been profoundly impressed by Socrates’ discourse, feel that they would never be able to put any confidence in their own judgment again, if what had seemed to be
The purpose of all this by-play is to call attention to the critical importance of the two problems which have just been raised. We are, in fact, at the turning-point of the discussion. The “moral” argument based on the divinity of the soul, as proved by the character of the good to which it aspires, has been stated in all its impressiveness, and we have now to consider whether “science” can invalidate it. To use Kantian language, we have seen what the demand of “practical reason” is, and the question is whether there is an insoluble conflict between this demand and the principles of the “speculative reason,” as Echecrates and the auditors of Socrates fear, or, in still more familiar language, the question is whether there is or is not an ultimate discord between “religion” and “science.”
As to the source and purport of the two objections it may be enough to say a very few words. That of Simmias, as is indicated by the remarks of Echecrates, is represented by Plato as based on the medical and physiological theories of the younger Pythagoreans. It is a natural development from the well-known theory of Alcmaeon that health depends on the ἰσονομίη or “constitutional balance” between the constituents of the organism. The comparison with the “attunement” of the strings of a musical instrument would be suggested at once by the Pythagorean discovery of the simple ratios corresponding to the intervals of the musical scale. From this to the conclusion that “mind” is the tune given out by the “strings” of the body, the music made by the body, is a very easy step; and since we now know that Philolaus, the teacher of Cebes and Simmias, had specially interested himself in medicine, we may make a probable conjecture that we are dealing with his doctrine (which is also that of his contemporary Empedocles, Frs. 107, 108). Since the same doctrine appears in Parmenides (Fr. 16), it was clearly making its way among the Pythagoreans by the beginning of the fifth century, though it is, of course, quite inconsistent with their religious beliefs about re-birth in animal bodies: (on all this, see Early Greek Philosophy 3 295-296).
In principle the theory is exactly that of modern “epiphenomenalism,” according to which “consciousness” is a mere byproduct of the activities of the bodily organism, the “whistle,” as Huxley said, given off by the steam as it escapes from the engine. A satisfactory refutation of it must ipso facto be a refutation of the whole epiphenomenalist position.
The source of the difficulty raised by Cebes is different. His allusion to the alternation of waste and repair in the organism at once suggests a Heraclitean origin; he is thinking of the view of
Solution of the Scientific Difficulties (88e-102a)—This section of the dialogue falls into three subdivisions. There is first a preliminary discourse by Socrates intended to warn us against being disgusted with serious thinking by the occurrence of difficulties and so led into mere “irrationalism,” next a discussion of the difficulty of Simmias, and then a longer treatment of the much more fundamental problem raised by Cebes, this last subdivision receiving a special narrative introduction of its own.
(α) The Warning Against Misology (89a-91c)—Socrates, alone of the company, shows himself calm and even playful in the presence of the bolt—or rather bolts—just shot from the blue. The “argument,” at any rate, shall be “raised again,” if he can perform the miracle. But whether he succeeds or not, he would at least utter a solemn warning against “misology,” irrationalism. Distrust of reason arises much in the same way as misanthropy, distrust of our fellows. The commonest cause of misanthropy is an unwise confidence based on ignorance of character. When a man has repeatedly put this ignorant confidence in the unworthy and been disillusioned, he often ends by conceiving a spite against mankind and denouncing humanity as radically vicious. But the truth is that exalted virtue and gross wickedness are both rare. What the disillusioned man ought to blame for his experience is his own blind ignorance of human nature. So if a man who has not the art of knowing a sound argument from an unsound one has found
(β) The Objection of Simmias removed. (91c-95a)—In the first place, it may be pointed out that the difficulty raised by Simmias is incompatible with his own professed principles. He avows himself satisfied now by what had been already said that knowledge is “reminiscence” and that, consequently, our souls existed before they wore our present bodily guise. Plainly that cannot be the case if the soul is an “epiphenomenon” the melody given out by the body, the “whistle of the engine” to recur to Huxley’s version of the same doctrine. The musical instrument must preexist and its strings be screwed up to the right pitch before the melody can be there. We may assert either that all knowledge is “reminiscence” or that the soul is an epiphenomenon; we must not assert both propositions at once. And Simmias himself has no doubt which of the two positions has the better claim to acceptance. The doctrine of “reminiscence” has been deduced from the “postulate” (ὑπόθεσις) of the reality of the “forms,” a principle which Simmias has all through accepted as certain. The epiphenomenalist theory of the soul rests on nothing more than a plausible analogy, and we all know how deceptive such analogies can be—in geometry, for example (92d).
(There is real point in Socrates’ argumentum ad hominem, independently of the assumption of preexistence. We may compare the story of W. G. Ward’s crushing reply to Huxley, who had just explained mental life to his own satisfaction by epiphenomenalism plus the laws of association, “You have forgotten memory,” i.e. the fundamental fact of the recognition of the past as past. As Huxley had to admit, his scheme could give no account of recognition, and without presupposing recognition it would not work.)
But the epiphenomenalist theory is not merely incompatible with our unproved postulate about “forms”; it is also demonstrably false on independent grounds. There are two things which are characteristic of every “attunement” or “melody”; every “attunement” is completely determined by its constituents, and no “attunement” admits of degrees. If a pair of vibrating strings
(The argument, though stated in a way unfamiliar to us, is precisely that which weighs with men who are in earnest with ethics against a philosophy like Spinoza’s. Though Spinoza does not make “consciousness depend causally on the organism, for practical purposes his theory of the independent “attributes” works out in the same way as epiphenomenalism. The ψυχή, though not causally dependent on the constituents of the organism, is supposed to be mathematically determinable as a function of them. Consequently, just as Simmias has to allow that no “attunement” is more or less an “attunement” than any other, Spinoza holds a rigidly nominalist doctrine about “human nature.” There is really no such thing as a “human nature” of which Peter or Paul is a good specimen, but Nero a very bad one. Nero is not, properly speaking, a bad specimen of a man; he is a perfect specimen of a Nero. To say that he may be a perfect Nero, but is a very bad man, is judging by a purely arbitrary and “subjective” standard. (See Ethics, Part I, Appendix, Part IV., Preface.) But, if this is so, Spinoza is undertaking an impossible task in writing a treatise on the good for man and the way to obtain it.)
(γ) The Difficulty of Cebes discussed (95a-102)—As has been said already, the difficulty raised by Cebes is of a much more serious kind than that of Simmias. As the subsequent history of psychology has proved, epiphenomenalism is after all a thoughtless and incoherent theory based on hopelessly misleading analogies and incompetent to take account of the obvious facts of mental life. The theory on which Cebes is relying is a very different matter; he is appealing to the first principles of a “mechanical” philosophy of nature. Put in modern language, his contention comes to this, that the action of mind on body presupposed in ethics cannot be reconciled with the principles of natural science except by supposing that mind “expends energy” in doing its work of “direction.” If this expenditure of energy goes on without compensation, a
Does the guiding influence of intelligence on bodily movement come under the scope of the two great laws of the Conservation and the Degradation of Energy? If it does, we must look with certainty to the disappearance of our personality after the lapse of some finite duration; if it does not, the principles of mechanics are not of universal application. The development of Energetics in the nineteenth century has enabled us to state the problem with a precision which would have been impossible not merely to Plato, but even to Descartes or Leibniz, but in principle the problem itself has remained the same under all these developments; Socrates in this part of the Phaedo is dealing with the very question which is the theme, for instance, of James Ward’s Naturalism and Agnosticism.
The importance of the problem demands that we should formulate it with very special care. We may state it thus. Granting the “real distinction of mind from body,” it is possible that in every act of intercourse with the body the mind parts with energy which it cannot recover; if that is so, its progress to destruction begins with its very first entrance into contact with a body, and the completion of the progress is only a matter of time (95d). Now in discussing this problem we are driven to face a still more fundamental one, the question of “the causes of coming into being and passing out of being”(95e), that is, the question of the adequacy of the whole mechanical interpretation of Nature. Socrates’ object is to persuade his friends that no single process in Nature is adequately explained by the mechanical interpretation. He can most readily carry them with him by first giving an account of his own personal mental history and the reasons why he gave up the mechanical philosophy in early manhood. This brings us to the
Second Interlude (95e-102a)—The Origin of the Socratic Method—(For the, to my mind, overwhelming evidence that the narrative which follows is meant by Plato as a strictly historical account of the early development of Socrates, I must refer to Burnet’s detailed notes in his edition of the dialogue. The main point is that the general state of scientific opinion described can be shown to be precisely that which must have existed at Athens in the middle of the fifth century, and cannot well have existed anywhere else or at any later time. The “scientific doubts” of which Socrates speaks are all connected with two special problems—the reconciliation of Milesian with Pythagorean cosmology, and the facing of the contradictions Zeno had professed to discover in the foundation of Pythagorean mathematics. It is assumed that the system of Anaxagoras is the last great novelty in physics, and there are clear references to those of Diogenes of Apollonia and of Archelaus. This fixes the date to which Plato means to take us back down to the
The general drift of the narrative is as follows. As a young man, Socrates had felt an enthusiasm for “natural science” and made himself acquainted with the biological theories of the Milesians, the Heracliteans, Empedocles, the psychology of Alcmaeon, the flat-earth cosmologies of the Ionians and the spherical-earth cosmologies of the Italian Pythagoreans, as well as with the mathematical subtleties of Zeno about the “unit” and the nature of addition and subtraction. The result of all this eager study was to induce a state of dubitatio de omnibus; so far from discovering the cause of all processes, Socrates was led to feel that he did not understand the “reason why” of the simplest and most everyday occurrences. At this point he fell in with the doctrine of Anaxagoras that “mind” is the one cause of order everywhere. The doctrine appealed to him at once, from its teleological appearance. If all the arrangements in the universe are due to intelligence, that must mean that everything is “ordered as it is best it should be,” and Socrates therefore hoped to find in Anaxagoras a deliverer from all scientific uncertainties. He expected him to solve all problems in cosmology, astronomy, and biology by showing what grouping of things was best, and consequently most intelligent. But when he read the work of Anaxagoras, he found that its performance did not answer to its promise. Anaxagoras made no use of his principle when he came to the details of his cosmology; he merely fell back on the same sort of mechanical causes (“airs” and “waters”) as the rest of the cosmologists. Like them, he made the fatal mistake of confusing a cause, or causa principalis, with “that without which the cause would not act as a cause” causae concomitantes or “accessory conditions.” This was much as though a man should say that the reason why Socrates is now sitting quietly awaiting death, instead of being in full flight for Thebes or Megara, is the condition of his sinews, muscles, and bones. The real reason is
The disappointment, Socrates says, confirmed his opinion that he was “no good” (ἀφυὴς ὡς οὐδὲν χρημα)
His description of the “new method” reveals it to us at once as that which is characteristic of mathematics. It is a method of considering “things” by investigating the λόγοι or “propositions” we make about them. Its fundamental characteristic is that it is deductive. You start with the “postulate” or undemonstrated principle, which you think most satisfactory and proceed to draw out its consequences or “implications” (συμβαίνοντα), provisionally putting the consequences down as “true,” and any propositions which conflict with the postulate as false (100a). Of course, as is made clear later on, a “postulate” (ὑπόθεσις) which is found to imply consequences at variance with fact or destructive of one another is taken as disproved. But the absence of contradiction from the consequences of a “postulate” is not supposed to be sufficient proof of its truth. If you are called on by an opponent who disputes your postulate to defend it, you must deduce the postulate itself from a more ultimate one, and this procedure has to be repeated until you reach a postulate which is “adequate” (101e 1), that is, which all parties to the discussion are willing to admit. (We hear more of this part of the method in Republic vi. 510-511, where we discover that the ideal goal of the method is to deduce the whole of science from truths which are strictly self-evident, but nothing is said of this in the Phaedo.) The most important special rule of the method, however, is that, also insisted on by Descartes, that a proper order must be observed. We are not to raise the question of the truth of a “postulate” itself until we have first discovered exactly what its consequences are. The
What Socrates intends to explain is what we have learned from Aristotle to call “formal” causality, but he has no technical terminology ready to hand and therefore makes his meaning clear by examples. If we ask why something is beautiful, we may be told in one case, “because it has a bright colour” in another “because it has such-and-such a shape” The point that Socrates wants to make is that such answers are insufficient. There must ultimately be one single reason why we can predicate one and the same character, beauty, in all these cases. Having a bright colour cannot be the cause of beauty, since the thing we call beautiful on the strength of its shape may not be coloured at all; having a particular shape cannot be the cause of beauty, since we pronounce things which have not that shape to be beautiful, on the strength of their colour, and so on. Hence Socrates says he rejects all these learned explanations and sticks to the simple one that universally the reason why anything is beautiful is that “beauty” is “present to it” or that it “partakes of” beauty. The thought is that whenever we are justified in asserting the same predicate univocally of a plurality of logical subjects, the predicate in every case names one and the same “character.” It is these characters which Socrates calls “forms.” We might call them “universals” if we bear two cautions carefully in mind. They are not to be supposed to be “ideas in our minds” or anything of that sort; they are realities of which we think. Also, as the case of “beauty” is well adapted to show, a “form” may be “present” to a thing in very varying degrees. A thing may be very beautiful, or it may be only very imperfectly beautiful, and it may well be that nothing is superlatively and completely beautiful. We should also note that the precise character of the relation which Socrates calls “presence” or “participation” or “communication” (κοινωνία) is nowhere explained, and his hesitation about the name for this relation (100d) may perhaps mean that he feels that there is an unsolved problem involved by his “postulate.” There obviously is such a problem.
We might seem here to have lost sight of the insistence on teleology which had marked Socrates’ comments on Anaxagoras, but there is really a close connexion between “end” and “formal cause,” as Aristotle was to show at length. To say that the primary problem is always to explain what a thing is by reference to its “form” carries the implication that we have to explain the origins and rudimentary phases of things by what the things are, when they are at last there, not to explain what they are by discoursing on their origins, and this is precisely what we mean by taking a “teleological” point of view. But it would take us too far away from the Phaedo to discuss the full implications of such teleology.
At the point we have reached, the narrative of Phaedo is once more broken in order that Echecrates, as a mathematician, may express his high approval of Socrates’ doctrine of method (which, in fact, is pretty plainly inspired by the example of Zeno in his famous polemic, the point of which was to show that there must be something amiss with the “postulates” of the early Pythagorean
(c) Third (and Final) Proof of Immortality (102a-107b)—The “forms” had entered incidentally into both the proposed proofs which have been already examined. In this final proof we are offered a direct deduction of immortality from the fundamental postulate that the “forms” exist. This marks the argument as intended to be the climax of the whole reasoning, since the proof, if successful, must be recognized as complete by Cebes or any one else who regards the reality of the “forms” as the basis of his whole philosophy.
We have, in the first place, to stipulate for an unusual accuracy of expression which is necessary if we are to avoid fallacy. We commonly speak, for example, of one man as taller or shorter than another. We say Simmias is taller than Socrates but not so tall as Phaedo. On the face of it this looks as though we were calling Simmias at once tall and short, and therefore asserting the simultaneous presence in him of two “opposed” forms. But all we really mean is that Simmias happens to be relatively taller than Socrates and shorter than Phaedo. It is not “in virtue of being Simmias” (en sa qualite de Simmias) that these things can be predicated of him. The distinction here taken is that between essential and accidental predication since made familiar to us all by Aristotelian logic. Or, in scholastic terminology, it is the distinction between an intrinsic and an extrinsic denomination. The point has to be made, because the force of the argument now to be produced depends on the fact that it deals entirely with essential predication.
This being premised, we may go on to assert (a) that not only will no “form” e.g. magnitude, combine with an opposed “form,” but further, “the magnitude in us will never admit the small” (102d). That is, not only can we dismiss at once as false such assertions as that “virtue is vice,” “unity is plurality,” but we can also equally dismiss any proposition in which a subject, other than a “form,” of which that form is essentially predicated, is qualified by a predicate opposed to that which attaches to it essentially in virtue of the “form” under consideration. Thus, if “shortness” were an essential predicate of Socrates, we could say that “Socrates is tall” must be false; it is only because a given stature is an “accident” of Socrates that it is possible to say of him at one date that he is short, but at another (when he has grown) that he is “tall.” (Or to take an example which perhaps illustrates the point even better, not only is it absurd to say that virtue itself is vice, it would also be absurd to say “the virtues of the old pagans were splendid vices,” if we meant such a phrase as anything more than a rhetorical exaggeration.) When a “form” opposite to that which is essential to a certain thing “advances” to “occupy“” the thing, the original “form” cannot subsist side by side with its rival in joint occupation of the ground. It must either “beat its retreat” (ὑπεκχωρειν) or be “annihilated” (ἀπολωλέναι). (The
(β) We can make a further assertion which will conduct us straight to the conclusion we want. There are certain things which are not themselves “forms,” but of which participation in a given form is an essential character. Thus fire is not “warmth” nor is snow “cold.” But fire will not “admit” the form “cold,” nor snow the form “warmth.” Fire is never cool nor snow hot. As we said already, when “cold” attempts to “occupy” fire, or heat to “occupy” snow, an essential character of the thing must either “withdraw” or be “annihilated,” and in either case the thing, the fire or the snow, is no longer the thing it was. But we may now add that in cases like that of fire and snow, when each of a pair of subjects has predicated of it essentially “participation” in a form “opposite” to one in which the other member of the pair essentially participates, the same thing will occur. Thus “cold” is essentially predicated of snow and “hot” of fire. And we may say not only the snow will “retire” or be “annihilated” rather than allow itself to be “occupied” by heat, but further that snow will not abide the “advance” of fire. It melts and ceases to be snow when you expose it to fire. (This is a case of the alternative of “annihilation.” The snow, so to say, allows itself to be “cut up” in defense of its “position” when the forces of the fire make their onslaught.) So again the number “three” is not the same thing as “the odd,” or “odd number,” since there are many other odd numbers, but it “participates” essentially in the “form” odd. (It is true that “three” and the other numbers, unlike fire and snow, are also themselves spoken of freely in this and other dialogues as “forms,” but Socrates makes no difficulty about treating the “participation” of a sensible thing in a “form” and the “participation” of one “form” in another as examples of the same relation. As we might put it in the terminology of modern “logistic,” he does not discriminate between the relation of an individual to a class, and the relation of total inclusion between one class and another.) Consequently “whatever is occupied” by the “form” three is also “occupied“” by the accompanying “form” odd; the cardinal number of every “triplet” is an odd integer. Hence no triplet will allow itself to be “occupied” by the “form” even number. You cannot make an even triplet (e.g., when a man’s fourth child is born, the class “children of So-and-so” does not become an even triplet; it ceases to be a triplet as well as to be “odd.” This is an example of the alternative of “withdrawal”
We now apply these results to the case of the soul. Life is a necessary concomitant of the presence of a soul, as illness is of the presence of fever, or heat of the presence of fire. A soul always brings life with it to any body in which it is present. Now there is an “opposite” to life, namely, death. Hence we may say that a soul will never allow itself to be occupied by the opposite of the character it always carries with itself. That is, life may be essentially predicated of the soul and therefore death can never be predicated of it. Thus the soul is, in the literal sense of the word, “undying” (ἀθάνατος); that is, the phrase “a dead soul” would be a contradictio in adjecto. So much has now been actually demonstrated (105e).
Of course this does not take us the whole of the way we wish to go. What has been “demonstrated,” and would probably not be denied by anyone, is that, properly speaking, “death” is a process which belongs to the bodily organism. It is the body which dies, speaking strictly, not its “mind” But to prove that there is no such thing as a “dead soul,” though there are dead bodies, does not prove that the soul continues to live after the body has died, and Socrates is well aware of this. His demonstration, on his own admission, leaves us with an alternative: since “dead” cannot be predicated of a soul, the soul must either be annihilated or must “retire” when the body dies. Socrates’ faith is that the second member of the alternative is correct, but the emphatic “so much has been demonstrated” of 105e 8 seems to show that, when all is said, this remains for him an article of faith, not a demonstrated proposition of science. Our decision between the two alternatives will depend on the question whether the soul is not only “undying” but “imperishable” (ἀνώλεθρος). If it is, then we may safely say that what befalls it at death is merely “withdrawal elsewhere.” He is not actually called on to argue this fresh point, since his auditors at once assert their conviction that if what is “undying” is not imperishable, nothing can be supposed to be so, whereas there are, in fact, imperishables, such as God, and “the form of life.” Thus, in the end, the imperishability of the soul is accepted as a consequence of the standing conviction of all Greek religion that τὸ ἀθάνατον = τὸ θεον = τὸ ἄφθαρτον (deathless = God = immortal). It is the soul’s “divinity” which is, in the last resort, the ground for the hope of immortality, and the divinity of the soul is a postulate of a reasonable faith which the dialogue never attempts to “demonstrate.” The last word of Socrates himself on the value of his demonstration is that its “primary postulates” (i.e. the “forms” and the divinity of the soul) really demand further examination (107b 5).
The Practical Bearing of the Discussion (107c-108c). This brings us to the real moral of the dialogue. As we have
one must put genuine faith in the ancient sacred sayings which indicate that our soul is immortal, has to face a judge, and pays the gravest penalties when one has left the body,
etc. (πείθεςθαι δὲὄντως ἀεὶ χρὴ τοῑς παλαιοῑς τε καὶ ἱεροῑς, οἳ δὴ μηνύουσιν ἡμῑν ὰθάνατον φυχὴν εἱναι δικαστάς τε ἴσχειν τὰς μεγίστας τιμωρίας ὃταν τις ἀπαλλαχθῆ τού σώματος).
“‘Tendance of the soul’ is precisely what we call
the development of ‘moral personality.’”
I do not propose to make this chapter longer by dwelling either on the impressive myth in which Plato fits an imaginative picture of the future lot of the virtuous and the vicious into a framework supplied partly by a scheme of astronomy which seems to be Pythagorean, and possibly, as the admiring comment of Simmias at 109a suggests, due to Philolaus, and subterranean geography which manifestly comes from Empedocles, or on the famous description of the last earthly moments of Socrates. I must be content to refer the reader to Burnet’s commentary, and, for a study of the influence of the picture on later eschatology, to Professor J. A. Stewart’s Myths of Plato. It is useless to discuss the question how much in these myths of the unseen represents a genuine “extra-belief” of either Socrates or Plato, and how much is conscious “symbolism.” Probably neither philosopher could have answered the question himself. But we must bear in mind that Socrates regularly accompanies these stories with the warning (e.g. Phaedo, 114d) that no man of sense would put much confidence in the details, and that the one thing of serious moment is that we should
See further:
Burnet. Plato’s Phaedo. Oxford, 1913; Greek Philosophy, Part I, Chapters IX.-X.
Ritter, C. Platon, i. 532-586.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 168-181.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 126-163.
Stewart, J. A. Myths of Plato, 77-111 “The Phaedo Myth”; Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 39-47.
Note. Plutarch’s essay de Genio Socratis is rich in interesting traditions about Simmias and the Pythagoreans at Thebes. It describes Pelopidas and his fellow-conspirators, who recaptured the citadel of Thebes from the Spartans in 379, as meeting for their enterprise in the house of Simmias. Plutarch, as a Boeotian, was well informed on Theban matters and his story presumably has historical foundations.
Chapter IX. The Symposium
The Symposium is perhaps the most brilliant of all Plato’s achievements as a dramatic artist; perhaps for that very reason, it has been worse misunderstood than any other of his writings. Even in its own day it was apparently quite misapprehended by Xenophon, if one may judge by the tone of the very inferior imitation of it in his own piece of the same name. Xenophon was led by the form of the dialogue to suppose that it is meant to deal with the sexual passion and to pit against it a Symposium of his own, which has as its climax a eulogy of the pleasures of married life. Our own and the last generation, with the poison of Romanticism in their veins, have gone farther and discovered that the dialogue anticipates William Blake’s “prophecies” by finding the key to the universe in the fact of sex. This means that such readers have sought the teaching of the Symposium in the first instance in the Rabelaisian parody of a cosmogony put very appropriately into the mouth of Aristophanes. The very fact that this famous speech is given to the great γελωτοποιός (ridiculous), should, of course, have proved to an intelligent reader that the whole tale of the bi-sexual creatures is a piece of gracious Pantagruelism, and that Plato’s serious purpose must be looked for elsewhere. Similarly, it is more from the Symposium than from any other source that soul-sick “romanticists” have drawn their glorification of the very un-Platonic thing they have named “platonic love” a topic on which there is not a word in this or any other writing of Plato. We must resolutely put fancies like these out of our heads from the first if we mean to understand what the real theme of the dialogue is. We must remember that Eros, in whose honor the speeches of the dialogue are delivered, was a cosmogonic figure whose significance is hopelessly obscured by mere identification with the principle of “sex.” We must also remember that the scene is a festive one, and that the tone of most of the speeches is consequently more than half playful, and rightly so, as the gaiety of the company is meant to set off by contrast the high seriousness of the discourse of Socrates. It is there that we are to find Plato’s deepest meaning, and when we come to that speech we shall find that the “love” of which he speaks the praises is one which has left sexuality far behind, an amor mysticus which finds its nearest modern counterpart in the writers who have employed the imagery of Canticles to set forth the love of the soul for its Creator.
It is more interesting to remark the careful way in which the spirit of the time is kept up in the account of the banquet itself. Not only is the occasion itself, the first public victory of a new poet, a festive one, but the year is one in which the temper of the Imperial city itself was exceptionally joyous and high. The date is only a few months before the sailing of the great Armada which was confidently expected to make the conquest of Sicily a mere steppingstone to unlimited expansion, possibly to the conquest of Carthage (Thucydides. vi. 15); the extraordinary tone of ὕβρις (hubris = insolence or wantonness) characteristic of Alcibiades in the dialogue becomes much more explicable when we remember that at the moment of speaking he was the commander-designate of such an enterprise and drunk with the ambitions Thucydides ascribes to him quite as much as with wine. We note that Aristophanes also is depicted as he must have been at the height of his powers, when the Birds and the Lysistrata were yet to be written, not as the broken man, whom Plato might have known personally, who could sink to the tiresome dirtiness of the Ecclesiazusae. In a few months’ time the whole situation was changed by the scandal about the Hermae and the profanation of the mysteries; Alcibiades was an exile at Sparta, bent on ruining the city which had disgraced him, and there is good reason to think that at least two other speakers in our dialogue (Eryximachus and Phaedrus) were badly implicated in the same affair.
For the δημος itself, the year may be said to have been the crisis of its fate. It had staked its all on a great aggressive bid for Weltmacht and the bid failed. The city never recovered the loss of men and material;
Introduction (172a-178a) Aristodemus, then, related that, the day after Agathon’s victory, he met Socrates in very unusual “festal array,” on his way to Agathon’s dinner-party and accepted his proposal to join him. On the way Socrates fell into one of his ecstasies and left his companion to enter Agathon’s house, where he was warmly welcomed, alone. Agathon knew enough of Socrates’ habits not to be startled by learning that he was standing “tranced” in the doorway of the next house. He did not make his appearance until dinner was half over, when he took his seat by Agathon in the gayest of humors. When the dinner was finished, the party resolved, on the advice of the physician Eryximachus, that there should be no enforced deep “potting” and no flute-playing. They would entertain themselves, as sensible men should, with discourses. Phaedrus, another member of the party, had often remarked on the singular fact that though so many persons and things have been made subjects of eulogy, no one has as yet made an adequate eulogy of Eros.
The main object of this little introduction is plainly to call our attention to a marked feature in the character of Socrates. He is at heart a mystic and there is something “other-worldly” about him. We shall hear a great deal more about this later on from Alcibiades when he describes Socrates’ long “rapt” in the trenches before Potidaea, an experience which may have had a great significance
Speech of Phaedrus (178a-180b) Phaedrus is known to us chiefly from the part he plays in the dialogue called after him, where he appears as an amateur of rhetoric and a fervid admirer of the fashionable stylist of the moment, Lysias, in contradistinction to Socrates, who regards Lysias as intellectually inferior to the, as yet, little known Isocrates. Socrates is made to say of him there (Phaedrus, 242b) that he has been the cause of more “discourses,” either by delivering them himself or being the occasion of their delivery by other men, than any living person, if we leave Simmias of Thebes out of account. If we may trust the list of names inserted in Andocides i. 15, he was among the persons accused, a few months after Agathon’s dinner, of having “profaned the mysteries” (unless, though this is not so likely, the reference is to some other Phaedrus). In Lysias xix. 15 he is said to have fallen into poverty, but “not through vicious courses.” There is a well-known epigram in the Anthology, ascribed to Plato, which makes him an ἐρώμενος (lover) of the author, but, since Phaedrus was a man in 416 when Plato was a small boy, this is chronologically impossible.
The speech of Phaedrus is properly made jejune and commonplace, for a double reason. As a point of art, it is necessary to begin with the relatively tame and commonplace in order to lead up by a proper crescendo to the climax to be reached in the discourse of Socrates. And the triviality and vulgar morality of the discourse is in keeping with the character of the speaker as depicted for us in the Phaedrus. Phaedrus understands by Eros sexual passion, and particularly passion of this kind between two persons of the same sex. At Athens these relations were regarded as disgraceful both by law
and, as the next speaker in our dialogue will remind us, by general opinion, but literature shows that they
The argument of the speech is that Eros is entitled to honor on two grounds—(a) his noblesse, as proved by his antiquity, and (b) the advantages he bestows on us. The first point is established by an appeal to Hesiod and the cosmogonists generally, who presuppose Eros—the impulse to generation as an original first principle of the universe. It is brought in as a regular commonplace of encomiasts, who are fond of dwelling on the “pedigree” of their hero. (Socrates regarded this pride of birth as pure vanity as he tells us at Theaetetus 175a-b, where he criticises the common run of panegyrists on this ground.) The second point is supposed to be proved by the argument that “love” is the most powerful of incitements to ambition. A lover will do anything and endure anything to win the admiration of his “beloved” and avoid disgracing himself in his eyes. (Note then that Phaedrus has no conception of any “good” surpassing that of the “lover of honors.”) Hence an army of “lovers” if one could be raised, would be invincible. In short, the great service which Eros renders to men is that he inspires them with μένος (“prowess”). (This was, in fact, exactly the view taken in Spartan and other Dorian communities, where “homo-sexual love” in its coarsest form was encouraged because it was believed to contribute to military “chivalry.”
Orpheus, a mere “chicken-hearted” musician, was not allowed to recover his Eurydice, because he had not the “pluck” to die for her but sneaked down to the house of Hades without dying. In substance, then, the speech simply amounts to a defense of an unnatural practice on the plea of its military value. It is an apologia for the theory and practice of Sparta.
Speech of Pausanias (180c-185c) Pausanias is virtually an unknown figure to us. He appears also in the Protagoras (the supposed date of which must be roughly some twenty years before 416), in company with Agathon, then a mere stripling, and Socrates is there made to say playfully that he should not be surprised if the pair are “lovers” (Protagoras 315d). Xenophon has dutifully worked him in in his own imitation of the Symposium (viii. 32), where he is said to be the “lover of the poet Agathon” and to have “defended homosexual vice.”
The speech of Pausanias, unlike that of Phaedrus, really does attempt to take account of specifically Athenian moral sentiment, and is much more elaborately worked out in point of form. He is dissatisfied with Phaedrus on moral grounds, because he has drawn no distinction between worthy and criminal “love.” The distinction is even prefigured in mythology, which recognizes a difference between a “heavenly” Aphrodite, daughter of Uranus without any mother, and a “vulgar” (πάνδημος) Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus and Dione. Since Aphrodite is the mother of Eros, we must consequently distinguish between a “heavenly” and an earthly or “vulgar” Eros. The one is admirable, the other not. In fact—so far Pausanias agrees with Socratic ethics—there is a right and a wrong in all human activities, and consequently there must be a right and a wrong way of “being in love.”
The “low” form of love has two characteristics: (1) its object may be of either sex, and (2) what it loves in that object is the body rather than the soul, and this is why the vulgar lover prefers his beloved to be empty-headed (ἀνόητος = foolish, thoughtless) and therefore an easy quarry. The “heavenly” love is all masculine in his composition. The object of this love is therefore always male and the passion is free from “grossness” (ὕβρις = outrage). It is directed not on the young and pretty but on an object just on the verge of manhood, a person whose character promises assured lifelong friendship.
To this distinction corresponds the apparently self-contradictory character of the Attic “use and wont” in respect of Eros. In some communities, such as Elis and Boeotia, the “vulgar” and the more refined Eros are both permitted, in the Ionian cities both are regarded as disgraceful. This is because Eleans and Boeotians
In some respects the speech is morally on a higher level than that of Phaedrus. It is a real contribution to the discussion to introduce as fundamental the distinction between a noble and an ignoble “love.” And Pausanias is so far following right instinct when he makes the noble “love” independent of obvious physical prettiness and attractiveness and maintains that its object is a consortium totius vitae in the fullest sense of the words. So far he is in accord with the distinction we should draw ourselves between the love that is little more than a sensual weakness and the love which can lead to a “marriage of true minds.” To this extent, I cannot agree with the disparaging estimate of Mr. Bury (Symposium, xxvii). That Pausanias conceives of a consortium totius vitae as only possible between a younger and an older male is to be explained by the Attic neglect of the intellectual and moral education of the womenfolk of the citizens. There is no possibility of the “shared life” where one of the partners is an intelligent human being and the other a spoilt child or a domestic animal, and it is fair to remember this when we find Pausanias assuming that all love of women belongs to the ignoble kind. On the other hand, Pausanias’ conception of the noble Eros is pitched far too low. As his inclusion of Sparta as one of the places where the distinction is recognized would be enough to show, he quite definitely means to give his approval to what Socrates and Plato, like ourselves, regard as not merely “guilty” but “unnatural,” provided that it is made the basis for a permanent life of intimate devotion. The persons on whom he bestows unqualified admiration as having achieved the perfection of human excellence are just those whom Socrates is made to treat in the Phaedrus much as we should treat the “night” who is spurred to chivalrous exploits by a love which, though “sinful,” is not merely “carnal.” (Unlike Socrates, Pausanias would clearly never have understood why Sir Lancelot came short in the spiritual quest of the Sangraal.) He does, indeed, expect
Interlude and Speech of Eryximachus (185c-188e) We must not forget that we are listening to the speeches delivered at a gay party by guests, many of whom are in a merely festive humor. The grave moral issues which have been raised by the magnification of Eros will receive their proper treatment when we come to the great discourse of Socrates, but before Plato can so much as introduce that, he must raise the imaginative level of the conversation to a pitch at which the first crude glorification of “passion” only survives in an undertone. Otherwise, there will be far too violent a “modulation into a different key.” This function of desensualising the imaginative tone of the dialogue is to be achieved by making the speech of Socrates follow directly on one by Agathon, which is a brilliant but passionless and fanciful tissue of jeweled conceits. Even this needs to have the way prepared for it, if we are not to be conscious of too violent a change of mood. Hence the two interposed speeches of Eryximachus and Aristophanes with the little interlude which introduces them. The tone of this part of the dialogue is wholly playful, and I think it would be a mistake to regard it as anything more than a delightful specimen of “Pantagruelism” {coarse humor with a satirical or serious purpose; cynical humor}. The numerous persons who are unhappily without anything of the Pantagruelist in their own composition will continue, no doubt, to look for hidden meanings in this section of the Symposium, as they look for them in Rabelais, and with much the same kind of success. Fortunately, we need not imitate them, any more than we need take Rabelais’ book to be a disguised treatise on the “new monarchy.”
It was now, we are told, the turn of Aristophanes to speak, but as he was impeded by a hiccough, the physician Eryximachus undertook to speak out of order as well as to prescribe for the poet’s “passing indisposition.” Hidden allusions have been suspected in this simple incident, but without reason. Aristophanes, one of the sturdy topers of the party (176b), is held up, when his turn to speak comes, by an accident which is a small joke in itself; the medical man of the group, who also happens to be a sober soul (176c) not able to carry much liquor, gives him professional aid and fills up what would otherwise be a gap in the evening’s programme. There is nothing here which calls for a “serious” explanation.
Eryximachus is presumably the same person as the Eryximachus who was implicated in the business of the “profaning of the mysteries” (Andocides i. 35); at least, there was a certain Acumenus
Eryximachus opens his speech by giving emphatic assent to the distinction between a good and a bad Eros, but protests against looking for the effects of these contrasted forces exclusively in the souls of men. They can be traced everywhere in the structure of the universe, no less than in the human organism.
This may be illustrated from medicine. The healthy and the diseased constituents of the body have both their “cravings”; there are wholesome appetitions and morbid appetitions. The business of medical science is to gratify the one and check the other. We might define the science as “knowledge of the body’s passions for repletion and evacuation,” and the man who can tell which of these “passions” are healthy and which “morbid,” and can replace the morbid cravings in his patient by healthy ones, is the complete physician. The body is, in fact, composed of “opposites” which are at strife with one another, the hot, the cold, the dry, the moist, etc.; medicine is the art which produces “love and concord” between these opposites. The task of “gymnastic” agriculture, music, is precisely similar, and this may be what Heraclitus meant by saying, “It is drawn together in being drawn apart” and talking of the “concord of opposites” though his language is inadequate, since in the establishment of “concord,” the previous “opposition” is
Thus the point of the speech is to insist on the cosmic significance of Eros. The underlying thought is that nature is everywhere made up of “opposites,” which need to be combined or supplemented by one another; they may be combined either in proportions which make for stability, and then the result is temperate climate, health, prosperity, tranquility, or in proportions which lead to instability, and the result is then cataclysms of nature, disease, misfortune, violent and unwholesome excitement. The business of science in all cases is to discover the proportions upon which the “good” results depend. The sources of the doctrine are easily indicated. We detect the influence of the Heraclitean conception of the balance of “exchanges” as the explanation of the seeming permanences of the world-order, the Pythagorean doctrine that all things are combinations of “opposites,” and of the special biological working out of the thought which is characteristic of the philosophy of Empedocles, the founder of Sicilian medicine. The general point of view, as German scholars have pointed out, is much like that of some of the treatises of the Hippocratean corpus, notably the περὶ διαίτης α′ (diagnostic regimen for disease), in which the attempt is made to find a speculative foundation for medicine in the Heraclitean cosmology. The only inference we are entitled to draw is that the main ideas of Sicilian medicine could be presumed to be generally known to cultivated persons at Athens in the last third of the fifth century, as is, in fact, shown abundantly by the use made of analogies based upon them all through the ethical dialogues of Plato. For the argument of the Symposium itself, the chief function of the speech is to divert attention from the topic of sex, as must be done if sex itself is to be treated with the necessary philosophic detachment in the discourse of Socrates, and to call attention to the universal cosmic significance of the conception of the reconciliation of “opposites” in a higher “harmony.” This preludes to the discourse of Socrates, where we shall find that the principle has actually a supra-cosmic significance. Meanwhile, the introduction of this thought of Eros as a “world-building” principle provides the starting-point for the brilliant and characteristic burlesque cosmogony put into the mouth of Aristophanes.
As I have said, the brilliance of this fanciful speech must not blind us to the fact that it is in the main comedy, and that the real meaning of the dialogue must not be looked for in it. Plato is careful to remind us that the speaker is a professional jester; he is too good an artist to have made the remark without a purpose, or to have discounted the effect of the discourse of his hero Socrates by providing his dialogue with two centers of gravity. To be sure, there are touches of earnest under the mirth of his Aristophanes, as there always are under the wildest fun of the actual historical Aristophanes. There is real tenderness in Aristophanes’ description of the love-lorn condition of the creature looking for its lost “half,” and a real appreciation of unselfish devotion to the comrade who is one’s “second self.” Aristophanes shows more real feeling than any of the speakers who have been heard so far. It is also true that he is making a distant approximation to the conception, which Socrates will develop, of love as the longing of the soul for union with its true good. But the distance is even more marked
We may put the discourse in its true light by a consideration of its obvious sources. In the first place, I think it is clear that in composing the speech, Plato had in view the brilliant burlesque of an Orphic cosmogony in Aristophanes’ own Clouds (693-703), where also Eros is the great primitive cosmic active force. From the Clouds comes again the suggestion of the danger that the gods might run if the turbulent round-bodied creatures cut off the supply of sacrifices, the very method by which the birds of the play reduce Olympus to unconditional surrender. As for the details of the story, I think it is clear that they are a humorous parody of Empedocles. Creatures in whom both sexes are united figure in his cosmology (Fr. 61), along with the “men with the heads of oxen” and similar monsters, as appearing in the early stages of the evolutionary cycle to which we belong, the period of the world’s history in which “strife” is steadily disintegrating the “sphere” by dissociating the complexes into their constituent “roots.” This is enough to provide a hint for the construction of the whole narrative. We know that the theories of Empedocles became known at Athens in the fifth century. The Phaedo represents Socrates and his friends as well acquainted with them, and Aristotle tells us that a certain Critias—we may safely identify him with Plato’s great-grandfather, the Critias of the Timaeus and Critias—had expressly adopted one of them, the view that “we think with our blood.”
It is from this humorous burlesque (carefully “bowdlerized” to suit Christianized ethics, bien entendu), that the
There are now only two members of the party who have still to speak, Agathon and Socrates. A little by-play passes (193e-194e), which has no purpose beyond that of enhancing our anticipation and making it clear that their speeches are to be the “event” of the evening. It is worth noting that Plato is ready on occasion to turn the humor against the foibles of his own hero. Socrates is allowed, after his fashion, to put an apparently simple question, simply that he may be called to order; if he were not checked, the programme would be ruined by the substitution of a dialectical discussion for a eulogy. To be sure, when it comes to Socrates’ turn to speak, he gets his way after all and we are plunged into dialectic whether we like it or not; this is part of the fun.
The two speeches marked out as supremely important are wrought with even more art than any of those which have preceded. In form, as in matter, they exhibit the tension between opposites which is the life of a drama at its acutest pitch. Agathon is morally commonplace, cold in feeling, superficial in thought, for the lack of which he compensates by a free employment of all the artificial verbal patterns popularized by Gorgias; his encomium is a succession of frozen conceits with no real thought behind them—littérature in the worst sense of the word. Socrates is, as usual, simple and direct in manner; he begins what he has to say in the usual conversational tone of his “dialectic” though, before he has done, the elevation of his thought leads to a spontaneous elevation in style, and he ends on a note of genuine eloquence which leaves all the “fine language” of Agathon hopelessly in the shade. He is on fire with his subject, but with the clear, white-hot glow of a man whose very passion is intellectual. He thinks intensely where Agathon, and fine gentlemen like him, are content to talk prettily. And we are not allowed to forget that Agathon’s profession is the “stage”; he is the “actor” impressing an audience with emotions he simulates but does not feel; Socrates is the genuine man who “speaks from the heart” and to the heart. (Note the adroit way in which this point is worked in at 194b.)
Speech of Agathon (194e-197e) The whole speech is a masterly parody of the detestable “prose-poetry” of Gorgias, as will readily be seen by comparing it with the specimens of the original article which time has spared to us. It may be summarized, when divested of its verbal extravagances, as follows. Previous speakers have ignored the main point which a eulogy should make; they have talked about the gifts of Eros to men rather than about his intrinsic qualities. It is these on which the eulogist should dwell, (1) Eros is the most beautiful of all gods; for (a) he is the youngest of all, not the oldest as Phaedrus and his cosmologists pretend. The “wars in heaven” would never have happened if Eros had held sway then. Also he is eternally fair and young and consorts with youth, not with “crabbed age” (b) He is “soft” (ἁπαλός) and
(a) justice, for he neither does nor suffers violence. He cannot suffer from it, for love is unconstrained, and he never inflicts it, for all things are his willing slaves and nemini volenti fit iniuria. (b) Temperance, for he “masters all pleasures” (an idle verbal quibble), (c) valour, for he can master Ares, the “warrior famoused for fights.” (d) Wisdom; he is the author of medicine, as Eryximachus had said; he inspires poetry in the most unpoetical and must therefore be himself a supreme poet. He shows his wisdom, further, in being the contriver of all generation and the teacher of all crafts. It was love, love of the beautiful, which inspired the various gods who were their discoverers. In the beginning, when necessity held sway, heaven itself was a place of horror; the birth of Eros has thus been the cause of all that is good in heaven and on earth. In short, Eros is the giver of peace among men, calm in air and sea, tranquil sleep which relieves our cares, mirth, jollity—and here the speech loses itself in a torrent of flowery phrases, which “bring down the house,” as they were meant to do.
We see, of course, as Plato means that we shall, the barrenness of thought which all this euphuism cannot conceal. In a way, the praise of Eros, in Agathon’s mouth, has “lost all its grossness,” by transmutation into unmeaning prettiness, but it has incidentally lost all its reality. The discourse has all the insincerity of the conventional petrarchising sonneteer. Like the sonneteering tribe, Agathon is so intoxicated by his own fine-filed phrases, that he is evidently not at all clear which Eros he is belauding, the “heavenly” or the “vulgar.” For the euphuist’s purpose, this really does not matter much; the theme of his discourse is to him no more than a peg on which to hang his garlands of language. There had been real feeling, under all the burlesque and the grossness, in the speech of Aristophanes; from Agathon we get only “words, words, words.” Socrates indicates as much in the humorous observations which introduce his own contribution to the entertainment. He really began to be afraid, as Agathon grew more and more dithyrambic, that he might be petrified and struck dumb by the “Gorgias’ head.” He bethought himself, now that it was too late, that he had been rash in undertaking to deliver a eulogy at all. In the simplicity of his heart, he had supposed that all he would have to do would be to say the best which could be truthfully said of his subject. But it now appears that the eulogist is expected to glorify his subject at all “costs,” regardless of truth. This is more than Socrates engaged
Dialectical Interrogation of Agathon by Socrates (199c-201c) The purpose of this little interlude, as Socrates had said, is to make sure that his own encomium, which was to “tell the truth” shall begin at the right starting-point. In other words, we are to be brought back to reality, of which we have steadily been losing sight. Eros, “love,” “craving,” is a relative term; all Eros is Eros of something which is its correlate, and it is meant that this correlate is a satisfaction. This would be clear at once in Greek, but is a little obscured for us in English by the ambiguity of our word “love.” In English there are at least three quite distinct senses of the word “love,” and much loose sentimental half-thinking is due to confusion between them. If we would be accurate, we must distinguish them precisely. There is (1) “love of complacency,” the emotion aroused by the simple contemplation of what we admire and approve, the “love to the agent” of which the moral-sense school speak in their accounts of moral approval. We may feel this towards a person wholly incapable of being in any way affected for good or bad by our acts or affecting us by his, as when we glow with attachment to the great and good of whom we have read in history. There is (2) “love of benevolence,” which prompts us to confer kindnesses on its object or to do him services. This love we may feel to the good and the evil alike. It may show itself as active gratitude to a benefactor, as pity for the unfortunate or the sinful, and in many other guises. There is finally (3) “love of concupiscence,” desirous love, the eager appetition of what is apprehended as our own “good.” It is only this desirous love which can be called ἔρως (erôs) in Greek.
Eros, then, is always a desirous love of its object, and that object is always something not yet attained or possessed. Agathon had said that “love of things fair” has created the happiness of the gods themselves. But if Eros “wants” beauty, it must follow that
At this point Socrates closes his conversation with Agathon and enters on his “discourse” having found the ἀρχή (beginning) for it. The questioning of Agathon is no piece of mere verbal dexterity. It is indispensable that we should understand that the only Eros deserving of our praises is an amor ascendens, a desirous going forth of the soul in quest of a good which is above her. And this going forth must begin with the knowledge that there is something we want with all our hearts but have not yet got. As the old Evangelicals said, the first step towards salvation is to feel your need of a Saviour. “Blessed are they which hunger…for they shall be filled.” The soul which is to be love’s pilgrim must begin by feeling this heart-hunger, or it will never adventure the journey. This is the ἀρχή demanded by Socrates for any hohes Lied der Liebe which is to “tell the truth.”
Speech of Socrates (201d-212c). Though Socrates had affected to make his “dialectic” a mere preliminary to the “discourse” he was contemplating, he actually contrives to turn the discourse itself into “dialectic,” genuine thinking, by putting it into the mouth of one Diotima, a priestess and prophetess of Mantinea, and relating the process of question and answer by which the prophetess had opened his own eyes to understand the true mysteries of Eros. The purpose is that his hearers shall not merely follow his words and possibly be agreeably affected by them, but shall follow his thought. They are to listen to the “conversation of his soul with itself.” At the same time, I cannot agree with many modern scholars in regarding Diotima of Mantinea as a fictitious personage; still less in looking for fanciful reasons for giving the particular names Plato does to the prophetess and her place of origin. The introduction of purely fictitious named personages into a discourse seems to be a literary device unknown to Plato, as has been said in an earlier chapter, and I do not believe that if he had invented Diotima he would have gone on to put into the mouth of Socrates the definite statement that she had delayed the pestilence of the early years of the Archidamian war for ten years by “offering sacrifice” at Athens. As the Meno has told us, Socrates did derive hints for his thought from the traditions of “priests of both sexes who have been at pains to understand the rationale of what they do,” and the purpose of the reference to the presence of Diotima at Athens about 440 is manifestly not merely to account for Socrates’ acquaintance with her, but to make the point that the mystical doctrine of the contemplative “ascent” of the soul, now to be set forth, was one on which the philosopher’s mind had been brooding ever since his thirtieth year. This, if true, is very important for our understanding of the man’s personality, and I, for one, cannot believe that Plato was guilty of wanton mystifications about such things. At the same time, we may be sure that in reproducing a conversation
To all intents and purposes, we shall not go wrong by treating the “speech of Diotima” as a speech of Socrates. We can best describe the purpose of the speech in the language of religion by saying that it is the narrative of the pilgrimage of a soul on the way of salvation, from the initial moment at which it feels the need of salvation to its final “consummation.” In spite of all differences of precise outlook, the best comment on the whole narrative is furnished by the great writers who, in verse or prose, have described the stages of the “mystic way” by which the soul “goes out of herself,” to find herself again in finding God. In substance, what Socrates is describing is the same spiritual voyage which St. John of the Cross describes, for example, in the well-known song En una noche oscura which opens his treatise on the Dark Night, and Crashaw hints at more obscurely all through his lines on The Flaming Heart, and Bonaventura charts for us with precision in the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum. The Christian writers see by a clearer light and they have an intensity which is all their own, but the journey they describe is recognizably the same—the travel of the soul from temporality to eternity. In Greek literature, the speech, I think we may fairly say, stands alone until we come to Plotinus, with whom the same spiritual adventure is the main theme of the Enneads. Unless we have so much of the mystic in us as to understand the view that the “noughting” and remaking of the soul is the great business of life, the discourse will have no real meaning to us; we shall take it for a mythological bellum somnium. But if we do that, we shall never really understand the Apology and the other dialogues which deal with the doctrine of the “tendance of the soul” a simple-sounding name which conceals exactly the same conception of the attainment of “deiformity” as the real “work of man.” In the Phaedo we have had the picture of a human soul on the very verge of attainment, at the moment when it is about to “lose itself in light.” In the Symposium we are shown, more fully than anywhere else in Plato, the stages by which that soul has come to be what it is in the Phaedo. We see with Plato’s eyes the interior life of the soul of Socrates.
The desirous soul, as was already said, is as yet not “fair” or “good”; that is what it would be and will be, but is not yet. But this does not mean that it is “foul” and “wicked.” There is a state intermediate between these extremes, as there is a state intermediate between sheer ignorance and completed knowledge—the state of having true beliefs without the power to give a
When the thin veil of allegory is removed, we see that what is described here is simply the experience of the division of the self characteristic of man, when once he has become aware of his own rationality. Rationality is not an endowment of which man finds himself in possession; it is an attainment incumbent on him to achieve. Spiritual manhood and freedom are the good which he must reach if he is to be happy, but they are a far-away good, and his whole life is a struggle, and a struggle with many an alternation of success and failure, to reach them. If he completely attained them, his life would become that of a god; he would have put off temporality and put on an eternity secured against all mutability. If he does not strive to attain, he falls back into the condition of the mere animal, and becomes a thing of mere change and mutability. Hence while he is what he is, he is never at peace with himself; that is the state into which he is trying to grow. It is true, in a deeper sense than the author of the saying meant, that der Mensch ist etwas das überwunden werden muss (we are only truly men in so far as we are becoming something more). (That the “temporal”
It will be seen that Socrates is formally deferring to the dictum of Agathon about the proper disposition of the parts of an encomium. He has dealt with the question what the intrinsic character of Eros is; he now proceeds to the question of his services to us (τίνα χρεαν ἔχει τοις ἀνθρώποις. What is it that, in the end, is the object of the heart’s desirous longing? Good, or—in still plainer words—happiness (εὐδαιμονία). All men wish happiness for its own sake, and all wish their happiness to be “forever.” (Weh spricht, Vergeh! Dock alle Lust will Ewigkeit.) Why, then, do we not call all men lovers, since all have this desirous longing? For the same reason that we do not call all craftsmen “makers,” though they all are makers of something. Linguistic use has restricted the use of the word ποιητής (“maker”) to one species of maker, the man who fashions verse and song. So it is with the name “lover”; all desirous longing for good or happiness is love, but in use the name “lover” is given to the person who longs earnestly after one particular species of happiness—τόκος ἐν καλῷ (“procreation in the beautiful”)—whether this procreation is physical or spiritual (καὶ κατὰ τὸ σωμα κατὰ τὴν ψυχήν, (of both the body and the soul) 206b).
To explain the point more fully, we must know that maturity of either body or mind displays itself by the desire to procreate; beauty attracts us and awakens and fosters the procreative impulse, ugliness inhibits it. And love, in the current restricted sense of the word, is not, as might be thought, desire of the beautiful object, but desire to impregnate it and have offspring by it (desire της γεννήσως καὶ τον τοκου ἐν καλῷ). (It is meant quite strictly that physical desire for the “possession” of a beautiful woman is really at bottom a “masked” desire for offspring by a physically “fine” mother; sexual appetite itself is not really craving for “the pleasures of intercourse with the other sex”; it is a passion for parenthood.) And we readily understand why this desire for procreation should be so universal and deep-seated. It is an attempt to perpetuate one’s own being “under a form of eternity,” and we have just seen that the primary desire of all is desire to possess one’s “good” and to possess it for ever. The organism cannot realise this desire in its own individuality, because it is in its very nature subject to death. But it can achieve an approximation to eternity, if the succession of generations is kept up. Hence the vehemence of the passion for procreation and the strength of the instincts connected with mating and rearing a brood in all animals. The only way in which a thing of time can approximate to being eternal is to produce a new creature to take its place as it passes away. Even within the limits of our individual existence, the body “never continues in one stay”; it is a scene of unending
The passion for physical parenthood, however, is the most rudimentary form in which the desirous longing for the fruition of good eternal and immutable shows itself, and the form in which Diotima is least interested. Her main purpose is to elucidate the conception of spiritual parenthood. If we turn to the life of the “love of honors”—note that this reference (208c) implies that in what has been said about the physical instincts we have been considering the “body-loving” life—the passion for “fame undying” which has led Alcestis, Achilles, Codrus, and many another to despise death and danger is just another, and more spiritualized, form of the “desirous longing for the eternal.” Thus, just as the man who feels the craving for physical fatherhood is attracted by womankind and becomes “xceeding amorous,” so it is with those whose souls are ripe for the procreation of spiritual issue, “wisdom and goodness generally”; the mentally, like the physically adult looks for a “fair” partner to receive and bear his offspring (209a-b). He feels the attraction of fair face and form, but what he is really seeking is the “fair and noble and highly dowered” soul behind them. If he finds what he is looking for, he freely pours forth “discourse on goodness and what manner of man the good man should be, and what conduct he should practice, and tries to educate” the chosen soul he has found. The two friends are associated in the “nurture” of the spiritual offspring to which their converse has given birth, and the tie is still more enduring than that of literal common parenthood, inasmuch as the offspring which are the pledges of it are “fairer and more deathless.” Examples of such spiritual progeny are the poems of Homer and Hesiod, and still more the salutary institutions and rules of life left to succeeding ages by Lycurgus and Solon and many another statesman of Hellas or “Barbary”; some of these men have even been deified by the gratitude of later generations (209e).
Then he must duly recognize the superiority of beauty of soul, even where there is no outward comeliness to be an index to it. He must be “in love” with young and beautiful souls and try to bring to the birth with them “fair discourses.” Next, he must learn to see beauty and comeliness as they are displayed in ἐπιτηδεύματα and νόμοι, avocations and social institutions, and perceive the community of principle which comely avocations and institutions imply. Then he must turn to “science” and its intellectual beauties, which will disclose themselves to him as a whole wide ocean of delights. Here again, he will give birth to “many a noble and imposing discourse and thought in the copious wealth of philosophy“—that is, he will enrich the“sciences” he studies with high discoveries.
The meaning of the discourse is clear enough. In the earlier stages of the “ascent” which has just been described, we recognize at once that “tendance of the soul” or care for one’s “moral being” which Plato regularly makes Socrates preach to his young friends as the great business of life. That the work of “tendance of the soul” must go further than the development of ordinary good moral habits and rules, that it demands the training of the intellect by familiarity with the highest “science,” and that the task of the true philosopher is, by his insight into principles, to unify the “sciences,” and to bring the results of ripe philosophical thinking to bear on the whole conduct of life, is the same lesson which is taught us in the Republic by the scheme propounded for the education of the philosophic statesman. As in the Republic, the study of the separate sciences leads up to the supreme science of “dialectic” or metaphysics, in which we are. confronted with the principles on which all other knowing depends, so here also Socrates describes the man who is coming in sight of his goal as descrying “one single science” of Beauty (210d 7). And in both cases, in the final moment of attainment, the soul is described as having got beyond “science” itself. Science here passes in the end into direct “contact,” or, as the schoolmen say, “vision,” an apprehension
We must not, of course, especially in view of the convertibility of the terms καλόν and agathόn which is dwelt on more than once in our dialogue, be misled into doubting the absolute identity of the “form of good” of the Republic with the αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν of the Symposium. The place assigned to both in the ascent to “being and reality” is identical, and in both cases the stress is laid on the point that when the supreme “form” is descried, its apprehension comes as a sudden “revelation” though it is not to be had without the long preliminary process of travail of thought, and that it is apprehended by “direct acquaintance” not by discursive “knowledge about” it. It is just in this conviction that all “knowledge about” is only preparatory to a direct scientia visionis that Socrates reveals the fundamental agreement of his conception with that of the great mystics of all ages. The “good” or αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν is, in fact, the ens realissimum of Christian philosophers, in which the very distinction between esse and essentia, Sein and So-sein falls away. You cannot properly predicate anything of it, because it does not “participate” in good or any other “form”; it is its own So-sein. Consequently, the apprehension of it is strictly “incommunicable” since all communication takes the form of predication. Either a man possesses it and is himself possessed by it, or he does not, and there is no more to be said. This does not mean that the “most real being” is irrational, or that by “thinking things out” we are getting further away from it, but it does mean that we cannot “rationalise” it. We cannot give its constituent “formula” so to say, as we could that of an ellipse or a cycloid. You might spend eternity in trying to describe it, and all you found to say would be true and reasonable, so far as it goes, but its full secret would still elude you; it would still be infinitely rich with undisclosed mystery. As the Christian mystics say, God may be apprehended, but cannot be comprehended by any of His creatures. That is why He is “on the other side of being.” The “deiform” do not “think about” God, they live Him. This does not mean that “myth” is something in its own nature superior to scientific truth, a misconception on which Professor Burnet has said all that is necessary. Because “vision” is direct, the content of a tale or myth cannot really convey it. A “tale” is as much a mere form of “knowing about” as a scientific description, and as a form ofknowing about it is, of course, inferior. In
The position of God in the philosophy of both seems to me ambiguous and not fully thought out. Formally, Plato’s God is described in the Laws as a perfectly good soul (ἀρίστη ψυχή). This ought to mean, as Burnet clearly holds it to mean, that God too is only half-real, and belongs on one side to the realm of the mutable. I confess that I do not see how to reconcile such a position with the religious insistence on the eternal and immutable character of God which meets us everywhere in Plato. We could not meet the difficulty by supposing that God is an imaginative symbol of the “good,” since the whole point of Plato’s Theism is, as we shall see, that it is by the agency of God that the “participation” of the creatures in the good is made possible. Thus God is not identical with the good, and it seems equally impossible to suppose that God is simply a “creature” participating in good. I can only suppose that there was a really unsolved conflict between the Platonic metaphysics and the Platonic religion. In fact, the adjustment of the two became a cardinal problem for Plotinus and the Neoplatonic succession.
Plato clearly means, in spite of Diotima’s words of caution, to present Socrates in the Symposium as a man who has in his supreme hours attained the “vision” for himself, and for that very reason impresses his fellow-men by his whole bearing as being not of their world though he is in it. We could have inferred at least that he was steadily treading the road to “unification” with the supreme reality from the close correspondence of the description of that road by Diotima with what Plato elsewhere represents as his hero’s course of life. But naturally enough, Socrates cannot be made to boast of the supreme achievement with his own lips, and this is why Alcibiades, the most brilliant living specimen of the “ambitious life,” is introduced at this point. We are to gather from his famous narrative of the impression Socrates made on him in their years of close intercourse, and the hold the recollections of those years still
For the rest, Socrates’ remarkable power of adapting himself
On the description of the scene of revelry with which the “banquet” ends, I need only make one remark. We are told (223d) that when the new morning broke, Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon were the only persons in the party who were equal to continuing the conversation, and that Socrates was left by Aristodemus trying to convince the two dramatists that the man who can compose a tragedy τέχνη, “by his art,” can also compose a comedy. Much ingenuity has been wasted on the interpretation of this remark, and it has even been supposed to be a kind of prophecy of Shakespeare’s “tragi-comedies,” which are neither tragedies, nor yet comedies in the sense in which we give that name to the brilliant personal burlesques of the Attic “old comedians.” The real meaning lies on the surface. As we have seen, Socrates dissented from the current view that poets are σοφοι and their productions works of conscious “art.” He held that they depend on “genius” or “inspiration,” and cannot themselves explain their own happiest inspirations. His point is thus that the inability of Agathon to compose comedies and of Aristophanes to write tragedies, is a proof that neither of them is a σοφος, working with conscious mastery of an “art.” Both are the instruments of a “genius” which masters them, not wielders of a tool of which they are masters. The passage should really be quoted, not as an excuse for gush about Shakespeare, but as an illustration of what Socrates says in the Apology about his attempts to “refute the oracle” by finding a σοφος among the poets and their failure. In fact, he fails here. His two auditors are half asleep after their night of merriment and “do not quite take the point” (οὐ σφόδρα ἑπομένους νυστάζειν, 223d 6).
See further:
Ritter, C. Platon, i. 504-531.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 158-168.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 163-174.
Bury, R. G. Symposium of Plato. 1909.
Robin, L. Platon, Le Banquet. (Paris, 1929.)
Lagerborg, R. Platonische Liebe. Leipzig, 1926.
Stewart, J.A. The Myths of Plato, 397-450 “The Two Symposium Myths”; “Plato’s Theory of Ideas,” Pt. II.
Stenzel, J. Platon der Erzieher, 209-241.
Chapter X. The Protagoras
If there is any Platonic dialogue which can challenge the claim of the Symposium to be its author’s dramatic chef d’oeuvre it is the Protagoras, with its brilliant full-length portrait of the famous Protagoras and its mirthful sketches of the two minor “sophists” Prodicus and Hippias. The very life-likeness of the narrative has led to grave misunderstanding of the philosophical significance of the dialogue. It has been assumed that so lively a work must be a youthful composition, and this has led to the further supposition that its teaching must be “undeveloped” as compared with that of e.g. the Gorgias. By way of providing Plato with a crude “early ethical doctrine” for the Gorgias to correct, it has then been discovered that the Protagoras teaches the Hedonism of Bentham, a misconception which makes the right understanding of its purpose wholly impossible. We shall see, as we proceed, that the dialogue does not teach Hedonism at all; what it does teach is something quite different, the Socratic thesis that “all the virtues are one thing—knowledge,” and that its philosophical purpose is simply to make it clear that this thesis is the foundation of the whole Socratic criticism of life. The absurdity of regarding the dialogue as a juvenile performance is sufficiently shown by the perfect mastery of dramatic technique which distinguishes it. No beginner, however endowed with genius, produces such a masterpiece of elaborate art without earlier experiences of trial and failure. He has first to learn the use of his tools. And it is worth noting that Aristotle must have regarded the dialogue as a particularly ripe and masterly exposition of the Socratic moral theory, since he has taken directly from it his own account in the Ethics of the characteristic doctrines of Socrates.
Prodicus and Hippias will be roughly men of Socrates’ age. The scene is laid in the house of the famous “millionaire” Callias, son of Hipponicus,
In the speech of Andocides on the Mysteries he figures as the villain of the story, the party who, according to Andocides, is instigating the prosecution in pursuance of a personal grudge, and we hear endless scandal about his domestic affairs. From Lysias xix (delivered between 390 and 387) we learn that the family capital, which had once been believed to amount to two hundred talents, had now shrunk to two. (We must take into account the economic revolution which followed on the collapse of Athens in 404.) We hear of Callias from time to time in the Hellenica of Xenophon. He was commanding the Athenian force at Corinth on the famous occasion (390 BC) when Iphicrates cut up the Spartan mora (600 men) with his peltasts (light infantry) (op. cit. iv. 5, 13), and was one of the representatives of Athens at the critical congress held at Sparta early in 371, two or three months before the battle of Leuctra. Hence the agreement then concluded between the Athenian and Peloponnesian confederacies has been generally known as the “Peace of Callias.” His important social position at Athens can be gauged from the facts that he held by heredity the position of “Torchbearer” in the Eleusinian mysteries and proxenus, or, as we might say, “Consul” for Sparta. For a proper historical appreciation of Socrates it is important to note that Plato represents him, at this early date, as associating with persons like Callias and Alcibiades, both connected with the Periclean circle, on equal terms, and being in high consideration with both them and the most eminent of the foreign “wits.”
We cannot rate too high the importance of the Protagoras as the fullest and earliest exposition of the character and aims of the sophistic “education in goodness.” Nowhere else in Greek literature have we an account of the matter comparable for a moment to that which Plato has put into the mouth of Protagoras himself. There is really no reason why we should feel any distrust of the strict “historicity” of the statements. Plato stood near enough to the Periclean age to be excellently well informed of the facts. He could form his conclusions not merely from what he might be told by men of an elder generation who had known Protagoras, or actually taken his course, but from the work or works of the distinguished sophist himself. (The silly tale of their destruction is refuted not only by the way in which it is assumed in the Theaetetus that all the parties to that conversation are familiar with
He stood far enough away from it to have no personal motive for misrepresentation of any kind, and, in point of fact, the personality and the ideas of Protagoras are treated all through the dialogue with respect and understanding, though we are made to see what his limitations are. His exposition of his programme is done with as much “gusto” as anything in the whole of Plato’s works; so much so that some worthy modern critics have even discovered that Protagoras is the real hero of the dialogue who is meant to be commended at the expense of the doctrinaire Socrates. Preposterous as this exegesis is, the fact that it has been given in good faith is the best proof that the dialogue is no satirical caricature, so far as Protagoras is concerned. He is depicted as a man of high aims and sincere belief in the value of the education he gives; his one manifest foible is that he is not conscious of his own limitations, and in that respect, according to the Apology, he is only on a level with all the other “celebrities” of the Periclean age.
If we discount the little exchange of pleasantries between Socrates and his unnamed acquaintance (309a-310c), which merely serves the purpose of dating the interview of Socrates and Protagoras by reference to the age of Alcibiades at the time, the dialogue falls into the following main sections: (1) an introductory narrative, preparatory to the appearance of Protagoras on the scene (310a-316a); (2) a statement by Protagoras of the nature of the “goodness” he professes to be able to teach, followed by a series of “sceptical doubts” urged by Socrates against the possibility of such an education, which are, in their turn, replied to by Protagoras at great length (316b-328d); (3) an argument between Socrates and Protagoras leading up to the Socratic “paradox” of the unity of the virtues, which threatens to end in an irreconcilable disagreement (328d-334c); (4) a long interlude in which the conversation resolves itself for a time into the discussion of a moralizing poem of Simonides (334c-348c); (5) resumption of the argument begun in (3), with the further developments that the one thing to which all forms of “goodness” reduce is seen to be “knowledge” and the consequence is drawn that “all wrong-doing is error” (348c-360e); (6) a brief page of conclusion in which both parties to the discussion admit the need of further inquiry and take leave of one another with many courtesies (360e-362a). This general analysis of itself shows that the central purpose of the dialogue is to exhibit clearly the ultimate ethical presuppositions of the Socratic morality and the “sophistic” morality at its best, and to show exactly where they are in irreconcilable opposition. The one serious exegetical problem we shall have to face is that of discovering the connexion of the discussion of the poem of Simonides with what precedes and follows.
Clearly then, Hippocrates is taking a great risk and taking it
We need not delay over the lively description of the scene in the house of Callias, the crowd of visitors, and the figures of those lesser lights Prodicus and Hippias. Some of the party must have been mere boys; Socrates says this, in so many words, of Agathon, and it must be as true of Charmides, who was still a mere lad in the year of Potidaea. Plato has been reprimanded for making fun of the invalidism of Prodicus, but for all we know, Prodicus may really have been a malade imaginaire at whom it is quite fair to laugh. It is interesting to note that all the speakers of the Symposium are present except Aristophanes, who would be little more than a child at the supposed date of our dialogue.
II. The Programme of Protagoras (316b-328d) As soon as Protagoras makes his appearance, Socrates, who already knows him personally, opens the business on which he has come. His young, well-born, and wealthy friend Hippocrates has political aspirations which he thinks might be furthered by studying under Protagoras. But a preliminary interview is desirable. Protagoras is of the same opinion, and is glad of the chance of explaining his aims as a teacher, since the profession is one in which a man cannot be too careful of his own reputation. Men feel a natural ill-will towards a brilliant stranger when they see the young men of promise preferring his company and instructions to those of their own most eminent countrymen. This is why all the most influential “educators” have preferred to disguise their real practice, from Homer’s time on, and have professed to be poets, physicians, musicians, anything but what they really are. Protagoras plumes himself on his own courage in taking the opposite course and frankly avowing that his calling is to “educate men.” His boldness has proved the wiser course, for in a long professional career he has escaped all serious consequences of the popular prejudice.
Socrates now repeats the question he had already put to Hippocrates; what precise benefit may be expected from study under Protagoras? The answer Protagoras gives is that a pupil who comes to him will go away daily “better than he came,” (318a. This establishes the formal equivalence of the notions of “educating men” and “teaching goodness.”) But this statement needs to be made more precise. Any master of a speciality might say as much. If you studied under Zeuxippus, you would improve—in drawing, if under Orthagoras—in flute-playing. But in what will you improve daily if you study under Protagoras? The question, says Protagoras, is rightly and fairly put, and the answer is that his pupil will daily improve, not in knowledge of astronomy or geometry (like the pupils of the polymath Hippias), but in what is the great concern of life, “prudence in the management of one’s private affairs and capacity to speak and act in the affairs of the city.” That is, Protagoras undertakes to teach us not how to be
There can be no doubt that this is the most important thing a man could teach, if it is really true that statesmanship can be taught. But Socrates feels a perplexity on the question whether statesmanship is teachable. It is hard to disbelieve in the claims of a famous man like Protagoras who has been pursuing his profession for so many years; on the other hand, there are considerations which make the other way, and Socrates now proposes to state them. We must observe that he does not undertake to prove that statesmanship cannot be taught, nor does he commit himself to any of the views he goes on to present. He merely urges that, seeing the quarter from which they come, they cannot be simply dismissed, but have to be met. The argument is one from what Aristotle calls εἰκότα, the probabilities of the case.
The Athenians have a great name for being a “clever” people, and it is not likely that an opinion held very strongly by such a people should be a mere delusion. Now the Athenian public would appear to hold that “goodness” cannot be taught. For it is singular that though they will only accept public advice on what are admittedly matters for expert knowledge from properly qualified advisers, they listen to an opinion on the statesmanship of a proposed course of action without any such regard for qualifications. They will listen, on a point of naval construction, to no one who is not known either to be an expert himself or to have studied under experts. But when the issue is one of statesmanship—that is, one of the goodness or badness, the rightfulness or wrongfulness, of a proposed public act—they treat any one man’s opinion as equally deserving of a hearing with another’s; they make no demand here that a man shall be an approved “expert” or have learned from one.
And this is not merely the attitude of the “general”; the individuals who are regarded as our wisest and best statesmen show by their conduct that they hold the same view. They neither teach their own “goodness” to their sons nor procure masters of it for them, but leave it to chance whether the young men will pick up this goodness for themselves. The example selected, in this instance, is that of Pericles. Thus Socrates argues the case by appealing, in Aristotelian fashion, first to the opinion of the “many” and then to that of the “wise” the acknowledged experts. It is not likely that a very widespread conviction should be merely baseless; it is not likely that the convictions of “experts” should be merely baseless; it is still less likely that both parties should be victims of the same delusion. The point is raised simply as a difficulty; Socrates is quite ready to listen to a proof from Protagoras that, after all, both parties are wrong. The question is thus
In dealing with the reply of Protagoras, we must be careful to remember that his case is not established by the mere fact that there is a great deal of truth in what he says, so far as it goes. What is required is that he should make out sufficient justification for his claim to be able to teach statesmanship as a speciality, exactly as another man might teach geometry or medicine. If we keep this point carefully in view, it will be found that, though what Protagoras says is true enough, as a vindication of his own claim it is a complete ignoratio elenchi.
>He begins by indicating his position by means of a fable about the culture-hero Prometheus. At the making of living creatures, Epimetheus was charged with the work of distributing the various means of success in the “struggle for existence” among them; Prometheus was to act as supervisor and critic. Epimetheus managed the distribution so badly that when he came to deal with mankind, the various serviceable qualities had already been used up on the lower animals; none were left for man, who would thus have been helpless and defenseless if Prometheus had not stolen from heaven fire and the knowledge of industrial arts. (In plainer words, man is not equipped for self-preservation by a system of elaborate congenital instincts, and he is handicapped also by physical inferiority: he has to depend for survival on intelligence.) In the “state of nature,” however, intelligence and the possession of fire were not enough to secure men against their animal competitors; they had further to associate themselves in “cities,” and this gave occasion for all kinds of aggression on one another. (One may compare Rousseau’s speculations about the opportunity given by the social impulses of mankind to the exploitation of the many by the able and unscrupulous few.) Hence Zeus intervened to preserve the human race by sending Hermes to bestow on them δίκη and αἰδώς, the sense of right and conscience. But Zeus expressly commanded that these gifts were not to be confined, like e.g. skill in medicine, to a few specialists; they were to be distributed to every one, since “political association” is impossible on any other terms (322d). Hence the behavior of the Athenian ecclesia, which has surprised Socrates, is reasonable and right. “Political goodness” is wholly a matter of justice and “temperance” and no member of the community is a layman or outsider where justice and temperance are concerned; every “citizen,” in fact, is an expert in the virtues. This is also why we expect a man who is a layman in other accomplishments to confess the fact, and ridicule him if he pretends to an accomplishment which he does not possess. But when it comes to “justice,” or “temperance,” or any other “goodness of a citizen,“ we expect a man to pretend to it, even if he does not possess it; hypocrisy is a tribute we expect vice to
The little fable about Prometheus has already revealed Protagoras to us as a strong believer in the view that morality is dependent on νόμος, the system of conventions and traditions embodied in the “usages” of a civilized community. As we follow his explanation we shall find him laying still more stress on this point. Like Hobbes, he holds that in a “state of nature” there would be no morality to speak of, and the lack of it would make human life “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” He declares himself strongly opposed to the view of some of his rivals, that “citizen goodness” is a thing that comes by “nature” in other words, that men are born good or bad. He is wholly without any belief in the moral goodness of the unspoiled “savage” and, in fact, looks on morality as a product of civilization, a matter of imbibing a sound social tradition. Such a view would seem to suggest that, since, as we have just been told, every civilized man has to be a “specialist” in justice and temperance, there is no room and no need for the expert teacher of goodness, a conclusion which would make Protagoras’ own professional activities superfluous. Hence he goes on, at once, to explain that he does not mean to deny that goodness can be taught or that there are expert teachers of it. You do not imbibe it unconsciously; it is a thing which comes by teaching and training (323d). His position is that, in a civilized society, life is one long process of being taught goodness, and every citizen is, in his degree, an expert teacher. But there are a few exceptionally able teachers with a special vocation for their function, who do what every good citizen is doing, but do it better, and Protagoras himself is simply one of these.
In support of this view he makes an eloquent and telling speech on the educational process to which the civilized man is all through life subjected, as a consequence of the very fact that he is a member
The reply to Socrates’ doubts looks plausible, and has apparently traversed all the points of his case. But the plausibility is, after all, only apparent. If we look more closely, we shall see that the
Hence it follows that there is a certain inconsistency between Protagoras’ main position and the vindication of his profession with which he concludes his speech. To make the whole speech consistent, we should have to understand him to be claiming for himself a certain exceptional ability in catching the tone of the “social tradition” of Athens, or any other community he visits, and communicating that tone to his pupils. Now it would, in the first place, be something of a paradox to maintain that a brilliant foreigner from Abdera can so successfully take the print of the social traditions of every community where he spends a few weeks, that a lecture from him will impress that tone on a young man more effectively than lifelong intercourse with a society in which it is dominant. It would be bad manners, at least, for a brilliant Frenchman or American to profess that a few weeks spent in this country had enabled him to understand the “tone and temper of
III. The Unity of the “Virtues” (328d-334c) There is just one “little” point Socrates would like to have cleared up, before he can profess himself completely satisfied. Protagoras had specified two qualities as bestowed on mankind by Zeus—the sense of right (δίκη), and conscience (αἰδώς); he had gone on to mention piety and sophrosyne also as constituents of “goodness.” Does he mean that “goodness” is an aggregate of which these characters are distinct constituents (μόρια), or are we to understand that “conscience,” “sense of right,” “sophrosyne,” “piety,” are synonymous? He meant to be understood in the former sense. But did he mean that the constituents are constituents in the way in which eyes, nose, and ears are constituents of a face, or in the sense in which the smaller volumes contained in a homogeneous mass (like a lump of gold) are constituents? i.e. have the different “virtues” each its own constitutive formula, or is there only one such formula? The question is one on which a practical teacher of goodness is bound to have a definite opinion, because it has a very direct bearing on his educational methods. On the first view, a man might “specialize” in one virtue (for example, courage), while his neighbor might prefer to specialize in some other, just as one man may specialize in diseases of the respiratory organs and another in disorders of the digestive system, or as one man may become a crack oarsman, another a fast bowler. (Or again, a man might set himself to acquire “goodness” by specializing first in one of its “parts” or “branches” and then in another, like Benjamin Franklin.) But on the second view, the principle of goodness will be exactly the same in whatever relation of life it is displayed. A
Protagoras at once adopts the first alternative, that which recommends itself to average common sense. For he thinks it obvious that there are many brave but licentious men, and many “fair-dealing” men (δίκαιοι), who are far from “wise.” (Note the way in which the “quadrilateral” of the four great virtues is thus taken for granted by Protagoras, as by other speakers in Plato, as something already traditional.)
A view of this kind implies that each form of “goodness” has a function (δύναμις) of its own, distinctive of it, and radically different from the function of any other form. (We have already seen that this view, widely current in ordinary society, is in sharp opposition to the Socratic theory, in which the great difficulty of defining a given “virtue” is that we regularly find ourselves driven to adopt a definition which is equally applicable to every other virtue.) We proceed to treat this position in the recognized Socratic fashion by examining its consequences. It will follow that “justice,” to take an example, has a definite function, “piety” or “religion” another and a different function. Justice is not piety, and religion is not justice. But we cannot adopt the monstrous moral paradox that justice is impious, or that religion is “unjust,” or wrong, though this would seem to follow from the complete disparity between the “functions” of the different virtues just asserted by Protagoras.
Hence Protagoras himself is driven to take back what he had just said about the radical disparity of the different forms of goodness. The matter is, after all, not so simple as all that; there is some vague and unspecified resemblance between such different “parts” of goodness as piety and justice, though we cannot say exactly what or how close the resemblance is (331e). The reference to the scale of colours or hardnesses as illustrating the point (331d) shows that the meaning is that one virtue somehow “shades off” into a different one, though you cannot say exactly where the boundary-line should be drawn, as white shades off into black through a series of intermediate grays.
To expose the looseness of this way of thinking and speaking. Socrates resorts to another simple argument. Wisdom has been included by Protagoras in his list of forms of goodness, and the contrary opposite of wisdom is ἀφροσύνη (aphrosynê = “folly”). But sophrosyne
(The reasoning here appears at first sight to turn on a mere “accident” of language, the fact that profligacy happens to be spoken of in Greek as “folly.” When we reflect on the familiarity of the corresponding expressions in all languages which have an ethical literature, we should rather infer that the fact is no accident, but valuable evidence of the truth of the main tenet of Socratic morality. The thought underlying the linguistic usage is clearly that all morally wrong action is the pursuit of something which is not what rightly informed intelligence would pronounce good, and it is always wise to pursue what is truly good and foolish to prefer anything else.)
The next step in the argument is this. We have seen ground for identifying justice with piety and wisdom with temperance or moral sanity. This leaves us, so far, with two great types of “goodness,” justice, regard for right, and moral sanity. But may we not further identify these two? Can we really say of any act that it is “unjust,” a violation of some one’s rights, and yet that it is “morally sane” (σωφρον) or “temperate”? As a man of high character, Protagoras says that he personally would be ashamed to make such an assertion, but he knows that the “many” would make it. We may therefore examine the assertion simply as a piece of the current ethics of respectability, to see what it is worth (333b-c).
We must be careful, then, to bear in mind that, from
In fact, it is proverbial that profligacy is a vice of youth and hot blood, avarice and ambition vices of “cold” later age, and the “old young man” (like Joseph Surface) has always been specially unpopular with the ordinary satirist, who is commonly indulgent to the “rake,” unless he happens to be an elderly rake. Socrates’ conviction, like that of Dante, who punishes the prodigal and the miser in the same circle, is that Charles Surface and Joseph are brothers in the spirit, no less than in the flesh; the antithesis of the Sheridans and Macaulays between the “generous” and the “mean” vices, is a false one; there are no “generous vices,” and no “milksop” virtues.
Formally, the argument is not allowed to reach a conclusion; Protagoras, finding his case hard to defend, tries to take refuge in irrelevancy by diverting attention to the theory of the “relativity” of good. Socrates has started with the linguistic identification of “temperance” with moral sanity. The man who behaves with moral sanity is the εὐ βουλευόμενος, the man who acts “with good counsel.” Hence if a man can in the same act be both temperate and unjust, it must be possible to act with good counsel in violating a“right.” But a man only shows himself to be acting with good counsel when he “succeeds” or “does well” by disregarding that right. Socrates is thus taking advantage of the ambiguity of the expression εὐ ωράττειν, which may either mean “to act well,” or simply to “succeed in doing what you are proposing to do.” How he would have continued the argument is indicated by his next question, “Do you recognize the existence of goods?” He means, having got the admission that injustice is only “well-advised” when it is successful injustice, to argue that no injustice really does vsucceed” in procuring the aggressor on another man’s rights what he is really aiming at getting, real good or well-being; it is always unsuccessful because it always involves sacrificing the good of the soul to something inferior (the thesis of the Gorgias and of the closing pages of Republic i.). But the moment he shows his hand by
IV. Interlude. The Poem of Simonides (334c-348a) At this point the conversation threatens to end in a general confusion, and the interrupted argument is only resumed after a long and apparently irrelevant episode. The main reason for the introduction of the episode has already been explained. The argument for the Socratic “paradoxes” makes a severe demand on the reader’s power of hard thinking, and the most difficult part of it is yet to come. The strain of attention therefore requires to be relaxed, if we are to follow Socrates to his conclusion with full understanding. Plato also wants an opportunity to produce two striking dramatic effects. He wishes to contrast the manner of the “sophist,” who is highly plausible so long as he has the argument to himself, but gets into difficulty the moment he is confronted by close criticism with the manner of Socrates, who cares nothing for eloquent plausibility and everything for careful and exact thinking. And he wants to provide a part in the drama for the secondary characters, Prodicus and Hippias; they will get no chance of a “speaking part” while Protagoras and Socrates occupy the center of the stage. Hence I think we should take the whole of this long interlude as intended mainly to be humorous “relief,” a gay picture of the manners of cultivated Athenian society in the later years of the Periclean age, and not much more.
The fun opens with the humorous pretense of Socrates that, in
Unfortunately the poem (Fr. 3 in the Anthology of Hiller Crusius, 12 of Schneidewin) has to be reconstructed from the Protagoras itself, and the reconstruction can be neither complete nor certain, so that we are not entitled to speak with too much confidence about the precise drift of the poet. The general sense, appropriate enough in an encomium of a half-barbaric Thessalian chief, seems to be that it is idle to expect complete and all-round “goodness” in any man; there are difficult situations out of which no human goodness comes with credit. We must be content to call a man “good,” if his general conduct shows regard for right (δίκα), if he never misbehaves without highly extenuating circumstances; absolute superiority to circumstance can only be expected in a god. The impression one gets is that one is reading a paid panegyric on a magnate against whom there is the memory of some shocking deed or deeds which the eulogist wishes to excuse or palliate by the “tyrant’s plea, necessity.”
The point on which Protagoras fastens is this. Simonides takes occasion to comment unfavourably on the saying commonly ascribed to Pittacus that “it is hard to be good” (χαλεωὸν ἐσθλὸν ἔμμεναι). But he has just said the very same thing himself in almost the Same words (ἄνδρ̉ ἀγαθὸν μὲν ἀλαθέως γενέσθαι χαλεωὸν). He has thus committed the absurdity of censuring Pittacus for the very sentiment he has just uttered as his own (339d).
Socrates now seizes the opportunity to defend the poet by the aid of Prodicus and his famous art of discriminating between words. The point, he says, is that whereas Pittacus had said that it is hard
(So far, it is clear that the whole tone of the passage about Simonides is playful. Plato is laughing, as he often does, at the fifth-century fashion of trying to extract moral principles from the remarks of poets, especially of poets with a reputation, like Simonides, for worldly wisdom and a shrewd regard for the interests of “number one.” The mock-respectful discussion of another dictum of the same poet in Republic i. is couched in exactly the same tone. The solemn pedantry of Prodicus is a second subject of mockery. But the main stroke is aimed at the superficiality of Protagoras. With all his eloquence about the value of a critical study of “literature,” his ideal of criticism is to fasten on the first and most obvious weak point, and make an end of the matter. He has shown his cleverness by catching Simonides in a verbal contradiction; he does not see the need of an attempt to understand the drift of his poem as a whole, or to consider whether the apparent contradiction will vanish when taken in the light of the general context. We are all only too familiar with this sort of “criticism,” which aims at nothing more than the commendation or censure of individual phrases, while it lets “the whole” go unregarded.)
Socrates now undertakes to propound an interpretation which will pay due regard to the meaning of the whole poem (342a). He introduces it by some general observations, the tone of which ought seven sages
—the list of them given in this passage is the earliest extant—were all trained in this school, and Pittacus was one of them. Hence his saying “it is hard to be good” was much admired as a piece of this sententious “philosophy” and Simonides, being an ambitious man, wished to win a great reputation by refuting it. This is the object of his whole poem (342a-343c).
(It ought not to have to be said that this whole representation of Sparta and Crete, the least “intellectual” communities of Hellas, and the two which Socrates himself takes as his models in Republic viii. in describing the State which has made the mistake of “neglecting education,” is furious fun. Socrates is diverting himself by his whimsical suggestions that the “laconizing” fashionables of other cities, who affect the dress and appearance of prizefighters, are all the while imitating the wrong thing, the pretence under which the Spartans disguise their real interests, and that the “superiority of Sparta” is really based not on military prowess and success but on intellectual eminence. And if the explanation which introduces the exposition of the poem of Simonides is thus sheer fun, we are bound in common sense to expect that the exposition will turn out to be mainly fun too.)
We are now given the professed exegesis of the poem, which is only arrived at by a series of violences done to its language. Simonides must be understood as correcting the saying “it is hard to be good” by saying “no, the truly hard thing is not to be, but to become a thoroughly good man, though this is possible. To be permanently good is not hard, but absolutely impossible for a man; it is only possible to a god.” A man, as Simonides goes on to say, cannot help proving “bad” when he is “struck down” by irretrievable misfortunes. Now no one who is already down can be struck down. Hence Simonides must mean by a “man,” an “expert,” a wise and good man, and his meaning is shown by the fact that he goes on to say that a man is “good” as long as he “does well” (πράξας μὲν γὰρ εὐ πας ἀνὴρ ἀγαθός). For the man who “does well,” or “succeeds” in anything is the man who knows how the thing ought to be done, the man who “does ill” is always the man whose knowledge fails him. Simonides is thus made, by an arbitrary exegesis, to bear witness to the Socratic doctrine that “goodness” and knowledge are the same (345b). His meaning is that it is hard to become good but impossible for
The rest of the poem develops the same thought. In particular, when the poet says that he will “praise and love the man who does no deed of shame willingly” (ἑκών ὅστις ἕρδη μηδὲν αἰσχρόν) we are not to take his words in what seems their natural grammatical sense. The “cultured“” Simonides must be supposed to know that it is a vulgar error to suppose that anyone would do evil voluntarily. Hence the ἑκών (of one’s own free will) must be taken by an extravagant hyperbaton with the words which precede it, so that the sense is, “I readily praise and love the man who does no deeds of shame” (though my profession sometimes unfortunately requires me to pay constrained compliments to “tyrants” who have committed crimes).
Though there have been commentators who have taken Socrates’ exposition of the poem as perfectly serious, the blunder ought to be impossible to any man with a sense of humor or of the necessity of maintaining a dramatic unity of spirit throughout a scene. We have been prepared for the discussion of the verses by an introductory homily on the devotion of Sparta to “culture” which is manifestly the merest playful humor; we are fairly entitled to suspect Socrates whenever we find him pretending to discover deep philosophic truth in the compositions of any “poet,” and particularly in those of the poet who had become a byword for his adroit and profitable flatteries of “the great”; his purpose should be made unmistakable by the forced character of the verbal constructions he is driven to advocate. Clearly we are dealing with an amusing “skit” on the current methods of extracting any doctrine one pleases from a poet by devices which can make anything mean anything. Socrates is amusing himself by showing that, if he chooses to play at the game, he can beat the recognized champions, just as in the Parmenides Plato amuses himself by showing that he can, if he likes, outdo the constructors of “antinomies” in the use of their own weapons. The one thing in the whole of the “lecture” on the verses of Simonides which is not playful is Socrates’ insistence on the doctrine that wrongdoing is error, and is therefore not “voluntary.” Here he is in intense earnest, but the device by which he extracts the doctrine from the text of Simonides by an impossible “punctuation” is itself merely playful, just as his suggestion that what he well knew to be the “paradox” of his own theory is so universally admitted by all thinking men that it is incredible Simonides should not accept it, is equally playful. He knows that the very proposition he represents as too well known to be ignored by Simonides will be rejected as an extravagance by his audience when he conies shortly to defend it. His object in getting it into the otherwise whimsical exposition of Simonides is simply to bring back the discussion to the original issues from which it has been allowed to diverge, and he has the natural delight of a humorist in clothing his thesis in
V. The Main Argument Resumed.—The Identity of Goodness with Knowledge, and its Consequences (348c-360e). Now that Socrates has succeeded in bringing back the conversation to the point where it had been broken off, he carefully restates the question, with a polite assurance that he is not talking for victory but honestly asking the help of Protagoras towards the clarification of his own thought. The question is whether the names of the great virtues are different names for one and the same thing (349b), or whether to each of these names there answers “a peculiar reality or object with its own special function” (ἴδιος οὐσία καί πραγμα ἔχον ἑαυτου δύναμιν, where note that the word οὐσία, exactly as in the Euthyphro, implies the whole of the “doctrine of forms” expounded in the Phaedo). Protagoras has been so far impressed by the former arguments of Socrates that he now restates his original opinion with a large modification. He admits that most of the “parts of goodness” are “fairly like one another,” but holds that ἀνδρεία, valour, courage, has a distinct character of its own. This is a matter of everyday observation, for it is a manifest fact that many men are singularly brave, but have no other virtuous quality; they have no regard for rights, no religion, no command over their passions, no prudence. (The view is a familiar one; it is habitually adopted, for example, in the character-sketches of a work like Macaulay’s History. It implies, of course, that its supporters identify ἀνδρεία with with the “popular” courage which the Phaedo pronounces to be a counterfeit of true valiancy, mere hardihood in the face of perils.) The first point which has to be made against this position is that it rests on the false conversion of a true proposition. It amounts to identifying “the valiant” with the “confident” or “fearless” (θαρράλεοι). Now it is true that all brave men are fearless, but it is not true that all the “confident” or “fearless” are truly brave, and the two classes, therefore, cannot be identified. In the absence of a logical terminology, this point has to be made by examples. Men who have learned a “dangerous” accomplishment, such as diving, fighting in the cavalry, or the like, will be “fearless” in facing the risks they have learned to deal with, as we also call them “brave” divers or fighters But persons who have never learned to dive or to manage a horse will also sometimes be reckless in throwing themselves into the water or plunging into a charge. But this, Protagoras
Thus the question whether valour can be shown, as Protagoras now admits that the other leading forms of “goodness” can be, to be knowledge, requires us to raise still more fundamental questions. We admit that one may live well or live ill, and that the man who lives a life of pain and misery is not living well, but the man who lives a pleasant life is. May we say then that the pleasant life is the good life, the unpleasant life the bad? Protagoras wishes to stipulate that the pleasure must be “pleasure in fine, or noble, things” (τοις καλοις, 351c), thus anticipating Mill’s “distinction of qualities” of pleasure. But might we not say that things are good just in so far as they are pleasant, and bad in so far as they are unpleasant, so that good and pleasant are synonyms? Protagoras thinks it due to his character to maintain that this is not true; there are bad pleasures and good pains, and there are both pleasures and pains which are neither good nor bad. But he is willing to treat the suggestion, in the Socratic manner,
(It is very important, then, to remark that the Hedonist identification of good with pleasant comes into the conversation, in the first instance, as problematic; it is to be adopted or rejected according as its implications approve themselves or do not.) And the question about the relation between pleasure
But, since most men think otherwise, we, who dissent from them, must give a correct analysis of the facts they have in mind when they talk of a man’s judgment as “overcome” by pleasure or pain, and satisfy them that the popular analysis of these facts is inaccurate (353a). We might, in fact, ask the mass of men, who profess to believe that a man can be seduced by the prospect of pleasure or frightened by that of pain into doing, against his better knowledge, what he recognizes to be evil, the following questions: (a) When you talk of something as pleasant but evil, do you not mean simply that the pleasant thing in question leads to painful consequences, and when you call some things good but unpleasant, do you not mean that, though unpleasant for the time being, they lead to pleasurable consequences? “The many” would readily admit this, and thus would (b) commit themselves to the view that good and evil are identical with pleasant and painful. In fact (c) they would admit that the end they always pursue is getting the “greatest possible balance of pleasure over pain” (354c-e). It follows at once that, on the showing of the “many” themselves, the experience which they call “being overcome by pleasure or by pain” is really making a false estimate of pleasures and pains. To be “overcome” means “to take a greater amount of evil in exchange for a smaller amount of good” (356e), and on the hypothesis we are examining, “good” means “pleasure” and “evil” means “pain.” Errors of conduct are thus on the same level as false estimates of number, size, and weight. Now we are preserved from mistakes about number, size, weight, by the arts or sciences (τέχναι) of counting, measuring, and weighing. In the same way we need to be preserved from false estimates in moral choice by a similar art of estimating the relative magnitudes of “lots” of prospective goods and evils, that is to say, prospective pleasures and pains, in fact by an “hedonic calculus,” which will terminate disputes. And a “calculus,” of course, is “knowledge,” or “science.” An argument of this kind ought to reconcile the “many” themselves to the view that
It is on this section of the dialogue that the notion of a Platonic “Hedonism” has been erected, with the consequence that one of two equally impossible inferences has to be made, either that there is no consistent ethical doctrine to be found in the dialogues—Plato allows himself at pleasure to argue for or against any view which interests him for the moment (the theory of Grote—or that the Protagoras expresses an “early theory” which is afterward abandoned when we come to the Gorgias and Phaedo. Careful reading will show that neither of these conceptions is justified. Neither Protagoras nor Socrates is represented as adopting the Hedonist equation of good with pleasure. The thesis which Socrates is committed to is simply that of the identity of goodness and knowledge. The further identification of good with pleasure is carefully treated, as we have seen, as one neither to be affirmed nor denied. We are concerned solely with investigating its consequences. One of these consequences would be that what is commonly called “yielding to passion against our better knowledge” is a form of intellectual error and is involuntary, since it means choosing a smaller “lot of pleasure” when you might choose a greater. (These consequences are, in fact, habitually drawn by Hedonists.) Hedonism thus is in accord with the doctrines of Socrates on one point, its reduction of wrong choice to involuntary error, and for that reason Socrates says that you can make the apparent paradoxes of his ethics acceptable to mankind at large, if you also adopt the Hedonist equation, good = pleasure. (The “many,” in fact, do in practice accept this equation, because they are votaries of some form of the βίος φιλοχρήματος.) It does not follow that because Socrates agrees with vulgar Hedonism on the point that wrong choice is involuntary error and arises from lack of knowledge of good, that he identifies knowledge of good, as the Hedonist does, with calculation of the sizes of “lots” of pleasure and pain. All he wants to show is that even from the point of view of the persons who mistake “popular goodness” for genuine goodness, it is no paradox to say that goodness is knowledge of some sort; the Hedonist is a “rationalist” in his ethics, though his “rationalism” may not be of the right kind. That this is all that is meant is clear from the way in which Socrates is careful to insist over and over again that the appeal is being made to the standards of “the mass of mankind.” We must also not forget that the appeal to the unconscious Hedonism of the average man is being made for a further special purpose. The object of convincing the average man that, on his own assumptions, goodness is a matter of right calculation, is to prepare the way for the further proof that, even on these assumptions, courage can be brought under the same principle as all the rest of “goodness.” When we thus take the argument in its proper context, we see that the Protagoras no more teaches
To come to the application to the problem about ἀνδρεία. What is it that the courageous face, but the cowardly refuse to face? The current answer is that it is “dangers” (τὰ δεινά). But “danger” means an anticipated evil, and we have just seen that even the average man, when he comes to theorize about his own practice, holds that no one “goes to face” what he believes to be evil for him. The very fact that he chooses to face the situation shows that he regards it as the “lesser evil” to do so. The real reason, then, why some men face the risks of war but others run away, must be that the former judge that more good, which to them means more pleasure, is to be got by standing your ground than by running away; the latter think that they will get more good, and again they mean more pleasure, by running. If we praise the one and condemn the others, we are praising a true (and also condemning a false) calculation about the “balance of pleasure over pain” The brave man of everyday life faces the present pain and peril because he has correctly calculated that endurance of it will lead to a greater balance of pleasure than flinching. Thus even the unconscious theory of the average man at bottom implies the view that courage is a matter of knowing what is and what is not formidable (σοφία των δεινων ιαὶ μὴ δεινων, 360c). This is, in fact, exactly what Socrates says about “popular” courage in the Phaedo. (That what the “many” suppose to be knowledge of the good—namely, knowledge of the hedonic consequences of your act—is something very different from what Socrates means by knowledge of the good is true, but irrelevant to the present argument, which only aims at showing that, even if you adopt the working morality of the average man, courage stands on the same footing as the other “virtues.” From his standpoint, it resolves itself, like the rest, into calculation of hedonic consequences; from Socrates’ standpoint, it and all the rest issue from knowledge of the true and eternal good.)
VI. Epilogue Our discourse has, after all, only ended by bringing us in face of the really fundamental problem, what true “goodness” is (360c). (This remark, again, shows that Socrates is not represented as accepting the Hedonism which he finds to be the unconscious assumption of the average man. We have seen clearly enough what “goodness” is, on that theory.) In fact, we have ended by exchanging positions in a very entertaining fashion. Protagoras, who began by being sure that goodness can be taught
Of course, the apparent paradox of which Socrates speaks can be very simply explained. What he doubted was whether the sort of “goodness” of which the public men of Athens are examples can be taught. Since this “goodness” is just another name for “tactful management” of affairs, it obviously cannot be “taught.” A man has to acquire tact by the handling of affairs and men for himself; you cannot teach the theory of it. But political tact is something very different from anything Socrates understood by goodness. There is thus no real confusion or shifting of ground, so far as he is concerned. Protagoras is in a different position. By his own showing, the “goodness” he aims at teaching is just the secret of political success, and political success really does depend on a “tact” which cannot be taught. Hence Protagoras really does combine incompatible positions when he asserts both that “goodness” is not knowledge, and also that it can be taught. If by “goodness” we mean what Protagoras defined as “success in managing the affairs of your household and city,” he is right in maintaining that goodness is not knowledge, but clearly wrong in holding that it is an “art” which he can teach.
See further:
Ritter, C. Platon, i. 308-342.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 106-111.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 10-18.
Gomperz, Th. Griechische Denker, i. 250-264.
Stewart, J. A. The Myths of Plato, 212-258, “The Protagoras Myth,”
Dittmar, H. Aeschines von Sphettus, 186-212 (on Aeschines’ dialogue Callias, where, however, the author’s chronology of the life of Callias is wrong. Callias had two sons, both in at least their later ’teens in 399. Apology, 20a-c.)
The Republic is at once too long a work, and too well known by numerous excellent summaries and commentaries, to require or permit analysis on the scale we have found necessary in dealing with the Phaedo or Protagoras. We must be content to presume the student’s acquaintance with its contents, and to offer some general considerations of the relation of its main theses to one another and to those of dialogues already examined.
To begin with, it is desirable to have a definite conception of the assumed date of the conversation and the character of the historical background presupposed. It should be clear that Athens is supposed to be still, to all appearance at any rate, at the height of her imperial splendour and strength.
All these considerations, taken together, suggest that the supposed date of the conversation must be about the time of the
There is nothing in the dialogue to support any of the fanciful modern speculations about a possible “earlier edition” without the central books which discuss the character and education of the “philosopher-kings” or the possible existence of the first book by itself as a “dialogue of search.” On the contrary, the appearances are all in favour of regarding the whole as having been planned as a whole. It is not until we come to the sixth book that we are in sight of the “goodness” which is one and the same thing with knowledge; the goodness of the “guardians” of Republic ii-iv has been carefully marked as remaining all along at the level of “opinion.” It rises no higher than loyalty to a sound national tradition taken on trust, and is thus so far on a level with the “popular” goodness of the Phaedo, though the tradition in this case is that of a morally sounder society than that of Athens, or of any existing Greek πόλις.
“There is no distinction, except one of convenience, between morals and politics. The laws of right are the same for classes and cities as for individual men. But one must add that these laws are primarily laws of personal morality; politics is founded on ethics, not ethics on politics.”
The fundamental issue is raised in the introductory book with great artistic skill. From the simple observations of old Cephalus about the tranquility with which a man conscious of no undischarged obligations can look forward to whatever the unseen world may have to bring, Socrates takes the opportunity to raise the question what δικαιοσύνη, taken in the sense of the supreme rule of right—“morality” as we might say—is. What is the rule by which a man should order the whole of his life? Before we can embark on the question seriously, we need to be satisfied that it is not already answered for us by the ordinary current moral maxims of the decent man; that there really is a problem to be solved. Next we have to see that the theories in vogue among the superficially “enlightened,” which pretend to answer the question in a revolutionary way, are hopelessly incoherent. Only when we have seen that neither current convention nor current anti-conventionalism has any solution of the problem are we in a position to raise it and answer it by the true method. Thus there are three points of view to be considered: that of the unphilosophical decent representative of current convention, sustained by Cephalus and his son Polemarchus; that of the “new morality,” represented by Thrasymachus; and that of sober philosophical thinking, represented by Socrates.
As to the first point of view, that of decent acquiescence in a respectable convention which has never been criticised, we note, and this may serve as a corrective to exaggerations about the extent to which “the Greeks” identified morality with the νόμος of a “city,” that Plato has deliberately chosen as the exponent of moral convention a representative who, as a μέτοικος, naturally makes no appeal to the “city” and its usages; the rule of Cephalus is specially characteristic not of a πόλις but of a profession, and a profession which in all ages has enjoyed the reputation of sound and homely rectitude. The old man’s morality is just that which is characteristic of the honorable merchant of all places. “Right” according to him, means “giving to every man his own, and speaking the truth,” i.e. a man is to honor his business obligations and his word is to “be as good as his bond”; the man who acts thus has discharged the whole duty of man. The point of the conversation
Against Polemarchus, who thinks that morality can be reduced to “giving every one his duev in the sense of being a thoroughly valuable friend to your friends and a dangerous enemy to your foes (a working morality expressed in the “gnomic” verses of Solon and Theognis), it has to be shown that to make such a principle of conduct acceptable to a decent man’s conscience, we must at least take our “friends” and “foes” to mean “the good” and “the bad” respectively, and that, even then, the principle is condemned by the fact that it makes it one half of morality to “do evil” to some one. The argument equally disposes incidentally of the “sophistic” conception of “goodness” as a kind of special accomplishment by showing: (1) that in any definite situation in life, the “accomplishment” needed to confer the benefit demanded by that situation is some kind of skill other than “goodness”; and (2) that all these accomplishments can be put to a morally bad, as well as to a morally good, use. Virtue, for example, will not make a man the best of all advisers about an investment, and the knowledge which does make a man a good counsellor on such a matter also makes him a very dangerous adviser, if he chooses to use it for a fraudulent end. This prepares us to discover later on that though “goodness” in the end is knowledge and nothing but knowledge, it is something quite different from the “arts” or “accomplishments” with which the professional “teachers of goodness” confound it.
When we come to the anti-conventional “immoralism” of the “enlightenment” it is important to remark that Thrasymachus is made to overstate the position; as Glaucon says, at the opening of the second book, he has bungled the case. (As we know of no reason why Plato should misrepresent a prominent man of the preceding generation, the violence and exaggeration is presumably a genuine characteristic of the actual Thrasymachus, and it is used
The fact is that Thrasymachus, like Mr. Shaw or Mr. Chesterton, has the journalist’s trick of facile exaggeration. He is too good a journalist to be an esprit juste, and the consequence is that he lands himself in a dilemma. If his “sovereign” who has a view only to the interests of “number one” is meant to be an actual person or body of persons, it is obvious, as Socrates says, that he is not infallible. It is not true that the moral code and the institutions of any society are simply adapted to gratify the personal desires of the sovereign who, according to Thrasymachus, devises them, or to further his interests; judged by that standard, every existing set of νόμοι is full of blunders.
“Socrates is guided by the Pythagorean analogy between tuned string,
healthy body and healthy mind, which is the key to
half the best thought of the Greek moralists.”
On the argument by which Socrates meets the strictly ethical assertion that “conventional” morality is a mere expression of the low intelligence and weakness of the “herd,” all I wish to remark here is that he is guided throughout by the Pythagorean analogy between tuned string, healthy body and healthy mind, which is the key to half the best thought of the Greek moralists. The immoralist’s case is really disposed of in principle by the often misunderstood argument about πλεονεξία (avarice) (Republic i. 349b-350c). The reasoning already contains in germ the whole doctrine of the “right mean” afterward developed in the Philebus and the Ethics of Aristotle. The point is that in all applications of intelligence to the conduct of activity of any kind, the supreme wisdom is to know just where to stop, and to stop just there and nowhere else.
With the opening of the second book, we are introduced to the genuine version of the immoralist doctrine of which Thrasymachus had given a mere exaggeration, the theory that regard for moral rules is a pis aller {last resort}, though one which is unfortunately unavoidable by ordinary humanity. The theory is often referred to as that of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but it should be noted that Adeimantus takes no part in the statement of the theory and that Glaucon, who does explain it fully, is careful to dissociate himself from it; it is given as a speculation widely current in educated circles of the time of the Archidamian war and supported by specious though, as Glaucon holds, unsound arguments. His own position is simply that of an advocate speaking from his brief. He undertakes to make an effective defense of the case which Thrasymachus had mismanaged, in order that it may really be disproved, not merely dismissed without thorough examination of its real merits. The important feature of his argument is not so much the well-known statement of the “social contract” theory of the origin of moral codes as the analysis of existing morality to which the historical speculation is meant to lead up. The point is that “men practice the rules of right not because they choose, but because they cannot help themselves.” At heart everyone is set simply on gratifying his own passions, but you will best succeed in doing this by having the fear of your fellow-men before your eyes and abstaining from aggression on them. If you get the chance to gratify your passions without moral scruples, and can be sure not to be found out and made to suffer, you would be a fool not to benefit by your opportunity. This is the point of the imaginative fiction about the “ring of Gyges.” {A magical ring that conferred invisibility.} The real fact which gives the sting to the fiction is simply that we all know that there is no human virtue which would not be deteriorated by confidence of immunity from
The contribution of Adeimantus to the discussion is that he places the argument for regarding respect for the rights of one’s neighbor as a mere cover for self-seeking on a basis independent of all speculations about moral origins. The tone of his speech is carefully differentiated from that of Glaucon. Glaucon, as he himself admits, is simply making the ablest forensic defense he can of his case, and can jest about the gusto with which he has thrown himself into the cause of a dubious client; Adeimantus speaks from the heart in a vein of unmistakable moral indignation. He complains not of the speculations of dashing advanced thinkers, but of the low grounds on which the defense of morality is based by the very parties who might be presumed to have it most at heart. Parents who are sincerely anxious that their sons should grow up to be honest and honorable men regularly recommend virtue simply on the ground of its value as a means to worldly success and enjoyment; they never dwell on the intrinsic worth of virtue
The effect of the two speeches, taken in conjunction, is to impose on Socrates the task of indicating, by a sound analysis of human nature, the real foundations of morality in the very constitution of man, and of showing how education and religion can be, and ought to be, made allies, not enemies, of a sound morality. This, we may say, is the simple theme of the whole of the rest of the dialogue. Some comments may be offered on the various stages of the demonstration. The theme has already been propounded in the demand of Glaucon that it shall be made clear how “justice” and “injustice” respectively affect the inner life of their possessor, independently of any sanctions, human or divine. It is to the answer to this question that Socrates is really addressing himself in the picture of an ideally good man living in an ideal relation to society, which culminates in the description, given in Books VI-VII, of the philosopher-king, his functions in society, and the discipline by which he is fitted for their discharge, as well as by the briefer studies, in Books VIII and IX, of increasing degeneration from the true type of manhood. The answer to Adeimantus, so far as his indictment of education is concerned, has to be found in the account of the training of the young into worthy moral character by a right appeal, through literature and art, to the imagination (Books III-IV); his attack on immoral religion may be said to be the direct occasion both of the regulation of early “nursery tales” with which Socrates opens his scheme of reform in Book II, and of the magnificent myth of judgment with which the dialogue closes, itself a specimen of the way in which the religious imagination may be made the most potent reinforcement of a noble rule of life. In dealing with the details of the positive contributions of the dialogue to both politics and religion, it is necessary to observe some caution, if we are to
(1) In the impressive picture given in Books II-IV of the working of the principle of specialization of function according to vocation, which will ultimately turn out to be the foundation of all “justice” there are one or two points which have perhaps not received sufficient attention, and may therefore be briefly noted.
I think it is clear that we must not take the description of the three successive stages through which Socrates’ community passes as meant to convey any speculation about the beginnings of civilization. The “first city” is already on the right side of the line which separates civilization from barbarism. Its inhabitants are already agriculturists, permanently cultivating a fixed territory; they are at home in the working of metals, and in some respects they exhibit an advance in economic organization on the Athens of the Periclean age. (Thus they have their clothes made by a distinct class of artisans, not woven in the house by the women of the family, as was still largely the custom at Athens.) The notion that we are reading a satire on Antisthenes and the “return to nature” is merely ludicrous. What is really described is, in the main, the condition of a normal πόλις where the citizens are farming-folk. To me it seems clear that, so far as Plato has any particular historical development before his mind, he is thinking of what Athens itself had been before the period of victory and expansion which made her an imperial city and the center of a world-wide sea-borne commerce. (This is suggested almost irresistibly by the assumption that even the “first city” like Athens, requires to import a good many of its necessaries from elsewhere,
(2) We must, of course, note that not all the artificial wants which arise in the city as it becomes “luxurious” are meant to be condemned. Even the demand for delicacies for the table is an indication that the standard of living is rising, and all social students know that a rise in this standard is by no means an entirely unwholesome thing. It is more significant that one of the chief features of the development is the growth of professions like those of the actor and the impresario. People are beginning to feel the need of amusement, and this means, of course, that they are becoming conscious that they have minds, which need to be fed no less than their bodies. Presumably the reason why Socrates could not look for “justice” in the community of farmers, but has to wait for the “luxurious city” to come into existence and be reformed, is precisely that the members of the first society would hardly be alive to the fact that they have souls at all; they could not feel the need for a daily supply of any bread but that which perishes; they have no “social problem.”
(3) It has been asked why, when over-population leads to an acute social problem, aggressive warfare rather than colonization should be assumed as the only way out of the difficulty. The answer, of course, is simple. In the first place, peaceful colonization of derelict territories had never been a feasible procedure for a Greek city. The founders of the ancient and famous cities we call the “Greek colonies” had regularly had to wrest their sites from previous occupants not much inferior to themselves in “culture.” There was no America or Australia in the Mediterranean basin. And in the second, Socrates knows his countrymen and is well aware that a Greek “surplus population” would not be likely to transport itself across the seas in quest of a new home so long as there was a fair chance of a successful inroad on its neighbors. He is, as he says, not discussing the morality of the proceeding; he is merely noting that it is what the city would, in fact, do. (In theory, to be sure, it was a commonplace that an aggressive war of expansion is not a iustum bellum {war theory}.) And the point he wishes to insist on is the perfectly sound one, that the experience of having to make common sacrifices and face common dangers in war, just or unjust (but when did any nation throw its soul into the prosecution of a war which it seriously believed to be unjust?), does more to generate self-devotion in citizens than any other. War gives the social reformer his chance, for the double reason that it produces the temper which is willing to live hard, make sacrifices, and submit to discipline, and, when it is hard contested and
“Neither socialism nor communism is to be found in the Republic....there is no system of “caste” in the Republic.”
(4) It is unhappily customary to make two bad mistakes about the nature of the reconstituted social structure which, in Socrates’ narrative, emerges from the experience provided by a great war. It is called a “system of caste,” and the matter is then made worse by calling the δημιουργοί who form the third of Socrates’ social classes, “the working class,” or “the industrial class.” The immediate consequence is that the social and political theory of the Republic suffers a complete travesty, due to the unconscious influence of ideas derived from our experience of modern “industrialism.” To guard against misconceptions of this kind, we must, in the first place, be clear on the point that there is no system of “caste” in the Republic. The characteristic of “caste” is that one is born into it, and that once born into a caste it is impossible to rise above it. You may forfeit your caste in various ways, as a Brahmin does by crossing the seas, but no one can become a Brahmin if he is not born one. Now Socrates believes, rightly or wrongly, that heredity is a powerful force in the intellectual and moral sphere; as a general rule, a man will find his natural place in the “class” to which his parents belong (all the more, no doubt, as procreation is to be placed under careful “eugenic” regulations). But the rule has its notable exceptions: there are those who prove quite unfitted for the work of the class into which they are born, and those who show themselves qualified to take their place in a higher class. Hence it is part of Socrates’ idea that the early life of the individual shall be under close and constant surveillance, and subjected to repeated tests of character and intelligence. There is to be every opportunity for the discovery and degradation of the unworthy and the promotion of the worthy; no one is to be ensured by the accident of birth in a particular social status, and no one is to be excluded by it from rising to the highest eminence. This qualification of the principle of heredity by the antithetic principle of the “open career” for ability and character is absolutely destructive of “caste.” The philosopher-kings or the soldiers of the Socratic state are no more a “caste” than Napoleon’s marshals. And, in the second place, the δημουργοί do not correspond to what we call the “artisan” or “working” class, i.e. to wage-earners or persons who maintain themselves by selling their labour. They include our wage-earners, but they also include the great bulk of what we should call the civilian population, independently of economic status. The thought underlying the distinction of the three classes has primarily nothing to do with economic status. It is simply that in any full-grown society, you may distinguish three types of social service. There is a small section which serves the community directly by directing its public life, making rules and regulations and controlling policy. These are the “complete” or “full-grown” guardians. There is necessarily
(5) An immediate consequence is that, in spite of all that has been said about the “socialism” or “communism” of the Republic, there is really neither socialism nor communism to be found in the work. The current confusions on the point are probably due mainly to the mistaken notion that the emphatic demand of Book IV
The point made in Book IV. is simply that a man’s character and work in life will be spoiled equally by the possession of irresponsible wealth, with no adequate social duties attached to it, and by a penury which breaks his spirit and forces him to do bad and scamped work in order to keep himself alive. A man may be aware of these dangers without adopting either the socialist or the communist theory of the right economic organization of society. In point of fact,
(6) It may not be unnecessary to remark that, as there is no socialism, there is also no “community of women” in the Republic. If the reader will take the trouble to work out the consequences of the regulations prescribed for the mating of the guardians, he will find that the impulses of sex and the family affections connected with
(7) There are one or two remarks which may be made about the plan of moral and religious training laid down in Books II and III, as supplementary to the many excellent studies of this part of the dialogue already in existence. We note that in the proposed purification of the stories by which religious impressions are to be communicated to the very young, it is not merely, nor even mainly, the Homeric mythology to which exception is taken. The crowning offenders are Hesiod and the other theogonists who have related
(8) Most of the specific criticisms contained in the discussion of the educational employment of poetry and music are, naturally enough, negative. Socrates clearly holds quite strongly that the tendency of the art of his own time is to a love of a relaxed and formless complexity and variety for its own sake, and he thinks it necessary, in the interests of character, as well as of taste, to revert to austerer and more “classical” standards. It is important to remember that these strictures are put into the mouth of Socrates, speaking not later than the peace of Nicias.
We must not, then, suppose that they are aimed at epigoni (offspring) of a later generation. It is not the floridity of Timotheus or Agathon which is the object of attack, but the art of the Periclean age. We are only throwing dust in our own eyes if we suppose that Socrates wants merely to repress the cheap music-hall and the garish melodrama, or the equivalents of freak movements like Dada. He is seriously proposing to censure just what we consider the imperishable contributions of Athens to the art and literature of the world, because he holds that they have tendencies which are
(9) Since the whole of the early education contemplated in the Republic is based on an appeal to taste and imagination, it follows that, as Socrates is careful to insist, the “goodness” it produces, though it will be quite sufficient for every class except the statesmen, is not the true and philosophic goodness of which the Phaedo speaks. As we are carefully reminded, the self-devotion of even the fighting force of the reformed city is founded on “opinion,” not on knowledge; their virtue is absolute loyalty to a sound tradition which they have imbibed from their “social environment,” not loyalty to the claims of a summum bonum grasped by personal insight. Thus the virtue described and analysed in Book IV is still “popular virtue”; its superiority over the goodness of the average Athenian, the respectability we have heard Protagoras preaching, is due simply to the superiority of the “social tradition” of the Socratic city over that of Periclean democracy. There is thus a double reason
Recognition that the whole account of the virtues given in Republic iv. is thus provisional should save us from attaching too much importance to the famous doctrine of the “three parts” of the soul. We must be careful to understand that this doctrine does not profess to be original nor to be a piece of scientific psychology. We have already found it presupposed as something known in educated circles in the Gorgias and Phaedo, and have seen reason to think that it is Pythagorean in origin, as Posidonius is known to have maintained,
This means that we are to take it primarily as a working account of “active principles” or “springs of action,” which sufficiently describes the leading types of “goodness” as goodness can be exhibited in any form short of the highest. The scheme will thus be excellently applicable to the goodness of the ἐπίκουροι (epicurians), for their life is still a form, though the worthiest form, of the φιλότιμος βίος (conscientious life). Loyalty to “honor,” “chivalry,” “ambition” (though a wholly unselfish ambition), is the utmost we demand of them; the life of duty remains for the best of them a struggle between a “higher” and a “lower,” though a struggle in which the “higher” regularly wins, and this justifies our recognition of a plurality of “parts of the soul” in them. It will be characteristic of their experience that there should be conflicts of “desire” with the tradition of loyalty, and that chivalrous sentiment should be required to act as the reinforcement of loyalty to tradition in the conflict. But the familiar Socratic doctrine is that the “philosopher” who has directly gazed for himself on that supreme good of which the Symposium has told us, necessarily desires the good he has beheld; to him “disobedience to the heavenly vision”
I do not think it needful to say more about the doctrine here, than to utter a word of warning against two possible misunderstandings. We must avoid every temptation to find a parallel between the “parts” or “figures” in the soul and the modern doctrine of the “three aspects” of a complete “mental process” (cognition, conation (volition), feeling). Plato is not talking about “aspects” of this kind, but about rival springs of action, and the doctrine, as presented in the Republic, has no reference to anything but action and “active principles” or “determining motives.” Also we must not make the blunder of trying to identify the θυμοειδές with “will” (spirited). From the Socratic point of view, will cannot be distinguished from the judgment “this is good,” and this judgment is always, of course, a deliverance of the λογιστικόν (logical). But the λογιστικόν may pronounce a true judgment, or it may be led into a false one under the influence of present appetite or of anger or ambition, or again, it may only be saved from false judgment because the “sense of honor” comes into collision with the promptings of appetite. To look in the scheme of the Republic for some facultas electiva, intervening between the formation of a judgment of “practical thinking” and the ensuing action, would be to misunderstand its whole character.
(10) We see then why there can never have been a “first Republic” including the “guardians” and the scheme for their early education, but without the philosopher-king and his training in hard scientific thinking. The philosopher-king is doubly demanded as the only adequate embodiment of the Socratic conception of goodness, and also as the authority whose personal insight into good creates the public tradition by which the rest of society is to live. To do full justice to the conception we must not forget that Socrates’ statesmen are expected to combine two
How preoccupation with science was expected to ennoble character (provided that only the right type of person is allowed to meddle with it), we see most readily by comparing the courage pronounced in Book IV to be all that is wanted of the ἐπίκουροι with the still higher type of courage declared in Book VI to be part of the character of the philosopher. The “courage” demanded of the good soldier, in whose make-up θυμός plays the leading part, was defined as steadfast loyalty in the face of perils and seductions to the right opinions inculcated in him by education. Its foundation is thus allegiance to a code of honor held with such passion that no fear of pain or death and no bait that can be offered to cupidity is able to overcome it. Clearly a courage like this will carry a man “over the top” make him volunteer for a desperate enterprise, or win him a V.C. But there are situations in life which make a demand for a still higher degree of fortitude. It is matter of experience that a V.C. may not be equal to the task of duty imposed, for example, on a priest whose business it is to tend daily the last hours of the victims of some foul pestilence in a plague-smitten city. Or again a brave soldier, who will face deadly peril when his “blood is up” and the eyes of his comrades and his commander are on him, may not have the nerve of the scientific man who will quietly inoculate himself with some loathsome disorder to study its symptoms, or try the effects of some new and powerful anesthetic upon himself, in order to decide on its possible utility in medicine. This is the sort of courage of which Socrates speaks as only possible to a man who “knows” the relative insignificance of the duration of any individual personal life from his habitual “contemplation of all time and all existence.” We should, probably, prefer, both in the case of the priest and in the case of the man of science, to speak of “faith,” but the point is that, in both cases, the agent is inspired by an absolutely assured personal conviction about the universal order and his own place in it. Without this absolute assurance of conviction, one is never wholly free from liability to illusion about one’s own personal importance, and so never quite a free man. Because Socrates holds that the sciences form a ladder which leads up in the end to the vision of the
(a) The Forms (ἰδέαι) in the Republic. From the Phaedo, among other dialogues, we gather that there is a form corresponding to each “universal” predicate which can be significantly affirmed of a variety of logical subjects. The same thing is explicitly said in the Republic (vi. 507b, x. 596a); in the latter place the “form of bed or table” is given as an example. (This seems at variance with the well-known statement of Aristotle that “we”—i.e. the Platonists—deny that there are “forms” of artificial things,
Now, since it is assumed in the Republic that scientific knowledge is knowledge of forms, the objects which are thus said to derive their being from “the good” must clearly mean the whole body of the forms. The “good” thus holds a preeminence among forms, and strictly speaking, it might be doubtful whether we ought to call it a “form” any more than we can call the sun a colour. At least, all the other forms must be manifestations or expressions of it. In the Phaedo nothing was said which would warrant this treatment of the forms as a hierarchy or ordered series with a first member of such a unique
That Socrates finds himself unable to speak of this form of good except negatively, and that he can only characterize it positively by an imperfect analogy, is inevitable from the nature of the case. The same thing may be seen in any philosophy which does not simply deny or ignore the “Absolute” or supreme source of all reality. Because this source is ex hypothesi a source of all reality, you are bound to insist that it transcends, and is thus “wholly other” than, every particular real thing; every predicate you affirm of it belongs properly to some of its effects in contradistinction from others and can therefore only be asserted of the supreme source “analogically” and with the warning that the analogy is imperfect and would mislead if pressed unduly. At the same time, because it is the source of all reality, every predicate which expresses a “positive perfection” must, in its degree, characterize the source of all “perfections” and must be ascribed to it “analogically.” All we gain by knowledge of the “detail” of the universe must add to and enrich our conception
“Science is eternally progressive just because it is always tentative.”
{Hence, science can never be ‘settled.’}
The language used in the Republic of the “form of Good,” as the last paragraph has suggested, at once raises the question whether or not this form can be identified with God, of whom language of the same kind is used by Christian theologians and philosophers. We cannot answer this important question correctly except by making a distinctio sometimes forgotten. If the question means “is the Form of Good another name for the God recognized in the Platonic philosophy?” the answer must be definitely No, for the reason given by Burnet, that the good is a form, whereas God is not a form but a “soul,” the supremely good soul. When we come to deal with the Laws, we shall see the importance for Plato’s own thought of this distinction. It is just because his God is not a form that God can play the part the Platonic philosophy assigns to Him. But if we mean “is the Good spoken of in the Republic identical with what Christian divines and philosophers have meant
(b) The Criticism of the Sciences. In studying the criticism Socrates passes upon the sciences and his theory about their limitations, we must not be misled by the fact that he deals throughout only with the various branches of mathematics as recognized in the fifth century. This was inevitable because he had before him no other examples of systematic and organized knowledge. In principle what he has to say is readily applicable to the whole great body of more “concrete” sciences which has grown up since his own day. If we speak of his comments as a criticism on the
The main thought is quite simple. In all the sciences the objects we are really studying are objects which we have to think but cannot see or perceive by any of our senses. Yet the sciences throughout direct attention to these objects, which are, in fact, forms, by appealing in the first instance to sense. The geometer draws a figure which he calls a “square” and a line which he calls
This suggests to us at once the possibility and necessity of a higher and more rigorous science, “dialectic.” Such a science would differ from the sciences in vogue in two ways: (1) it would treat the initial postulates of the sciences as mere starting-points to be used for the discovery of some more ultimate premisses which are not “postulated,” but strictly self-luminous and evident (ἀνυπόθετα), a real “principle of everything,” and when it had
In this account of the aims of dialectic we recognize at once the method described in the Phaedo as that of σκέψις ἐν λόγοις (logical studies) on which Socrates had fallen back after his disillusionment about Anaxagoras. Only here the special emphasis is thrown on just that side of the dialectic method which the immediate purposes of the Phaedo permitted us to dismiss in a single sentence. We are contemplating the procedure there said to be necessary if anyone disputes an initial “postulate.” In that case, the Phaedo told us, our “postulate” will require to be itself deduced as a consequence from one more ultimate, and the process will have to be repeated until we come to a postulate which all parties are content to accept. In the last resort this would, of course, involve deduction from some principle which can be seen to possess unquestionable internal necessity. Thus, so far, the Republic agrees exactly with the Phaedo about the task of “dialectic,” except that it lays special stress on just that part of it which had not to be taken into account in the Phaedo because the company there were all willing to admit the doctrine of forms as a “postulate” without demanding any justification of it. It is clear from the Republic that if a disputant should refuse to make this admission, the theory of forms itself would require to be examined in the same way in which the postulates of the mathematician von Fach are to be investigated. In the one passage of the dialogues where any such examination is made, it is not put into the mouth of Socrates but into that of the Pythagorean Timaeus (Timaeus 51b 7 ff.).
Though Socrates naturally confines himself to criticisms of the sciences which had attained some degree of organization in his own day, it is obvious that they would apply with equal force to any others. Physics, chemistry, biology, economics are all full of undefined “primitive notions” and undemonstrated assumptions, and it is part of the work of the students of these sciences themselves to make a steady effort to ascertain just what their untested presuppositions are, and to consider how far they are really required, and how far they form a consistent system. The progress made by pure mathematics in the last half-century has largely consisted in a more accurate and complete statement of the “primitive notions” and “indemonstrable postulates” of the science and the
But the “reduction of all pure mathematics to logic” is only a part, and not the most important part, of what the Republic understands by “dialectic.” Such a unification of the sciences as the Republic contemplates would require a combination of the reduction of mathematics to logic with the Cartesian reduction of the natural sciences to geometry. When the task was finished, no proposition asserting “matter of fact,” devoid of internal necessity, should appear anywhere among the premisses from which our conclusions are ultimately drawn. The first principles to which the dialectician traces back all our knowledge ought to exhibit a self-evident necessity, so that science would end by transforming all “truths of fact” into what Leibniz called “truths of reason.” This involves a still more significant extension of the range of
We need not suppose that Plato imagined this programme for the completion of science as capable of actual execution by human beings. We have learned from the Symposium that “philosophy” itself is a life of progress, it is not those who are already in possession of “wisdom,” but those who are endeavouring after it, who philosophize. The Timaeus reminds us with almost wearisome repetition that, in physical science in particular, all our results are inevitably provisional, the best we can reach with our present lights, and that we must be prepared to see them all superseded or modified. One of the standing contrasts between Plato and his great disciple Aristotle is just that this sense of the provisionality and progressiveness of science is so prominent in the one and so absent from the other. Plato never assumes, as Aristotle was so apt to assume, that he can do the world’s scientific thinking for it once for all. This apparent finality, which made Aristotle so attractive to the thinkers of the thirteenth century, who were just recovering the thought of “Nature” as a field for study on her own account, makes the real value of Aristotle’s science rather difficult for us to appreciate today. Plato was far too true to the Socratic conception of the insignificance of human knowledge by
(c) It should be unnecessary to dwell on the point that, with all his devotion to this demand for a critical metaphysic of the sciences, Plato is no champion of a mere vita contemplativa divorced from practical social activity. One could not even say that he, like Kant, conceives of “speculative” and “practical” reason as active in two distinct spheres of which one is subordinated to the other. To his mind, the two spheres are inseparable. The unification of science is only possible to one who is illuminated by the vision of the Good which is the principle of the unification, and the Good is only seen by the man who lives it. Hence the demand that the “philosopher” shall devote the best years of his working life to the arduous practice of governing, in all its details great or small, is only the other side of the conviction that without the “heroic” character no one will ever rise to the supreme rank in science itself. The “philosopher” is necessarily a missionary and a sort of lesser Providence to mankind because, on Socratic principles, the “good” cannot be seen without drawing all who see it into its service. The “philosophers’” social activity is all the more effective that it is not pursued directly for its own sake, in the spirit of the well-meaning but tiresome persons of our own day who take up “social work” as they might take up typewriting or civil engineering, but issues naturally and inevitably, as a sort of “by-product,” from their aspiration after something else, just as the “great inventions” of modern times regularly issue from the discoveries of men who were not thinking at all of the applications of science to convenience and commerce, or as art, literature, social life have all owed an incalculable debt to St. Francis and his “little brethren,” who never gave a thought to any of them.
(12) This desultory chapter may be brought to an end by a few remarks on the impressive picture of Republic viii-ix about the stages of progressive degeneration through which personal and national character pass as the true ideal of life falls more completely out of view. It should be obvious that the primary interest of these sketches is throughout ethical, not political. The “imperfect” constitutions are examined in order to throw light on the different phases of personal human sinfulness, not in the interests of a theory
It is generally admitted that the picture of the “democratic” city where every one does as he pleases, and the most typical of citizens is the gifted amateur who plays, as the mood takes him, at every kind of life from that of the voluptuary to that of the ascetic—a sort of Goethe, in fact—is a humorous satire on Athenian life and manners. Of course we should be alive to the further point that the satire would be wholly beside the mark if directed against the drab and decent bourgeois Athens of Plato’s manhood. The burlesque is aimed directly against the Imperial democracy of the spacious days of Pericles when Athens was a busy home of world-commerce and the “new learning.” If we read the description side by side with the famous Funeral Oration in Thucydides, we shall see at once that the very notes of Athenian life which Pericles there selects as evidence of its superiority are carefully dwelt upon by Socrates for the opposite purpose of proving that, for all its
We are given no hint of the source from which the picture of the intermediate society, where wealth is the great title to admiration and “merchant princes” control the national destiny, is taken. But I do not doubt that we can name the State which Plato has in mind. When we remember that, as we see from allusions in the Laws and in Aristotle’s Politics,
The reasoning is that we have already met in the Gorgias, and turns on the application of the medical formula of “depletion and recovery from depletion” to the moral life. The “passions,” like the physical appetites of hunger and thirst, are capable of no permanent and progressive satisfaction. You feed full today, but tomorrow finds you as hungry again as though today had never been. What you mistake for happiness has been only the temporary arrest of a “depletion” On the other hand, what you gain in knowledge
See further:
Nettleship, R. L. “Lectures on the Republic of Plato,” vol. ii. of Philosophical Remains; Plato’s Conception of Goodness and the Good; The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic in Hellenica II, 61-165.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 175-215.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii. 3-39, 554-641 al.; Platons Staat, Darstel lung des Inhalts. Stuttgart, 1909.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 181-245.
Barker, E. Greek Political Theory: Plato and his Predecessors, 145-268.
Stewart, J. A. Myths of Plato, 133-172; “Myth of Er” 471-474; “Myth of the Earth-born”; Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 47-62.
Shorey, P. Plato’s Republic. (London and New York, Vol. I 1930, Vol. II 1935.)
Dies, A. Introduction to the edition of the dialogue in the Collection des Universite’s de France. (Paris, 1932.)
Chapter XII. The Phaedrus
The Phaedrus
The first question, on examination, proves capable of being narrowed down to one which we may regard as of minor importance. No serious student of Platonic style now defends the singular theory of some critics in classical antiquity that the prominence of Eros in the dialogue and the loaded rhetoric of Socrates’ encomium on him prove the work to be a youthful writing, perhaps the earliest of all the dialogues.
On the other hand,
The other problem is more difficult, and I would recommend the reader to suspend his judgment on it until he has followed our analysis of the dialogue. My own opinion is on the side of those who regard the right use of “rhetoric” as the main topic, for the following simple reason. In Socrates, with whom the “tendance of the soul” was the great business of life, it is quite intelligible that a discussion of the use of rhetoric or anything else should be found to lead up to the great issues of conduct. If the real subject of the Phaedrus were sexual love, it is hard to see how its elaborate discussion of the possibility of applying a scientific psychology of the emotions to the creation of a genuine art of persuasion, or its examination of the defects of Lysias as a writer, can be anything but the purest irrelevance.
In structure the dialogue is of the simplest type. Socrates falls in with Phaedrus who is, under medical advice, taking a constitutional in the country outside the city walls, and, for the sake of his company, joins him, departing for once from his preference for the streets of the town. He soon persuades Phaedrus to sit down by the bank of the Ilissus under the shade of a plane tree; the conversation which ensues takes place here and is strictly tete-a-tete. As for the supposed date of the conversation, it can be approximately fixed by the opening sentences. Lysias, who figures as a mere lad in the Republic, is now at the height of his fame as a writer of λόγοι (228a), and is living at Athens (227b). We may add the further detail that Polemarchus is also alive and, according to Socrates, “has betaken himself to philosophy” (257b), also that Isocrates, though still young, is already rivaling Lysias in his profession; Socrates anticipates that he may either throw Lysias and all former professors of it into the shade, or even aspire to a still higher calling,
When Socrates falls in with Phaedrus, the time of day is already close on noon (this explains why the pair so soon take rest under the plane-tree). Phaedrus has spent the early morning listening to a brilliant and paradoxical λόγος—we should call it an essay—by Lysias in defense of the thesis that a lad should be kinder to a wooer who is not “in love” than to one who is. He has the written text with him, and Socrates professes to believe that he is taking his solitary stroll for the express purpose of getting it by heart. The main point of the short and playful conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus as they make their way to the place they have chosen for their siesta (227-230) is to pitch the ethical key for what is to follow. Socrates is not interested in the “rationalisation of myths” like that of Boreas and Orithyia, because he is preoccupied with a graver problem, that of learning to “know himself”; he is indifferent to the charms of the country, because the trees, unlike the men he meets in the streets, can “teach him nothing” that bears on this supreme topic, the moral being of man. These remarks prepare us for the moral earnestness with which the merits of Lysias’s essay and the possibilities of rhetoric are to be treated in the body of the dialogue.
The Essay of Lysias (230e-234c). It has been disputed whether the discourse Phaedrus proceeds to read is an authentic composition of Lysias or a brilliant imitation of his style by Plato himself. There is no evidence either way, but for my own part, I feel that we must agree with those scholars, including Lysias’ latest editor, Hude, who regard the essay as genuine. No one doubts Plato’s ability to compose a λόγος for Lysias with perfect fidelity to the style of the supposed author. But, since the dialogue ends with severe and formal censure of Lysias, founded on a searching criticism of the λόγος, I find it difficult to believe that the document is an invention. It would be self-stultifying to publish a severe criticism of a well-known author based on an imitation of him which the critic had composed for his own purposes and could
The thesis of Lysias, we must remember, would be an offensive paradox even to the section of Athenian society which practiced “unnatural” aberrations. The fashionable theory was that the relations in question are ennobled when they are inspired by genuine “romantic” attachment, but not otherwise, as is taken for granted by the encomiasts of them in the Symposium. To suffer the advances of an ἐραστής from calculations of advantage was regarded as the basest thing a Greek lad could do. For a modern parallel to the paradox we might imagine a clever essay written to show that Tom Jones’s conduct towards Lady Bellaston is morally more innocent than his affair with Molly Seagrim. We must not suppose that Lysias intends his argument to be taken seriously. He simply means to exhibit his cleverness by showing how good a case he can make out for the worst conduct, much as a clever writer today might amuse himself and his readers by an essay on the moral elevation of a bomb-throwing “Communist” But there are theses which cannot be defended and arguments which cannot be employed, even in jest, without revealing deep-seated moral depravity or insensibility; the kind of cleverness which sustains such theses by the use of such arguments is a real moral danger to the community and requires to be countered, as it is by Socrates, with better morality and superior wit.
The discourse may be summarized very briefly; it is throughout an appeal to considerations of “utility” in the most sordid sense of the word. One is likely to make one’s price much more effectively out of a suitor who is a cold sensualist. Romantic love has its fits of repentance and its lovers’ quarrels; it changes its object, and when it does so, it passes into hate and scorn. It imperils reputation, since the romantic suitor “blabs” of his success, while the business-like sensualist knows how to hold his tongue. The “lover” is notoriously jealous and tries to monopolize his beloved; the cool sensualist does not object to going shares with rivals recommended by their wealth or other qualities.
The “lover” is attracted by physical charm before he has considered the suitability of the connexion in other respects; the man who is not “in love” chooses carefully. The lover’s judgment is blinded by his passion, and this makes him the worst of confidants and advisers. He flatters one’s weaknesses and quarrels with one’s better qualities. On all these grounds it is absurd to expect solid and lasting advantage from one’s complaisances towards him. (Manifestly such a
Socrates professes at first to have paid no attention to the matter of the discourse. He was attending wholly to its stylistic qualities, and these even Lysias himself could hardly approve, since it was full of empty repetition and tautology. The mere recollection of what poets like Sappho and Anacreon have said about love would enable a man to make a much better speech on the same theme. Lysias has in fact shown no “invention” in his essay; he has merely dwelt on one obvious point, the “blindness” and irrationality of the lover’s passion, a point no one could miss. The whole merit of his performance, if it has any, must be looked for in the arrangement (διάθεσις) of this commonplace material. Phaedrus himself admits this (236a-b), but challenges Socrates, if he can, to treat the same theme (ὑπόθεσις), the admitted “madness” of the lover’s passion, better than Lysias has done. Socrates accepts the challenge, with a prayer to the Muses to make up for his well-known ignorance by the aid of their “inspiration.” With this preface he makes a rival speech on the theme, only carefully introducing one slight but significant modification. The supposed speaker, in his discourse, is to be not a cold-blooded sensualist making a disgraceful “business proposition,” but a “lover” astute enough to cloak his passion under an appearance of indifference. (This gives Socrates a double advantage over Lysias. He safeguards his own character by abstaining from even a playful defense of a morally disgraceful thesis, and he leaves himself free, if he pleases, to urge subsequently that the apparent reasonability of the speech is only the simulated rationality of a madman, since the client into whose mouth it is put is really inspired all the time by “romantic” unreason.)
First Speech of Socrates—Thesis: It Is Bad to Listen to the Blandishments of a “Lover” (237b-241d). The first requisite for all sound deliberation is to know the real character of the object about which we are deliberating. Since the question is whether one should yield to a lover, we must start by understanding what “love” is, and what it aims at, and whether it is for our good or for our harm. “Love” is, of course, a desire or craving for something. Now there are two principal types of desire—the “inborn” craving for the pleasant, and the desire for the “best,” which is not inborn, but has to be acquired, and is based on judgment (δόξα)—and there is often a clash between the two. The victory of judgment (δόξα) in this conflict over appetitive craving is what we call sophrosyne; the victory of appetite over our judgment of good |304| we call “lust” or “passion” (ὔβρις). “Love” (ἔρως, sexual passion) is one special variety of ὔβρις or “lust.” It is the prevalence of violent desire for the pleasant uninformed by rational judgment of good, when aroused by physical beauty (238c). The question before us, then, is whether it is for the benefit or for the hurt of the party who has aroused such a passion to gratify it. And here, Socrates says, he will give the rein to an almost “poetical” eloquence with which he feels himself inspired beyond his ordinary, perhaps by the surroundings in which he is speaking. (The artificial graces of Lysias are to be met by the “unstudied eloquence” of the “heart.”)
The “lover,” being a slave to his pleasures, will, of course, desire his beloved to be the pliant minister to them, and will hate everything which makes him less subservient, and gives him any kind of personal independence. Now wisdom, valour, even ready wit and eloquence themselves, tend to give one an independent personality, and for that reason a “lover” will object to them in the object of his passion. His jealousy will prompt him to exclude the beloved from all intercourse which would “make a man” of him, and above all from “divine philosophy.” The last thing he will desire is that his “minion’s” charm for himself should be endangered by the acquisition of intelligent and manly qualities of soul. In the next place, he will resent the acquisition of hardy and manly physical qualities such as make one of worth in “war and other necessities”; he will deliberately, for his own pleasure, try to keep the ἐρώμενος to a soft and effeminate course of life. Finally, he will be anxious to isolate his victim from all the influences of family affections; he will object to his having any financial independence, or to his marrying and forming a family of his own, since he resents whatever tends to emancipate the victim from the position of mere minister to his own selfish pleasure. Thus the “lover” is an enemy to the good alike of the victim’s soul, of his body, and of his estate. (We see that Socrates’ pretence of being carried out of himself on a flood of “inspired” eloquence must not be taken too seriously. He is deliberately observing the rules of arrangement which Lysias had neglected. His theme is nominally that of Lysias, the jealous and petulant selfishness of the “lover.” But he has carefully articulated his argument and avoided vain repetition by grouping the effects of the lover’s jealousy on his victim under the heads of mind, body, estate. This has given him further the opening for lifting the whole argument to a worthier moral level by insisting on the supreme importance of the moral goods which are jeopardized by complaisance. Considered simply as an example of effective pleading, Socrates’ speech has thus stylistic advantages over that of Lysias which far outweigh his neglect of the verbal graces and prettinesses of the other.)
The speech ends with a further consideration. Connexion with an ἐραστής has been shown to be productive of evil to mind, body, and fortune. We may add, as a minor point, that besides
Even Phaedrus can see that this discourse, though it gives good reasons against bestowing favours on a “lover” does nothing to advance the plea of the suitor who is not “in love.” Socrates, who, of course, did not mean to act as advocate for such a client, suggests that it would be enough to add that such a person is in all respects the very opposite of the lover whose faults we have exposed. He is about to take his leave of Phaedrus with this remark, when “the divine sign” checks him. He professes to understand this as a warning that, since Eros is a god, he has committed an impiety by denouncing him and must purge himself of his contempt by a palinode, as Stesichorus did when he had blasphemed Helen. If a real gentleman had overheard either the speech of Lysias or that which Socrates has just delivered, he would have imagined that he was listening to persons brought up among “common sailors,” incapable of understanding what a free man means by “love.” Thus the point of the “palinode” is to be that it is a recantation of the identification of ἔρως with a brutal physical appetite (241d-243e).
Second Speech of Socrates (244a-256e) The True Psychology of Love. The ground on which we have so far maintained that it is better to associate with one who is not in love than with a “lover” is that the lover is “beside himself” (μαίνεται), but the man who is not in love retains his sanity, and sanity is better than “madness.” This is the proposition we are now to recant. It would be true if there were only one kind of frenzy, common madness. But there is an inspired “frenzy” which is productive of good we could not equally obtain in a state of sanity and control of ourselves. One of its forms is prophecy; the priestess of Delphi, who predicts in a state of “exaltation,” is far superior as a prophet to diviners who predict the future by calculations based on the flight of birds and similar omens; a second form is the “exaltation” of the authors of “purifications” and “initiations,” “founders of
In the first place, the soul is immortal (245c), a statement which means to a Greek that it is divine. The proof of this is that whatever is always in motion is immortal, and the soul is always in motion. The minor premiss of this syllogism is again proved thus. The soul is the source and initiator of its own motions; its motions are not communicated from without, but spontaneously originated from within. Thus they were never started by anything else, and, as the soul itself is the first fountain of them, they can never come to an end. If the soul could come to an end, there would be an end of nature and becoming universally (245e)—a statement which implies that souls are the only things which can move from within, and so the only possible sources of movement. The soul may thus be rigorously defined as “that which moves itself” (246a).
But
(We see at once that we are dealing in a parable with the “three parts” of the soul; the driver is judgment, the two horses are “honor” or “mettle” and “appetite.” If we press the details, they imply that all three “parts” are present not only in the soul which has not yet put on the garment of the flesh, but in the gods, who are never embodied at all. This would be quite at variance with the hints of the Republic and the express teaching of the Timaeus. But it is not really permissible to extract metaphysics from mythical details which are necessitated by simple regard for the coherency of the pictorial representation.)
The myth proceeds to describe the life of all souls under the image of a great festal procession. The souls progress, under the leadership of the gods, round the whole compass of the heavens, maintaining the universal order of things. The goal of the whole pilgrimage is reached by an ascent to a region outside the whole heaven, “the plain of reality,” where the procession pauses and enjoys a Sabbath rest in the contemplation of “bodiless reality, without figure, colour, or tangible quality” (in other words the forms); this is the true home of souls, and the source of their spiritual food. Thus the thought is that it is in the strength of this pure contemplation that gods and men alike execute the practical task of establishing and maintaining natural and moral order in the realm of mutability and becoming. Like Moses they make everything after the pattern they have seen “in the mount.” The gods, of course, achieve this “steep ascent of heaven” with complete success; they actually conduct their living chariots out of the whole region of “nature” to the goal outside it. With men it is otherwise. The best of them only succeed for a time in getting their heads above the visible region, and attaining a glimpse of
Now our sensible experiences only suggest few and faint images of righteousness and temperance and the other forms, but beauty is much more impressively adumbrated in sense-experience, and the effect of the experience in awakening “recollection” is therefore exceptionally startling. In the soul which has all but lost the impression of heavenly beauty, the effect of its earthly adumbration is to provoke “brutal” appetite (τετράωοδος νόμον, 250e) for intercourse with the beautiful body. But in a soul fresh from deep contemplation of spiritual beauty, the sight of earthly beauty
But we must remember what we said about the difference in strain between the horses of the human soul. The better horse is modest and chivalrous, a “thorough-bred”; the worse horse is a “bolter.” So when the charioteer is wrapt in the contemplation of the beloved, the better horse modestly holds himself in, but the worse “bolts,” in spite of rein and whip, from lust after carnal delight. The worse horse may be often “pulled to his haunches,” but he persists in his struggles, and the time of really fierce temptation comes when the passion which began on one side is reciprocated on the other. If the temptation is successfully resisted, the pair have won one out of the three “Olympic victories” necessary to release them from incarnation in the flesh. Henceforward they have mastered the evil in themselves and won their freedom. But if their lives are directed only to the second-best, “honor,” in the place of the first-best, “wisdom,” the evil horse may get his way in an unguarded moment, and then there will be other such moments in their lives, though not many, as their conduct has not commended itself to their “whole souls.” Their attachment will be real, but not so real as that of the pair who have won the mastery over themselves. At death, they are still “wingless” though “desirous to be winged,” and even this is a gain. It is at least a beginning of the journey heavenwards, and the rest will come (253a-256d).
This, then, is what association with a true lover may bestow; intimate relations with the man who is “not in love” lead to a meanness of soul, falsely taken for a virtue, and a nine-thousand-years’ period of “folly,” spent on and under the earth. May Eros accept this recantation, grant Socrates not to lose his “skill in matters of love,” and punish Lysias by converting him, as his
Phaedrus is delighted with the fine speech to which he has just listened. Lysias himself could hardly match it. Perhaps he would not try; he is a touchy man and was recently gravely offended by a politician who had called him a mere “writer of speeches” in depreciation. But, says Socrates, politicians who affect to despise “discourse-writing” are only disguising envy under the mask of contempt. They are vain enough of the decrees they propose and carry, and what is a decree but the record of a “discourse” to which the author has prefixed the names of its admirers, “the council” or “the people”? And how much vainer a man is when his “discourses” are preserved in perpetuity as the “laws” of a State. Clearly, if there is any discredit it is not in composing discourses, but in composing them ill. And this raises the whole question, what is good writing? (258d). This is the sort of problem which it gives an educated man real pleasure to discuss. If we neglect it and prefer to sleep out the warm noon-tide, the cicadae over our heads may carry our bad report to their patrons the Muses.
The Principles of Style (259e-278b). (Nominally the question under discussion is that of the canons of a sound rhetoric, but we shall see that it rapidly expands into a consideration of the character of “style” in literature in general. A speaker or writer has a case of which he wishes to convince his hearer or reader. The question is what principles may be laid down for the presentation of this case in the way which will be most effective. Thus the considerations urged by Socrates bear as much on the written exposition of a subject in an essay or a treatise as upon the spoken presentation of it to an audience. The reason for approaching the topic primarily from the side of spoken discourse is simply that, in the age of Socrates, there was no serious prose literature in existence. The one still extant prose work of importance of an earlier date than the supposed conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus was the book of Herodotus. The “preSocratic philosophers” had, indeed, attempted to state their views about φύσις in a sort of prose; the Periclean age saw the first written manuals of “rhetoric” and medicine, and the first written discussions of ethical and political problems. But the writers of τέχναι made no pretensions to style, and their compositions were not regarded as “literature.” Literary prose, as a vehicle for the artistic expression of reflection upon life, was the creation of Isocrates,
It would seem obvious that the first prerequisite of a really good “discourse” is that the deliverer of it should know the truth about his subject. Yet the accepted view is that this is unnecessary. To compose a telling speech you need not know what are the δίκαια, the “rights and wrongs of the case”; you need only know what the audience who are to decide the issue think right and wrong. You win your case by appeal to the “prejudices of your hearers.” But this view will not bear examination. It would be a comic situation if Phaedrus, being under the impression that the word “horse” means a donkey, should be persuaded by a discourse on the usefulness of the horse in war to provide himself with a donkey
May we not define rhetoric as verbal “sorcery” (ψυχαγωγία)
The writers on the subject, it is true, generally confine the sphere of the art to public discourses before law-courts and popular assemblies; but they forget that such a restriction would amount to excluding Zeno and his paradoxes from consideration.
A second grave fault in style is that there is no recognizable order in the discourse of Lysias. It is not the consistent development of a theme and has no organic structure. There is no discoverable reason why the various points of the speech might not have been made in a wholly different order. But a good discourse ought to have a definite organic structure, just like a living creature. There should be a definite plan underlying it which would be ruined if you inverted the order of its paragraphs.
Here again the discourse with which the Nymphs inspired Socrates presents an instructive contrast. It began by saying what “love” is, a kind of “madness” or “frenzy.” Next it distinguished two main types of
Phaedrus agrees that this is a good account of “dialectic,” and that Socrates has a correct conception of a “scientific style.” But Thrasymachus and the other teachers of prose style have not the qualities we have described. What they mean by “rhetorical style” is something different. They mean, in fact, the arrangement of the parts of a “discourse” on a certain model which they prescribe, but which has nothing to do with the kind of logical structure just described. To use technical terms, they say, e.g., that a good speech must have its exordium (προοίμιον); then you must go on to the narration (διήγησις), which relates what you allege to be the facts of the case; next to the production of the depositions (μαρτυρίαι) of witnesses; then to a consideration of the presumptions (τεκμήρια) and plausibilities (εἰκότα); and there are many other subdivisions. (The precise meaning of the technical terms is in
Suppose a man claimed to be a physician on the ground that he knew recipes for raising and lowering the body’s temperature, producing a vomit and an evacuation and the like, would specialists like our friend Eryximachus admit his claim? If he did not know also in what patients, when, and with what violence to produce these effects, they would say at once that he did not know medicine. So Sophocles or Euripides would say to anyone who knew how to make single speeches effectively but not how to construct an artistic whole out of them, “You may understand the preliminaries to play-making, but you don’t know how to make a play.” So Pericles, we may be sure, would have told us urbanely that a man who has learned the devices of the textbooks has only learned the preliminaries to “rhetoric.” The art consists in knowing how and when to use the various devices to effect (πιθανως) and to make your discourse into a real whole (268a-269c).
Admittedly this cannot be learned from any of the law-books: how then should a man set himself to acquire a really persuasive style? To begin with, he must have a natural gift of expression, or he will be wasting time in trying to cultivate a barren soil. If he has the natural gift, its cultivation demands both knowledge and practice (μελέτη), and is thus not wholly a matter of “art.” In so far as it does depend on knowledge and thus is an “art” Lysias and Thrasymachus have misconceived the kind of knowledge required. What it is may be suggested to us by the facts about Pericles, the most effective of all our great orators. Over and above his natural gift of speech (πρὸς τῳ εὐφυὴς είναι, 270a), Pericles had the advantage of early association with Anaxagoras. This gave him a certain largeness of mental outlook which makes itself felt in his political oratory.
The great stylist, in fact, needs
The same thing is true of the “orator.” He is trying to produce healthy convictions in the minds of his audience by discourses exactly as the physician produces healthy conditions in their bodies by his prescriptions. Hence anyone who undertakes to teach the art of persuasion needs first of all to have a thoroughly scientific knowledge of the mind. He must know what are its components and exactly how each type of discourse will affect them. In a word, he must have a sound psychology of human nature. Thus he must understand what different temperaments there are among his auditors, what different types of “discourses” there are, and why such and such a type of “discourse” appeals to such and such a temperament. And this is not all. The effective speaker, like the successful physician, must have skill in diagnosis. He must be able in practice to judge rapidly and surely of the temperament of an actual audience and the type of appeal which will go home to them. Only when he has thus diagnosed his hearers’ temperaments and decided on the right kind of appeal to make will he be in a position to apply the rules given in the hand-books for producing the kind of effect which will be opportune (269d-272b).
The road to oratorical success we have described is, no doubt, a long and difficult one; but can the writers of the handbooks really show us an easier short cut? We know that, as has been already mentioned, they often say the “speaker” or “stylist” need not concern himself with realities or “truths”; he need only aim at being plausible, and, indeed, should often prefer plausibility to truth. Thus if he is employed in a case where a plucky little man has beaten a stronger but cowardly man, he would, speaking
We may now turn to the question, suggested by the sneer of the unnamed politician about Lysias (257c, whether it is a proper thing to perpetuate one’s discourses in writing. Socrates professes to have heard a story—Phaedrus prefers to think that he is inventing it—that, in the old days when Egypt was governed by gods, the god Thoth invented the art of writing and recommended it to Amon,
“...written records tend to make us neglect the cultivation of memory by making it unnecessary, and to fill men with an empty conceit of their own wisdom. They think they know a great deal which they have merely read without understanding and without any abiding effect on their minds.”
Amon reproved him, on the ground that written records tend to make us neglect the cultivation of memory by making it unnecessary, and to fill men with an empty conceit of their own wisdom. They think they know a great deal which they have merely read without understanding and without any abiding effect on their minds. The art of writing does not act as a substitute for memory; it merely provides us with memoranda—convenient means of refreshing our memory from time to time. A book is like a picture. The figures of the picture may actually “look alive,” but they cannot speak. So the words and sentences in a written book look full of wisdom, but if you question the book about its meaning, you can get no reply. A “discourse” once written down, comes into the hands of the unintelligent, as well as of the intelligent, and is exposed to misinterpretation. If it is to be rightly understood, it needs the living voice of the author to explain and defend it. Thus the written discourse is at best a lifeless image of the living thought which is
This conviction that a man’s personality ought to be greater than his literary “work,” and, in particular, that the true philosopher is a great personality whose very deepest thoughts are those which he cannot set down “in black and white,” was one Plato held strongly and retained to the end of his life.
It explains why he never attempted to put in writing any of his own profoundest metaphysical speculations. They were the fruit of a “way of life,” and, to be understood, presupposed the living of the same life on the part of the recipient. To record them for the world at large would have been merely to court dangerous misunderstanding. Even so, Carlyle, as the jest has it, wrote thirty-seven volumes to persuade the world that silence is golden. Naturally he could not tell us the secret of the “golden silence.” That could only be told to a man with the soul of a second Carlyle, and such a man would discover the secret without needing to read the thirty-seven volumes.
Nothing remains now but that Socrates should take leave of the spot where he has spent his hour of siesta with a brief prayer to Pan and its other tutelary spirits. His prayer is that “he may become fair in the inward man, and that the outer man may be conformable to the inward; that he may regard wisdom as the true riches and that his wealth may be such as none but the temperate can carry.” Thus the prayer is for good of mind, body, and fortune, and is worded in a way to remind us of the Socratic estimate of the relative importance of the three.
There is no real need to enter into the idle questions which have been raised about the significance of the allusions to Isocrates. What is said is strictly true and appropriate to the assumed situation. Isocrates certainly had greater parts than Lysias and stood on a higher intellectual and moral level. He showed his superiority in parts by becoming the real creator of literary prose style, and his superiority in character by deserting “speech-writing” for the foundation of a school for the training of the young for public life. However defective Plato may have thought the training he gave, the simple fact that it was based on a generous Pan-Hellenism, and that Isocrates was the recognized mouthpiece of this Pan-Hellenism among the publicists of his age, fully explains Plato’s ascribing to Socrates the remark, quite likely enough to have been actually made, that there was a strain of philosophy in the man. There can be no doubt about the historical fact of the influence of Socrates on Isocrates.
As to the alleged “feud” between Isocrates and Plato, of which much has been made by some modern writers, there is really no evidence for it. The frequent expressions in Isocrates’ writings depreciatory of “science” and “eristic” as a propaedeutic for the statesman are, indeed, pretty clearly meant specially for the Academy, but the attempts to find sarcastic rejoinders in Plato to these little acerbities have not really been successful, and the ingenuity devoted to these attempts seems to me to have been simply wasted. After all, Plato and Isocrates had a good deal in common in their views on practical politics, and they were neither Alexandrian literati nor German Professors. We in this country can quite understand how two eminent men can differ in their |319| philosophical programmes without becoming personal enemies, or how the bigger man of the two can afford to take an occasional “rap over the knuckles” from the lesser in good part. (No one supposes, for example, that Shakespeare’s relations with Ben Jonson were disturbed by Ben’s occasional quips.) Hence I cannot but agree with Professor Burnet in thinking that the tradition followed by Cicero, which represents Plato and Isocrates as being on personally friendly terms, is likely to be the true one.
In taking leave of the Phaedrus, we may note that while it supplements the Gorgias in its conclusions about the value of “style,” it modifies nothing that was said in the earlier dialogue. The moral condemnation pronounced on the use of eloquent speech to pervert facts and produce false impressions remains the same. So does the verdict that the sort of thing the professional teachers from Tisias to Thrasymachus profess to expound is not a science but a mere “trick” or “knack” (and therefore cannot be conveyed, as they professed to convey it, by “lessons”). In adding that a thorough knowledge of a subject-matter and a sound knowledge of the psychology of the public addressed furnish a really scientific basis for a worthy and effective style, Plato is saying nothing inconsistent with the results of the Gorgias. There is thus no sufficient ground for thinking that the teaching of the Phaedrus represents a later “development” from the more “Socratic” position of the Gorgias. Socrates cannot have lived in the Athens of the Archidamian war and the subsequent twenty years without having had occasion to turn his thoughts to the problem of the value of “rhetorical” style, and there is no reason why he should not actually have reached the conclusions of the Phaedrus, though naturally we cannot prove that he had.
See further:
Thompson, W. H. Plato’s Phaedrus.
Robin, L. Phedre. Collection des Universites de France, Paris. 1933.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii. 39-62; Platons Dialog Phaidros 2, pp. 1-280.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 245-279.
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Natorp. Platons Ideenlehre, 52-87.
Stewart, J. A. Myths of Plato, 306-396 Phaedrus Myth; Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 62-65 and Part II.
Dies, A. Autour de Platon II, 400-449.
Chapter XIII. Theaetetus
It seems possible to date the composition of the Theaetetus more precisely than that of any other Platonic dialogue. For the main discussion is introduced by a short preliminary conversation between the Megarians, Euclides and Terpsion, whom we met in the Phaedo as members of the inner Socratic circle. Terpsion relates that he has just met Theaetetus of Athens, who is being conveyed home from the Athenian camp at Corinth after a battle, wounded and suffering severely from dysentery. The thought of the loss such a man will be to the world reminds Euclides that Socrates had once met Theaetetus, just before his own death, and had prophesied a distinguished future for the lad. Euclides professes to have heard all about this from Socrates himself; he was so struck that he at once wrote out memoranda of what Socrates had told him, and afterward corrected and enlarged them with the help of Socrates himself.
Since much stress is laid on the point that Theaetetus, who is called a distinguished “man” by Terpsion (142b) was a mere “lad” in the year 399, it is clear that the battle from which Theaetetus, as the whole tone of the Prologue implies, was carried home to die, must fall a good while later. As Dr. Eva Sachs has shown,
Manifestly the dialogue was written as a tribute to the memory of Theaetetus, shortly after his death, which Euclides and Terpsion regard as certainly impending. This brings us to 368 or the beginning of 367 as the date of its completion. Thus, as Burnet points out, it must have been finished on the very eve of Plato’s departure from Athens to throw himself into his great political adventure at Syracuse, and probably with full consciousness that he was, for the time, about to abandon the studious life for that of affairs.
Several points in the introduction call for remark, (1) When Euclides explains that, to avoid tediousness, he has adopted the
The main conversation is dated very shortly before the famous trial of 399, as we see from the concluding sentence (210d), where Socrates explains that he has to attend at the office of the “king” to put in his answer to the indictment of Meletus. The parties present, besides Socrates, are the Pythagorean geometer Theodorus, the lad Theaetetus, his companion the younger Socrates (147d), who is a “mute personage,” and possibly one or two other unnamed lads. The scene is an unnamed palaestra (144c), possibly that in the Lyceum. We learn in the course of the dialogue that Theodorus comes from Cyrene, and that he is a friend and admirer of the now deceased Protagoras, though he professes to be strictly a mathematician, wholly unversed in the methods and terminology of contemporary Athenian “philosophy” (146b, 165a). That he belonged to the Pythagorean order is indicated by the appearance of his name in the list of Pythagoreans given by Iamblichus (Vita Pythagoras. xxxvi. 267). A notice preserved by Proclus in his commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements (Friedlein, p. 66) shows that Eudemus in his History of Mathematics ranked Theodorus with Hippocrates of Chios as one of the greatest of fifth-century geometers. Xenophon (Memorabilia iv. 2, 10) mentions him in a way which implies that Socrates knew him, though this may be only Xenophon’s inference from our dialogue. Theaetetus, it is important to remember, was a member of Plato’s Academy and one of the very first mathematicians of the fourth century. Eudemus, as we see from Proclus (loc. cit.), named him along with Archytas and Leodamas as one of the three prominent geometers of the fourth century. From notices in the Scholia to Euclid’s Elements and elsewhere, we gather that he was one of the first mathematicians to begin the systematic study of the types of “quadratic surd” worked out to its completion in Euclid’s Tenth Book, and he is still more often referred to as the geometer who completed the theory of the “regular solids,” by adding to the three known to the Pythagoreans (tetrahedron, cube, dodecahedron) the remaining two (octahedron, icosahedron).
Though the dramatic power of the Theaetetus is still remarkable, it has features which show that we are near the point at which
Introduction (143d-151e). The problem to be discussed is still made to arise, in the fashion of the Protagoras or Republic, apparently almost by accident. In the old way, Socrates is made to speak of his interest in the young and to ask Theodorus whether any of the lads of Athens have struck him as showing remarkable promise. Theodorus says that there is one whose remarkable combination of quick intelligence, perseverance, and modesty afford grounds for hoping very great things of him, Theaetetus. It is curious that this remarkable boy has a quaint physical resemblance to Socrates himself. This gives Socrates his opening. He calls Theaetetus out of the group of lads who are anointing themselves after their exercises and begins a conversation with him. Theodorus, he says, has just made a remark about our facial resemblance. As Theodorus is not a portrait-painter, such a remark from him is not very important. But as he is an eminent man of science, his opinion about our mental endowments carries weight. Hence Socrates would be glad to discover whether the lad’s mental gifts really bear out the very high commendation they have just received. He will put this to the test by asking a question. Theaetetus is learning geometry and other things from Theodorus. Now to learn means to be acquiring knowledge. But what exactly is knowledge? Can Theaetetus offer any answer to this question, one which has often perplexed Socrates himself? The lad begins, as Plato so often makes an interlocutor do, by an enumeration. Geometry and the other things taught by Theodorus are knowledge; so is shoe-making or carpentry.
Of course, as Socrates points out, this is no answer to the question. To answer the question what knowledge is by saying that shoe-making is knowledge only amounts to saying that knowing how to make shoes is knowledge. Knowing how to make furniture is also knowledge. Our problem is to say what we mean by the “knowing” which appears as a “determinable” in both these statements. Theaetetus seizes the point at once, since it makes the problem under consideration the same in type with a mathematical one which he and the younger Socrates have just solved. That problem was to find a common formula for what we call, in our modern terminology, “quadratic surds” or “irrational square
Socrates is delighted with this achievement, and only wishes Theaetetus to apply the same ability to determining the class of “sciences” or “knowledges,” by bringing them all under one common determinable (148d). Theaetetus is eager to solve the problem, but does not feel equal to the task, though he cannot persuade himself to let it drop from his mind. This shows that Theaetetus is “pregnant” with a thought which he cannot successfully bring to the birth. Now Socrates, like his mother, practices the obstetric art, not, like her, on the bodies of women, but on the souls of men. He has no spiritual offspring of his own to bear, as midwives are no longer fruitful when they enter on their profession.
But he has great skill in assisting at the birth of a younger man’s thoughts, and in discerning whether they are healthy and well formed or
First Definition of Knowledge (151e-186e) Knowledge and Sensation: The Theory Stated (151e-160d). With this encouragement Theaetetus attempts a first definition. A man who knows a thing “perceives” the thing he knows (as our own proverb says, “seeing is believing”). So we may say, as a first suggestion, that “knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) is just perception” (αἴσθησις).
This would seem to be only another way of saying what Protagoras expressed by the formula that “man is the measure.” Theaetetus, who has often read Protagoras (152a), agrees with Socrates that Protagoras meant by this that “what appears to me, is to me; what appears to you, is to you.” In fact, “I perceive this” = “this appears to me” = “this is so to me” (152b). “Sense” (αἴσθησις) is thus always apprehension
We should note very carefully exactly what is the theory here ascribed to Protagoras. (That the interpretation of his dictum is the correct interpretation, or at least that supposed by his readers at large to be correct, is clear, since it is assumed that all the parties to the conversation are quite familiar with the context of the saying, and not one of them suggests that there can be any mistake about its meaning.) The view Plato ascribes to Protagoras is not “subjectivism.” It is not suggested that “what appears to me” is a “mental modification” of myself. The theory is strictly realistic; it is assumed that “what appears to me” is never a “mere appearance” but always “that which is,” “reality.” But Protagoras denies that there is a common real world which can be known by two percipients. Reality itself is individual in the sense that I live in a private world known only to me, you in another private world known only to you. Thus if I say the wind is unpleasantly hot and you that it is disagreeably chilly, we both speak the truth, for each of us is speaking of a “real” wind, but of a “real” wind which belongs to that private world to which he, and only he, has access. No two of these private worlds have a single constituent in common, and that is precisely why it can be held that each of us is infallible about his own private world. Protagoras is not denying the genuine “objectivity” of each man’s private world; his equation of “appears to me” with “is, is real, to me” is meant to insist on this objectivity. But he denies the reality of the “common environment” presupposed by “intra-subjective intercourse.” His thesis is strictly metaphysical, not psychological.
But now, how if Protagoras really meant something more elaborate than this, and explained his meaning more fully to his intimates “in secret,” though he gave the world at large only this one hint of it? There is a “far from contemptible” (οὐ φαυλος) view which we might regard as implied by the Protagorean dictum, and it is as follows.
If you selected your standard differently, the same thing could truly be said to be “small” or “cold,” relatively to the new standard. This applies even to existential propositions. You cannot say absolutely “this is,” any more than you can say “this is so.” You can only say “this is, is real” relatively to something else. For the very word “is” is a misnomer. The things we speak of as “existing” are really events which “happen” as a consequence of movements; movement is the only thing which is ultimately real in the universe, as
Before we can judge such a theory on its merits we need a further clarification of our thoughts. On the “private-world” theory, six dice will not only “appear” but “be” at once “many” and “few”: “many,” if a group of four is my standard of comparison, “few” if my standard is a dozen. Reflection on such cases leads us irresistibly to make three affirmations which seem to be self-evident and yet not all mutually compatible: (1) nothing can become greater in bulk or number except by being augmented
Yet the case of the dice, or the case in which Socrates is one year taller than Theaetetus but the next shorter, seems to create a difficulty. In this last case, Theaetetus has grown, but Socrates has neither grown nor shrunk. He is now, what he was not last year, “shorter,” and yet there has been no process of “coming to be shorter.” How are we to explain the paradox? We cannot explain it at all to a corporealist who denies the reality of acts and processes and the invisible generally. But it might be explained y the theory of certain more refined (κομψότεροι) persons, whose secret Socrates offers to disclose (156a). Their theory is this. As has been already suggested, the only reality is motion. There are two types of motion, the active and the passive. The mutual friction or interference (τριψις) of an active and a passive motion regularly gives rise to a twin product, “sense” + “sensible quality” and neither of these is ever to be found without its “twin.” And this twin product is itself, again, a pair of movements, though of movements more rapid than those which gave rise to it. Thus, to apply the theory to the case of vision, you have first two “slower” causative “movements” (the “active” movement here is supposed to be the “event” which is the visual apparatus, the “passive” is the event we call the environment); when there is an “interference” of these two motions, in that very process there emerge two correlated “quicker” movements, neither of which ever exists without the other,
Thus the couple “seeing eye” and “colour seen” are themselves a dual more “rapid” event produced as an effect by the mutual interference of the two “slower” causal movements. It follows that all predication is strictly relative. The “causal” motions themselves are strictly relative to one another, each is “active” or “passive” only in relation to its correlate; and similarly in the “effect” the seen colour is seen only by this “seeing eye,” and this “seeing eye” sees only this colour. “Being” is thus a strictly relative term. To speak accurately, we ought never to say “x is,” but “x is, relatively to y”; if we omit the qualification, it is only because of an inveterate linguistic bad habit. Socrates does not
We note that the difference between the Protagorean formula and the doctrine now given as that of certain unnamed “fine wits” is that the first is a piece of “epistemology,” the second is ontology, and professes to give the grounds for the individualistic or “solipsist” epistemology. The proposition that my perceived world only exists for me, and that it is meaningless to ask whether your “world” and “mine” can contain one and the same object, is only one special consequence of the much more far-reaching doctrine that “is” itself has no meaning unless one adds the qualification “relatively to.” It is now being asserted not merely that perceived qualities only exist “for” the percipient who is aware of them, and he is only “percipient” of just these qualities, but that the correlated active and passive “slower” movements, thing and environment, only are relatively to one another. (Thus, e.g., the statement that a particle A exists would actually mean that A interacts in a certain way with B and C, and so on for B and C themselves.) This is why the doctrine described here cannot be disposed of in the summary way in which Mr. Bradley has disposed of the “phenomenalism” of many modern scientific men in Appearance and Reality. The persons of whom Mr. Bradley is thinking have really not got behind the restricted doctrine of the “relativity” of perceived quality to percipient. At the back of their minds there is still the notion that both percipient and perceived quality are effects of something which, though not itself perceived, is, or is real in an absolute sense, and thus they are easily convicted of inconsistency with themselves. But the theory we are now dealing with asserts that the “slower motions,” assumed by the victims of Mr. Bradley’s dialectic to be simply “real,” are themselves purely relative, each such “active” motion being relative to a specific “passive” motion and vice versa. It is thus not open to the criticism that it regards anything whatever, perceptible or imperceptible, as simply real; “this is real” is, on this view, always an incomplete statement which, as it stands, is strictly devoid of significance.
It is not clear from what quarter Socrates is supposed to have learned the theory. He is clearly not inventing it, since he represents it as the “secret” of certain refined wits. Nor do I think it likely that Plato has devised the whole thing for himself simply as a metaphysic which might be urged, and in fact would have to be urged, by a far-seeing defender of the Protagorean formula. The insistence on motion as the only reality at once suggests a Heraclitean influence, and the elaborate kinematic working out of the thought further suggests that the κομψοί (fashionable) of whom Socrates is thinking are persons with a strong mathematical interest. If we had more information than we have about the curious blend of
With this general metaphysical theory as a presupposition, we could now dispose of the superficial objection to Protagoras that some “appearances”—those of dreams, delirium, fever—are deceptive. The world of the sleeper or the fever-patient is as real to him, while his dream or fever lasts, as the world of the man awake and in health is to him. And it is not true to say that there is any conflict between the way in which the world appears to one and the same percipient, according as he is awake or asleep, ill or well. On the theory, the “twin-product,” sensation + sensed quality is a function of the complex, organism + environment. But it is an immediate consequence that, since a sleeping or delirious organism is different from a waking or healthy organism, the result of interaction with environment must be different. Socrates asleep is different from Socrates awake in important organic respects, and, on the theory we are considering there is no “self” or “percipient” but the organism as it is at the moment. Thus the sensa of Socrates asleep are real relatively to Socrates asleep, exactly as those of Socrates awake are real relatively to Socrates awake, and it would be abandoning the whole theory of the relativity of “being” to judge of the reality of the sensa of Socrates asleep by reference to those of Socrates awake (157e-160c). The sensa of any percipient organism at any moment are relative to the state of that organism at that moment, and to nothing else, just as that organism at that moment is relative to those sensa and to nothing else. (The esse of the organism at the moment t, we may say, is to perceive the sensa it perceives at that moment; the esse of those sensa is to be perceived by it at that moment; neither organism nor sensa have any further reality.) Consequently the “world” of any percipient at any moment is private to that percipient and that moment. “My perception is inerrant, for it is relative to my world (ἐμὴ οὐσία) at that moment.”
If we are to press mere verbal points, any
Socrates’ Proposed Defense of Protagoras (166a-168c). Protagoras might fairly say that he would not have been affected by the question about memory which puzzled a lad like Theaetetus. He would have exposed the absurdity of talking about memory as if it meant the “persistence” of the state of the organism in which it was at the moment of stimulation. He would have insisted on the point that, according to his theory, each of us is not one percipient but a different percipient with every change in the state of his organism. And he would have urged that it is for his opponent to refute him directly by proving either that a man’s “senses” (αἴσθησις) are not private to himself, or, alternatively, that, granting this position, the sense-object which “appears” or “is” need not be private.
Meanwhile, the thesis of Protagoras remains untouched. Each percipient has his own strictly personal and private world; it is not merely his “apparent” world, but a real, though private, world. And yet there is a difference between the wise man and his neighbors, a practical difference. The wise man is one who can influence another so that the other man’s private world, which appears and really is bad, is made to appear and be good (166d). Thus the abnormal perceptions of the diseased organism are as much a disclosure of reality as the normal perceptions of the healthy. The physician does not attempt to argue the patient into denying their reality. He subjects the patient to a regimen which brings his perceptions into accord with those of his fellow-men, and thus makes them “wholesome” or ”useful,” whereas they were, before treatment, dangerous and unwholesome. So the “sophist,” who is the physician of the soul, aims not at giving a pupil “truer views”—that would be impossible, if the pupil is the “measure” of his own real world—but at giving him “better” and more wholesome views of life (166d-167c). The defense made by Socrates for Protagoras thus amounts to crediting him with a “pragmatist” view. Any one belief, actually held, is as “true” as any other, but some sensations and some ways of thinking are “better” that is, “more useful his practice” than others. It is implied, though not actually said, that the “useful” way of perceiving and thinking is that
Since Socrates offers this interpretation as a substitute for an “official” exegesis, it is clear that it cannot have been given by Protagoras himself; since it is welcomed by Protagoras’ old admirer Theodoras, we may infer that it is offered as a fair and honest attempt to explain what Protagoras meant, on the assumption that he was a man of intelligence and that his doctrine was intended to be compatible with his claims for himself as a practical teacher. So far as I can see, it is not only offered in good faith, but is about the best defense which can be made for the view that the “common” world is strictly the creation of the “intersubjective intercourse” on which all practical co-operation depends. Against modern statements of pragmatism it has the advantage that it does not attempt the task of equating “true” with “practically useful”; it simply sets aside the distinction between “true” and “false” as irrelevant to human life, and replaces it by the obviously relevant distinction between “useful” and “harmful.” Our attention is thus concentrated on the fundamental question whether the abolition of the distinction of true from false really leaves this all-important practical distinction between useful and harmful standing or not. This ultimate issue is so serious that we cannot allow the case for the pragmatist to be prejudiced by being left to the championship of a boy, even if he is, like Theaetetus, a boy of genius; Theodoras must take the defense on himself (168c-169e).
Digression. The Contemplative Life (172c-176c). How far the pragmatist criterion is from being self-evident or universally accepted we may see by contrasting the whole attitude towards life of the philosopher or true man of science with that of the “man of affairs,” and the man of law. The former is free where the latter is a slave,
But from the philosopher’s point of view, the brilliant practical man is equally absurd. Take him away from the field of small personal concerns and set him to think about the ultimate issues of life, what are right and wrong, what are human happiness and misery, and how is the one to be found and the other shunned—in a word, take him out of the realm of the temporal into the eternal, and he is helpless in “discourse,” for all his forensic “acumen.”
This conflict between opposing standards of valuation is inherent in “mortality,” and that is the very reason why the man who means to be happy must make it his supreme aim to “escape” from mortality. The only way of escape is “to become assimilated
The whole passage recalls, and is obviously meant to recall, the spiritual mood and even the phraseology of the Gorgias and Phaedo. But its connexion with the present argument is loose, and hardly amounts to more than this, that the worldly man’s estimate of the philosopher and the philosopher’s estimate of him furnish the best proof that there is no single accepted standard of valuation. The most natural way of accounting for the presence of the digression is that of Burnet, that it is an expression of the mood in which Plato is contemplating his own coming absorption in the necessarily largely uncongenial mundane life of the Syracusan court. The ideal of the world-renouncing pure “scientist” had never been his own; his early ambitions had been definitely political, and his mature conviction was that the gifts of the philosopher ought to be consecrated to the work of practical administration, but we can readily understand that he would have a keen sense of the sacrifice he was making to public duty and the pettiness of the personalities and problems with which he was now called to mix himself up (Greek Philosophy, Part I pp. 244-5). It would be a bad mistake, though the mistake has been made, to find in so splendid a passage a polemic against the aims of his older rival Isocrates. Whatever the limitations of Isocrates were, Plato must have sympathized with his attempt to give his pupils at least a broader and nobler outlook on the problems of public life than that of the mere party-man of a little Greek πόλις; the whole picture of the “man of affairs” who is pitted against the philosopher suggests in its details an admirer of Antiphon or Thrasymachus rather than a figure from the school of Isocrates, the last place where the cult of “successful unrighteousness” would be likely to be in favour.
Second Criticism of the Protagorean Thesis Concluded (176c-179b). To return—We had just said that though the thinkers who identify reality with change and those who teach that “what appears to anyone is for him the reality,” are ready enough to extend these formulae to right and wrong, no one seriously contends that what a city agrees to regard as good or useful must really be so, so long as the agreement continues. Everyone recognizes that what is really good or profitable is so independently of the beliefs which may be entertained about it. Now this suggests a generalization of the problem raised by the saying of Protagoras. When a city makes regulations to ensure good or advantage, it is acting with a view to the future. So we may ask, granting that the Homo mensura formula is valid for convictions about the present,
Final Refutation of the Identification of Knowledge with Sense-perception (179d-186e). The complete examination of the theory that actual present sense-perception is knowledge demands a consideration of the already mentioned metaphysical theory that nothing is real but movement. We cannot get any coherent statement of the grounds for this theory from its official representatives, the Heracliteans, who disdain connected exposition and affect to speak in cryptic aphorisms; we must try what we can make of the doctrine for ourselves (179e-180c). We must remember, too, that Melissus and Parmenides maintain the very opposite—that what is is one and unmoving. A complete examination would involve studying the views both of the “men of flux” (the ρέοντες) and of the “faction of the one-and-all“” (the του ὅλος στασιωται); it might end by carrying us over into one of the camps, or by leaving us in the comically presumptuous position of standing alone against both parties. Still we must make the venture, and we will begin by considering the Heraclitean view (180c-181b).
Everything is always in motion: what is the precise sense of this? There are two easily distinguishable types of “motion”: (a) one which includes translation and rotation, which we will call locomotion (φορά); (b) another illustrated by the transition from youth to age, from black to white, from hard to soft; we will call it alteration (ἀλλοίωσις). Is it meant, then, that everything is at every moment changing both its position and its quality, or only that each thing is at every moment exhibiting one or other of these changes? If the statement that there is no rest or stability in the world at all is meant strictly, we must take the former interpretation. Nothing ever keeps the same quality for the tiniest interval, any more than it retains the same position (181e). Otherwise there would be some sort of stability about things.
Socrates now enters on a line of thought which is by far the most important contribution the dialogue has as yet made to the solution of its problem. He calls attention to the, so far neglected, distinction between sensation and thought, or judgment. We can point out the bodily instruments which a man uses in seeing, hearing, touching. He sees with his eyes, hears with his ears, and so forth. Or to be still more accurate, since it is always the man, that is his ψυχή, which sees and hears, we should do well to say rather that he sees and hears through his eyes and ears (184d).
If we try to make a list of the determinations of an object which are thus made “without any bodily organ,” we have to reckon among them not only “reality” (οὐσία), number, sameness, difference, likeness and unlikeness, but good and bad, right and wrong (186a). Thus the ultimate categories of value, like those of “fact,” are apprehended by thought, not by sense. In fact, they are asserted as the result of reflection, comparison, and discrimination: this explains why animals are as capable of sensation as men, and babies as adults (186c), but sound convictions about “reality and value” (οὐσία and ὠφέλεια) are only attained by us with time and pains and education. Now we cannot have knowledge without apprehension of a “reality” (οὐσία) which is known. Hence it follows that “knowledge” is not to be sought for in the affections of our sensibility (τοις παθήμασι) but in the mind’s reflection upon them (ἐν τω περὶ ἐκείνων, 186d). And this finally proves that knowledge is not the same thing as sensation (ibid. b).
Second Definition: Knowledge Is True Judgment (187b-200c). The common name for the process of reflection, comparison, and discrimination to which the occurrence of our sensations gives rise is “belief” or “judgment” (δόξα, τὸ δοξάζειν). The word δόξα is being used here in a way characteristic of Plato’s later dialogues. In his earlier writing δόξα had commonly been thought of as contrasted with ἐπιστήμη; it had meant “belief,” with the implication that the belief is a mistaken one, or at any rate a doubtful one; in our dialogue, and henceforward, the meaning is judgment, intellectual conviction in general, without any suggestion of disparagement. This is one of the many indications that a chief difference
If we are to examine the truth of this statement, we must begin by considering the difficulty suggested by the old arguments which have been used to show that a false judgment is impossible. The old argument, which we have met in the Euthydemus, was that either you know what you are judging about or you do not. If you do know, you cannot judge falsely; and if you do not, you cannot make any judgment at all, because your mind is a mere blank about that of which you “know nothing.” The point has now to be considered elaborately with a view to discovering the specific character of true judgments. If a man knows both A and B, it would seem that he cannot mistake one for the other; if he knows A but not B, how can he compare A with the merely unknown? If both A and B are unknown, is not the impossibility of a confusion even greater (188a-c). Perhaps we may avoid these difficulties if we say that a false judgment is a belief in “what is not” (188d), thus avoiding all reference to “knowing” in our definition.
But the “unreal” (τὸ μὴ ὄν), it may be said, is just nothing at all, and you can no more think and yet think nothing than you can see and yet see nothing. To think or believe is always to think or believe something; to think nothing is all one with not thinking at all. (Just as Parmenides had long ago declared that “what is not” can neither be thought nor spoken of.) This consideration leads us to try a third explanation of what we mean by a false judgment. We mean thinking that one reality (one ὄν) is some other reality, thinking that something is other than it is (ἀλλοδοξία) (mistaking one thing for another); false thinking is thus the mental confusion of one reality with another (189c), e.g. thinking that “fair is foul and foul is fair.” In the Sophistes we shall find that this is the true account of the matter and can be successfully defended against the Eleatic dialectic. But the defense will depend on recognizing that the Eleatic metaphysic itself requires a grave modification; there is a sense in which “the unreal” can be both thought and spoken of. In our dialogue Socrates is not allowed to probe the question to the bottom; he has already explained that he is not prepared at present to examine Eleaticism as a metaphysical theory. He contents himself therefore with raising the question within what limits the “confusion” of one reality with another would seem to be possible.
We may represent the process figuratively thus. There is something in each of us like a wax block prepared to receive the “impressions” of signets of all kinds; the quality of the wax is very different in different persons. We may regard sensation as a process in which an object stamps an impression of itself on the wax (the whole of the traditional language about “impressions” and “ideas” is ultimately derived from this passage).
How definite this impress is and how long it will remain undeformed depends on the original quality of the wax. So long as the impress remains, we may say that a man has memory and knowledge (191d). Now consider the case of a man who “knows” the impresses left on the block, and at the same time is attending to his present sensations. We may say that the confusion with which we have identified error can only arise in one specific way. If I “know” both Theodorus and Theaetetus and am simply thinking about one of them, I cannot confuse him with the other. If I “know” only one of them, I cannot confuse him in thought with the other, who is wholly unknown to me. If I neither “know” nor am
On reflection, however, this theory proves to be unsatisfactory in spite of its attractiveness. For it is not the fact that all error is misinterpretation of present sensation. A man may falsely think that 7+5 = 11, and most men do make arithmetical errors of this kind in operating with big numbers. And they do not make such mistakes only when they are counting things present to their senses, but when they are simply thinking of numbers and numerical relations. Thus error (and by consequence true judgment) cannot be restricted to the interpretation of present sensations. There may be false (and also true) judgments where the “sensible” does not figure as a constituent of the judgment at all (195d-196b). Thus our simile of the waxen block has not done what we hoped it would for us. (It has the merit of taking into account the facts of learning and forgetting, ignored in the crude old argument against the possibility of “false beliefs,” but it leaves the possibility of sheer intellectual error where it found it.
To cover the case of purely intellectual error we must amend our account of ἀλλοδοξία, and this may be done if we borrow a hint from a current statement about knowledge. (It is true that a mere “disputant for victory” would deny our right to use any such statement while we are still in quest of a definition of knowledge, but the fault, if it is one, is inevitable, and we have committed
Clearly the new suggestion has advanced the argument. As Socrates says, the distinction between knowledge in possession and knowledge in use has relieved us of the old difficulty that false judgment seems to involve both knowing and not knowing the same thing; there is no difficulty in admitting that a man “possesses” what he cannot lay his hand on. We may add (1) that a comparison of “beliefs” with living creatures is psychologically much sounder than the old comparison with “impresses” made once for all on a block of wax; judgment is a living process, not the mere retention of a stamp left on the mind once for all; (2) that the distinction made here is the starting-point for the more extended antithesis of “potentiality” and “actuality”
But there is still a grave unsolved difficulty. Error is now said to be due to a wrong “use” of knowledge which we already have in possession. If this is so, a man’s knowledge is the direct source of his false judgments; he only confuses A with B because he possesses “knowledge” of them both. At this rate, might we not equally say that error may be the cause of knowledge, or blindness of vision? (This difficulty is perhaps not meant to be taken wholly
Theaetetus suggests that we might elude this difficulty by modifying our image. We might say that there are “ignorances” as well as “pieces of knowledge” in the aviary, and that the man who makes a false judgment is putting his hand on an “ignorance.” But if that is so, since he really believes his false judgment, he must suppose the “ignorance” to be a piece of knowledge. And this gives an opening to the eristic for raising the old problem once more. Can a man who knows what knowledge and ignorance are confuse one with the other? And if he does not know what both are, how can he confuse something he knows with something of which he is quite unaware, or one thing of which he is unaware with another of which he is equally unaware? If we try to meet our opponent by suggesting that there is a “knowledge of the difference between knowledge and ignorance” which is a sort of knowledge of the second order, and that false judgment arises from inability to put one’s hand on this knowledge, we shall clearly be involved in an impossible “infinite regress” (200c). Thus the point which Socrates is labouring is the sound one that it is impossible to have a psychological criterion of true and false beliefs.
Independently of this impossibility of a criterion, there is an obvious objection to the identification of knowledge with a “true belief.” A man may be induced to hold a belief which in fact is true not by proof but by persuasive dexterous special pleading.
Third Definition: Knowledge Is “True Judgment Accompanied by Discourse” (201d-210d). Possibly the difficulty just raised may be turned. As Theaetetus says, he had forgotten to specify that a true judgment, to be
The analogy from letters and syllables is specious, but we must examine it more closely. It is true that the first syllable of Socrates’ name, the syllable So, has a certain λόγος. You can say that it is S and o the letter S has no such λόγος. You can make statements about it, e.g. that it is a “hissing” sound, but you cannot explain the sound by analysing it into components. But now arises a difficult question. Is the syllable So simply the sounds or signs S and o, taken in that order, or is it a new unity of a type different from that of its “component” sounds or symbols? If you take the first view, that So is just “S and o,” then it seems ridiculous to say that a man can “know” “S and o,” and yet neither know S nor know o. On the second view, So is itself a unity, and has not really S and o as “constituent” parts. Hence the syllable should, like the single letter, be an object of simple apprehension, and therefore, on the proposed definition, not an object of knowledge (202d-205e). Besides, the experience of our own early schooldays seems to show that we learned to recognize syllables simply by learning to recognize the letters of which they are composed; this tells forcibly against the view that “syllables” can be known when their component “letters” are not known (206a-c).
Apart from the question of the soundness of this analogy from letters and syllables, what may we suppose to be meant by λόγος (“discourse”) in the statement that knowledge is “a true judgment” accompanied by discourse? Three, and only three, possible meanings occur to us. (a) “discourse” may mean actual uttered speech made up of nouns and verbs. This, however, cannot be the meaning intended, for any true judgment can be expressed in speech, even if it is not entitled to rank as knowledge (206d). (b) Or the meaning might be a complete enumeration of the component “parts” of the thing thought about. Hesiod says that a hundred planks go to a wagon. You and I cannot name more than a few of them: is it meant, then, that we have only a “…”true judgment“…” about a wagon, but should know what a wagon is, if we could name all the hundred? The objection to this interpretation is that we cannot say that a man really knows a complex unless he can recognize its components not merely as components of that
This account looks as though it ought to be true, but when you examine it closely it is as perplexing as theatrical stage-paintings seen from close quarters. How can I have a “true judgment” about Theaetetus at all, if I am not alive to the distinctive individual characters which mark off Theaetetus from every one else? If I am unaware of them, how can my judgment be said to be about Theaetetus rather than about Theodoras or any man you please? Thus it would seem that to make a true judgment about Theaetetus, I must already have the differentia of Theaetetus in mind. Then what is added when this true judgment is converted into knowledge by the addition of the “discourse” of the differentia? It cannot be meant that we are to add a “true judgment” of the differentia to our existing true judgment, for we must clearly have possessed that in order to make a true judgment about Theaetetus. And to say that what is meant is that we reach knowledge when we not merely think but actually know the differentia amounts to the circular definition that “knowledge is true judgment plus knowledge of the differentia” (208c-210e).
Thus our dialogue of search ends formally with a negative conclusion. Three suggestions have been made and all found untenable. Theaetetus has no further suggestion of which to be delivered. If he should ever find himself pregnant with any further suggestions in future, we must examine them in the same fashion. It is not the function of Socrates to make any positive contribution to knowledge, and besides it is time that he went to the “…”king’s“…” office to make his formal reply to the indictment preferred by Meletus (210b-d).
The Theaetetus has thus been true to type as a Socratic dialogue in ending with no avowed results. But negatively we have reached a series of results of the highest importance. We have disposed of the identification of knowledge with sensation or any form of simple apprehension. We have also seen that pure relativism is untenable alike in the theory of knowledge and in metaphysics. It may be added that it has been at least forcibly suggested by the tenor of the whole argument that all the proposed definitions have failed precisely because each of them has attempted to provide a psychological criterion of knowledge, and no such psychological criterion is possible. The most important positive
Possibly the most striking feature of the whole dialogue is its silence on a matter about which we should have expected to hear something. Plato has written a long and elaborate discussion of knowledge without making a single reference to the doctrine of forms, though we might have thought it almost impossible for him to keep it out of the argument against relativism. A similar silence may be said to occur in all the dialogues we still have to examine. The forms are mentioned only in two of them: the Parmenides, where the doctrine is said to be that of Socrates in his early years and is criticised by Parmenides and Zeno, and the Timaeus, where it is put into the mouth of a fifth-century Pythagorean. I do not see how to account for these facts on the view that Plato had himself originated the doctrine and regarded it as his special contribution to philosophy. If we trust his own accounts of the matter, we shall find it most natural to suppose that in the earlier dialogues, which speak of the forms, Plato has not yet developed a doctrine which he feels to be specifically his own; he is reproducing the common inheritance of Socratic men. If that is so, the silence about the forms in the Theaetetus may mean either that when he wrote that dialogue he was feeling the necessity for a “Platonic” doctrine which had not yet been definitely worked out, or else that he had already arrived at the results Aristotle always assumes to be the Platonic teaching, and felt that they were so definitely his own that dramatic verisimilitude would be outraged by putting them into the mouth of Socrates.
See further:
Burnet. Greek Philosophy, Part I, 234-253.
Campbell, L. The Theaetetus of Plato 2. Oxford, 1883.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii. 96-120; Gedankengang und Grundan schauungen on Platos Theatet in appendix to Untersuch ungen ueber Platon. Stuttgart, 1888.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 279-297.
Diels, H. Elementum. Leipzig, 1899.
Dies, A. Autour de Platon, 450-452.
Stewart, J. A. Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 65-68.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 88-116.
Sachs, E. de Theaeteto Atheniensi. 1914.
Chapter XIV. Parmenides
It is most probable that the Parmenides and the Theaetetus were composed almost simultaneously. The Parmenides cannot well be a decidedly earlier work than the other, since it exhibits the same interest in Eleaticism and its great founder Parmenides; it cannot well be later, since it is the best example in Plato of that cumbrousness of the indirectly reported dialogue form which is mentioned in the Theaetetus as the reason for return to the simpler type of the earliest dialogues. Indeed, it may well be that it was just the difficulty of keeping up in the Parmenides the fiction that the whole is recited by a speaker to whom it had been formerly recited by a second person, who in his turn had heard it from a third, which led Plato to renounce this type of composition for the future. It had been useful so long as his purpose had been largely dramatic, but was found to be worse than useless for works in which the main interest lies in the analysis and criticism of ideas.
The dialogue has always been regarded as an exceptionally puzzling one, and the most divergent views have been held about its main purpose. Yet if we attend to certain plain hints, given by Plato himself, we may find that his object is indicated with unusual clearness. The general scheme of the dialogue is this. It falls into two parts of unequal length. In the first and briefer part (126a-135c) Socrates is represented as a very young man expounding his newly formulated theory of the “participation” of sensible things in forms to the great Parmenides and his famous scholar Zeno; Parmenides subjects the theory to a series of criticisms which look annihilating and to which Socrates offers no reply. Still he maintains that philosophy cannot dispense with the conception of the forms. The weakness of Socrates is that, being very young, he is attempting to philosophize without a sufficient logical discipline in considering all the consequences which follow from the acceptance or denial of a fundamental “hypothesis.” In the second part of the dialogue (136a-166c), Parmenides illustrates the kind of logical discipline he has in mind by taking for examination his own thesis that “Reality is One” or that “Things are a Unity.” He apparently shows in a series of antithetical “antinomies” that whether this thesis is affirmed or denied, the consequence is that a host of pairs of contradictory
Now it is quite certain that Plato never dreamed of denying the law of Contradiction; Aristotle would certainly have said something on the point if that had been so.
We get a clue to Plato’s real drift when he makes Parmenides say (135d) that the method of which he is about to give an example is that of Zeno, the inventor of “antinomies.” This remark is clearly meant to send us back to the earlier sentences (128c-d) in which Zeno has been made to explain the real intention of his own famous puzzles. His purpose, he says, was simply to retort on opponents who said that the Parmenidean doctrine “reality is one” leads to paradoxical conclusions by showing that their rival “hypothesis” that “reality is many” leads to still worse paradoxes. If we interpret the Parmenides, as we clearly ought to do, in the light of these broad hints, we shall see that it is constructed on the same pattern as the paradoxes of Zeno. A series of attempts to show that the Socratic “hypothesis” of forms leads to impossible results is retorted upon by an elaborate attempt to show that the Eleatic hypothesis is in still worse case. It is not safe even to mention it, for whether you assert it or deny it, in either case a clever formal logician can compel you to admit either that all assertions whatsoever are true or alternatively that they are all false.
It follows then that the objections urged against the doctrine of sensible things as “partaking of” forms are not Plato’s own, and are not meant as a serious criticism by himself either of Socrates or of his own earlier theories. They correspond to the objections against Parmenides which Zeno had in view in composing his own work. In other words, we are directed to regard these criticisms as coming from opponents of the theory of “participation.” And since Plato’s imitation of the Zenonian method takes the form of raising still worse puzzles about the consequences of the Eleatic doctrine, it is clear who these opponents must be. We must look for them among the formal logicians of the school of Megara who were the continuators of Eleaticism. It is in strict keeping with this interpretation that the main point of the objections made by Parmenides to Socrates is not to raise difficulties about the reality of the forms. That he seems to concede. What he criticises is
If this is the right way to understand the dialogue, and Plato seems to tell us that it is, it follows that the Parmenides is, all through, an elaborate jeu d’esprit, and that all interpretations based on taking it for anything else (including an earlier one by the present writer), are mistaken in principle. It equally follows that the ironical spirit of the work must not be forgotten in dealing with isolated passages. E.g., when Parmenides gravely censures Socrates for refusing to believe in forms of mud and dirt, and says that he will get the better of such a prejudice when he grows older and more philosophical (130e), we must understand the remark to be a piece of polite irony. In Parmenides’ mouth, it can only mean that a man who is going to admit any kind of reality in sensible things ought to be prepared to “go the whole hog” and nothing more. Presumably the remark is a reproduction of actual Megarian criticism. It tells us nothing of Plato’s own thought. More than any other Platonic work of any considerable compass, the Parmenides bears throughout the stamp of being an “occasional” composition. Its purpose is to “have some fun” with Monists who regard the sensible as illusion, and very little more.
There are several interesting points to be noted in connexion with the introductory narrative. The otherwise unknown speaker, Cephalus, who recites the dialogue, is a citizen of Clazomenae, the native town of Anaxagoras. It is not said where he is speaking or to whom, but apparently the scene is in one of the Ionian cities. The assumption is that he had gone to Athens expressly to learn the true story of the meeting between Socrates and the great Eleatics from the only surviving person who could relate it, Plato’s own half-brother Antiphon, son of Perictione by her second husband, the well-known statesman Pyrilampes. Antiphon could tell the tale accurately because he had often heard it when he was younger, from Pythodorus. (The person meant is the well-known Pythodorus, son of Isolochus, prominent in the Archidamian war, whom the writer of the Alcibiades I names as an actual pupil of Zeno.) Pythodorus had been the host of Parmenides and Zeno on their visit to Athens at the time of the great Panathenaea in a year when Socrates was still “very young.” It follows from all this that we are to suppose the meeting of Socrates with the Eleatic
Why does Plato make this unparalleled assumption that a conversation of Socrates is being repeated outside Athens, after Socrates’ death and a good half-century after the holding of the conversation? Clearly, by insisting on the early date of the conversation, and the fact that no one is living who could check the third-hand report of what passed, he frees himself from responsibility for the strict accuracy of his narrative. If we find the conversation so à propos to present-day Megarianism, well, we only know what Socrates and Parmenides said from a second-hand story told by Antiphon, a younger man than Plato himself, and who will go bail for Antiphon? I think it ought also to be said that the tale of the anxiety of the Ionian philosophers to hear Antiphon’s story justifies an inference. Why the lonians of Asia Minor should feel this interest is obvious. They would be members of the school founded in Ionia by Anaxagoras on his removal from Athens; Socrates, the favourite pupil of Anaxagoras’ successor Archelaus, would in any case be an object of interest to such a group. That Plato thinks it a plausible fiction that their interest should lead them to visit Athens in order to gather a true account of events fifty years old seems only explicable on the supposition that the encounter of Socrates with the great Eleatics was a real historical fact and, for philosophical circles, a memorable one, as an encounter between two great chess-players or gamblers is memorable for persons interested in chess or gaming.
The situation at the opening of the conversation is this. Zeno has just been reading aloud his famous work containing the antinomies for which he is still remembered. Socrates fastens on one of them, an argument which has not survived and of which the precise sense is uncertain, to the effect that “if things are many, they must be like and must also be unlike, but this is absurd,” as an example of the rest. He proposes to regard the whole work as intended to establish the thesis of Parmenides by disproving its contradictory. Parmenides says “reality is one,“ Zeno that “reality is not many.” Zeno accepts the statement with the minor correction that his object was not to prove the Parmenidean thesis, but simply to silence its critics by showing that their own rival “hypothesis” has even more impossible consequences than those they urge against Parmenides (127d-128e). Socrates then suggests that if we will only accept the doctrine of forms and the participation of things in forms, there is really no paradox in saying that the same “things” may “partake” at once of the form of likeness and of that of unlikeness, and so be at once like and unlike. But it would be a real and intolerable paradox (τέρας) to hold that
I may summarize these arguments the more briefly that they are admirably dealt with by Professor Burnet in Greek Philosophy, Part I, 253-264, and other writers on the philosophy of Plato. I have attempted a complete discussion of their weight and derivation elsewhere in “Parmenides, Zeno, and Socrates,” Philosophical Studies, pp. 28-90, whither I may refer a reader desirous of further information.
Parmenides begins by raising the question what precisely is the content of the world of forms. Socrates professes himself certain that there are forms corresponding to the fundamental notions of ethics—Right (δίκαιον), Good (αγαθόν), Noble (καλόν); he is doubtful about forms of organisms and physical things (Man, Fire, Water); in the case of such things as mud, dirt, hair—i.e.
The theory then is that all the “particulars” of which a common predicate is affirmed owe their possession of that predicate to their “participation” in the corresponding form, and Parmenides sets himself to show that, however we understand this relation of “participation,” we are led to consequences which are logically absurd. This is exactly the line of reasoning adopted by Zeno for the confutation of the Pythagorean mathematicians who assume that “reality is many.” The argument may be analysed as follows:
(a) If a form is “in” each of a number of things, either the whole of it is “in” each of them, or only part of it is “in” each. In the first case the form itself being as a whole “in” each of several separate things is “outside” itself (i.e. it is, after all, many and not one, contrary to the Socratic thesis of its unity). In the second case, the form is divisible (μεριστόν), and thus becomes many by division just as, on the alternative view, it becomes many by multiplication; the whole form is thus “in” no one of the things called after it, and thus they are not really entitled to the “common name” (131a-e). Thus we have an apparent reductio ad absurdum of the “hypothesis” of “participation”; it permits of only two alternative interpretations and you are led, by a slightly different route, to the same denial of the hypothesis itself, whichever alternative you adopt. The hypothesis is thus “self-refuting.” (The precise meaning of the reasoning by which the second of the alternatives is refuted in the special case of the form “magnitude” is obscure, but seems to be this. If you say that one thing is bigger than another in virtue of the presence in it of a ”part” of the form of “magnitude,” less than the whole of the form, you are maintaining in effect that there is such a relation as “not quite bigger than.” Thus you are committed to holding that, e.g., if A and B are segments of a straight line, the relation between them may be that A is “not quite longer” than, or “nearly longer” than B, and this is manifestly nonsense. So, in the case of the form of “smallness,” you are committed to the view that it would be significant to say that “A is nearly smaller than B, but not quite
(b) The reason and the only reason for Socrates’ doctrine is the assumption that when several things have a common predicate, it is assumed that there is a single determinate reality (the form) denoted by this predicate. But it ought to follow that, since the common predicate can be affirmed of the form itself, there must be a second form “present” alike to the first form and the things which “participate” in it, and similarly, by the same reason, a third, and so on in indefinitum. Thus there must be no one single form of, e.g., magnitude, but a simply infinite series of forms of magnitude; thus, once more, the Socratic theory is shown to be self-refuting, and again it is the asserted “presence” of forms to things which has created the difficulty (132a-b).
In strict logic this reasoning is not conclusive, since it turns on a confusion between a predication and the assertion of an identity. E.g. David and Jonathan are a pair of friends, Orestes and Pylades are another pair. Both pairs have something in common, the cardinal number 2, which is the number of the members of each. But the number 2 is not itself a pair; it is a number, and cannot be said to have a number. Since Plato’s object is merely to rehearse the objections of Eleatics to the Socratic doctrine in order to over-trump them by showing that their own methods can be turned with even more effect against their own theories, we need not suppose that he was unaware of this logical flaw, though he has no occasion to expose it. He had already made Socrates himself in the Republic (597c) remark in passing that if you once surrender the absolute unity of the form by admitting that there can be two forms of the same thing, you are committed to the “infinite regress.” We may reasonably infer that this kind of reasoning was already current in Socrates’ own lifetime, not invented for the first time after his death by Eleatic critics of the positions ascribed to him in the Platonic dialogues. Hence I think it unlikely that this particular difficulty has anything to do with the difficulty urged, as Alexander of Aphrodisias tells us, by Polyxenus the Megarian against the doctrine of “participation.” As I understand the statements of Alexander, the point of Polyxenus was that on the Platonic theory there ought to be not only visible men, like Socrates and Plato, and a form of man, but also a “third” man, intermediate between the two, exactly as, on the Platonic theory itself, there are certain “mathematical objects” intermediate between the form of
(c) At this point Socrates suggests a way of escape from the difficulty about the unity of the form. How if a form is really a “thought” (νόημα) and therefore is not “in” things at all, but “in our minds” (ἐν ψυχαις)? We could then maintain its unity without exposing ourselves to either of the lines of argument (a) and (b). Parmenides, however, has a reply based on the principle which is employed in his own poem as the foundation of his criticism of all his precursors. You cannot think without thinking of something—that is, of something real (to think of nothing would be equivalent to not thinking at all); this something is some one determinate thing which “that thought thinks, as being there in all the instances.” In other words, what the thought thinks is always a form. (E.g., when you think of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, you think some definite predicate about them, such as, e.g., that they are all men, and thus we are back at our old position. You are thinking of man as a form “present” to the three.) What then, on this view that a form is a thought, can the “presence” of the form to the thing mean? Does it mean that a thing is a complex of thoughts and that everything thinks? Or would you admit that there are “thoughts which do not think”? (132b-c).
Once more, the difficulty is one not about the reality of the form but about the possibility of the “presence” of it to something
(d) Socrates next falls back on what Aristotle regarded as the Pythagorean formula for the relation between form and thing. The form is an archetype or model (ωαράδειγμα), the other things called by its name are likenesses (ὁμοιώμασατα) of it, so that the relation between sensible thing and form is that the “thing” is a
As before, the difficulty really arises from a fallacy. As Proclus rightly says, the relation of copy to original is not simply one of likeness. (It is in fact a relation of resemblance + derivation, and this relation is not symmetrical. My reflection in the glass is a reflection of my face, but my face is not a reflection of it.) It should be specially remarked that the suggestion that the relation between form and “thing” is one of “likeness” is not offered as an alternative to the doctrine of “participation,” but as a further specification of its precise meaning (132d 3, ἡ μέθεξς αὕτη…των εἰδων οὐκ ἄλλη τις ἢ εἰκασθηναι αὐτοις), and that Parmenides meets both formulae with precisely the same objection that they appear to involve the “indefinite regress.”
(e) The gravest difficulty of all has yet to be faced. It is that the recognition of two “worlds,” presupposed by Socrates, a world of forms and an “other” world of “things” which somehow “partake” of the forms, leads direct to complete scepticism (133a-135c). For the world of which each of us is a member is ex hypothesi not the world of forms, but the “other” world (since it had been observed at the outset that each of us is a man, none of us is the “form of man”). Consequently the relations between forms will belong exclusively to the world or system of related forms; corresponding relations of which “we” are terms will belong to “our world” and will have their correlates within “our world.” There will be a relation between “master” as such and “servant” as such, and the terms of this will be the form of master and the form of servant. But each of us will be master or servant to another man, and the relation between this pair will fall outside the world of forms; it will connect one man with another man, not with a form. So the correlate of the form of knowledge will be Reality as such. But the correlate of our knowledge will be such reality as the objects of our world possess. And it is admitted that “our” knowledge is not the form of knowledge (that is, the knowledge we have is partial and imperfect). Its counterpart therefore is not the completely real. We are precluded from knowing what real good is, for the counterpart of a merely relative and partial knowledge must be a relative and partial reality. And we may invert the argument with even more startling results. God, at any rate, might be supposed to possess “absolute” or “perfect”
Yet to deny the reality of forms is destructive of thought itself, since it amounts to a denial of the possibility of definite knowledge, if Socrates has been badly perplexed by the discussion which has just been closed, it is because, in his zeal, he has attempted to enunciate his doctrine about forms without a sufficient preparatory discipline in arid and apparently “useless” formal logic. The kind of discipline required may be exemplified by Zeno’s famous antinomies, but needs to go even beyond them. Zeno had attempted to prove the thesis that “reality is many” self-refuting any showing that it can be made to lead to pairs of contradictory conclusions. For a really searching investigation it is not enough to ask what follows from the assertion of a thesis, but also what follows from the denial of it. E.g. Zeno should have asked not merely, “If things are many, what can be asserted about the many things, and what about the unit, and about the relation of the two?” But also, “If things are not many, what follows about plurality, the unit, and their relations?” (It was not enough to argue that the consequences of Pluralism are self-contradictory; the same issue should have been raised about the consequences of denying Pluralism.) Complete investigation of any proposed philosophical principle demands this twofold consideration of the implications both of its assertion and of its denial (135b-136c).
In these remarks, which effect a transition to the second half of the dialogue, there are two interesting implications. If Parmenides ascribes the helplessness of the young Socrates in face of the difficulties just raised to want of training in formal logic, we may infer that the suggestion is that the apparently formidable arguments are themselves fallacious and would be seen to be so by a more practiced logician. That is, the fault of Plato’s Megarian critics is not that they are logicians, but that they are not logical enough. If we are only thorough enough with our logic, the alleged logical objections to the metaphysic of forms will vanish of themselves, It seems further to be meant that the particular fault of these logicians is one-sidedness. They scrutinize the consequences of the
In the second part of the dialogue Parmenides consents to give an elaborate example of the kind of logical method he has been recommending, choosing as the respondent to his questions the youngest member of the party, Aristoteles, on the ground that his very youth will be a guarantee that his answers will be given without finesse of any kind. The thesis selected for examination is, naturally enough, Parmenides’ own principle that “reality is one.” (136c-137c. It is significant that he speaks of the whole proceeding as an elaborate “game” (παιδιά), a plain hint that the antinomies now to follow are not to be taken quite seriously, and that we must not be surprised if there is a touch of conscious “sophistry” about some of them. In fact, it is incredible that Plato should not have known that some of them are pure fallacies. But, as his purpose is simply to show that the methods of his critics can be made to recoil on themselves, it is strictly fair that he should play their game by their own rules. Any kind of reasoning they permit themselves is equally permissible in a “skit” upon them.)
According to the programme already laid down by Parmenides, we should expect to find him raising four problems: (1) if the real is one, what can be asserted about this one real? (2) if the real is one, what can be said about “the many”? (3) if the real is not one, what can be said about the one? (4) if the real is not one, what can be said about the many? But by a further refinement, each of these questions is raised twice over, the purpose being to show that on either assumption (that the real is one or that it is not one) you can make it appear at pleasure either that contradictory predicates can be both affirmed or both denied alike of the one and of the many. Thus we get altogether eight arguments forming four “antinomies”—two in which the subject of both thesis and antithesis is the one, and two in which it is the many. The issue is that the apparent dilemma to which Socrates had been reduced at the end of the first part of the dialogue, that knowledge of the real is equally impossible with or without his theory about forms and “participation” is more than matched by the dilemma offered to the Eleatics, and maliciously offered through the mouth of their own founder Parmenides professing to be applying their own peculiar method, that, whether you accept or reject their Monism, you must either simultaneously assert or simultaneously deny both members of an indefinite series of contradictory pairs of propositions.
A{ I. If the real is one, nothing whatever can be asserted of it (137c-142a).
A{ II. If the real is one, everything can be asserted of it (142b-157c).
B{ III. If the real is one, everything can be asserted of “things other than the one” (157b-159b).
B{ IV. If the real is one, nothing can be asserted of “things other than the one” (159b-160b).
C{ V. If the one is unreal, everything can be asserted of it (160b-163b).
C{ VI. If the one is unreal, nothing at all can be asserted of it (163b-164b).
D{ VII. If the one is unreal, everything can be asserted about “things other than the one” (164b-165e)
D{ VIII. If the one is unreal, nothing can be asserted about anything (165e-166c)
It would be taking Plato’s metaphysical jest too gravely to make a minute examination of all the details of these bewildering arguments. It will be sufficient to point out the peculiar character of the dialectical method employed and to summarize the results. The peculiarities of the method are dictated by the consideration that it is avowedly a parody of that of Zeno. Now Zeno’s special trick of fence, a perfectly legitimate one, was to turn one-half of the assumed “postulates” of his opponents against the other half. This is the secret, for example, of the famous “paradoxes” about motion. The double assumption of the geometers whom Zeno is criticising is that (a) any finite segment of a straight line can be bisected, (b) such a segment is a path between two end-points which are finite minima of magnitude. The geometers cannot give up (a) without ruining their whole scientific edifice; they cannot give up (b) without destroying the parallelism between geometry and arithmetic which is part of their system. Zeno turns (a) against (b). From (a) it follows at once that there must be an endless series of points intermediate between any two given “end-points” and this is fatal to the view that the point has a finite magnitude. His reasoning silences his opponents because they are not prepared to surrender (a) by admitting the existence of “indivisible lines” nor yet to give up (b) by regarding the point as a geometrical zero. In exactly the same way, the “hypothesis” of the Eleatics—“if It is one” or “if there is One”—as they understand it, really covers two assumptions—(a) unity is real, (b) reality is unity; Plato’s trick is to play off one of these assumptions against the other. This will come out more clearly if we compare the main positions of the antithetical members of each “antinomy.”
A. 1. “It is one;” therefore, “it” is not many, and therefore is not a whole and has no parts. Ergo it has neither beginning,
So it can have no temporal predicates. It cannot be contemporary with, nor more nor less ancient than itself or anything else (the reasoning being exactly like that just used about equality and inequality). It cannot, then, be in time at all. For we may say of whatever occupies time, but of nothing else, that (a) it is at any moment “becoming older” than itself and also “becoming younger” than itself; and (b) that its existence fills just the duration it does, and neither more nor less, and so it is “simultaneous with,” “of the same age as” itself. Since neither statement can be made about the one, it cannot be “in time.” Therefore, we must not say of it, “it was,” “it became,” “it will be,” “it will come to be,” since all these expressions involve reference to past or future, that is, to time. But the very word “is” or “comes to be” also involves a reference to time, to present time. And therefore we may not say of “it” that “it is” or “it becomes,” since “it” is not in time at all. But if we cannot say “is” of the one, we cannot ascribe being to it. It must be nonexistent. And if it is nonexistent, it cannot even be one, for to be one, it would have to be. But what is nothing at all can neither be named, spoken of, thought of, known, nor perceived by the senses. Thus we actually deduce from the proposition “it is one” the conclusion that nothing whatsoever can be thought or said about “it.”
It has been asked what the “it” presupposed as the subject
2. If the one is (ἕν εἰ ἔστιν), it “partakes of” being. It has two distinct characters; it is, and it is one. Thus it has “parts” (or, as we should say, distinct “aspects”). Unity and existence are parts, or constituents of “the existing one,” which is therefore a whole. And each of these “parts,” on inspection, is found to have itself the same two “parts.” Each is a constituent of the “existing one” and each is one such constituent. The “existing one” is thus an infinite manifold (ἄπειρον πλῆθος). Again, unity is different from existence, and difference is itself something different from both existence and unity. Here then are several terms—unity, existence, difference—which can be grouped into pairs. Each pair has a number—the number 2. We have thus established the existence of the numbers 1 and 2, and the addition of 1 and 2 establishes the existence of 3. We can then go on, by addition and multiplication, to establish the existence of the whole integer-series as a direct consequence of the existence of “the one.” Being thus has an infinite plurality of parts, and each of these parts is one part; there are as many units as there are “parts” of being. Thus not only “being” but “unity” itself turns out to be infinitely many.
Since parts are parts of a whole, they are contained by the whole and thus have a bound (πέρας). The “existing one,” then, is not only indefinitely many or boundless, but is also bounded, and therefore has first, last, and intermediate parts—beginning, middle, and end. Thus it has a shape or form (σχῆμα) of some kind. It is “in” itself, for all the parts are in the whole, and “the one” is at once “all the parts” and “the whole.” But equally the whole is not in the parts, either singly or taken together. To be in them all, it would have to be in each singly, and that is impossible. But it must be somewhere, if it is anything, and, as it cannot be “in itself,” it must be “in” something else. Thus, considered as “all the parts,” it is in itself; considered as “the whole,” it is in something not itself. Since it is “in itself” and so in one place (ἐν ἑνί) it is at rest; but since it is “always in something else,” it cannot be at rest, and so is moving. The one is neither a part of
The one is different from other things, and they are neither more nor less different from it, but to a “like” degree. Thus the one and other things are alike because different. But if difference implies likeness, identity will imply unlikeness, and the one and other things have just been shown to be identical. Therefore, because identical, they are unlike. And yet again, in so far as two terms have the same predicate they are alike, and in so far as they have different predicates they are unlike. So the one and other things will be alike because identical, and unlike because different. And since the one has been shown to be both identical with and different from itself, it must be both like and unlike itself.
Since the one is both “in” itself and “in” other things, it will have contact with itself and with them. But things which are in contact must occupy adjoining regions (ἐϕεξῆς κεῖσθαι), and that which is one cannot occupy two adjoining regions. Hence the one is not in contact with itself. But once more, nothing has contact with itself, and if there are to be n contacts, there must be n + 1 things in contact. Now the “things other than the one” cannot have any number, since what has a number “partakes of unity.” There can therefore be no contact between the one and other things, since contact implies number.
Again, the one is at once equal to and unequal to itself and to “other things.” (a) If a is > b, this means that the form of μέγεθο, greatness is in a relatively to b, and the form of σμικρότης, smallness in b relatively to a; if a is to be absolutely small or large, this means that the form smallness or greatness is “in” a. But neither greatness nor smallness can be “in” the one as a whole or in any part of it. For if smallness is in the one as a whole it is equal with the one, and if it “envelops” it it is greater than the one; in either case the form smallness would be “doing the function” of the different form ἰσότης, equal or greatness. And the same reasoning applies if we suppose smallness to be in any one part of the one. We may argue in the same way, mutatis mutandis, about greatness. Thus smallness and greatness cannot be “in” anything whatever, and it follows that nothing, except the form of greatness, can be “greater than” anything, and nothing except the form of smallness “less than” anything.
Once more, “if there is one,” the one is. And is expresses present participation of being. Hence the one is “in time.” And time “goes on” (πορεύεται). Hence the one is always getting older than itself as time goes on, and therefore, since “older” always has “younger” as its correlate, it is always getting younger than itself also. And at any moment in this process, it is both older and younger than itself. And yet it fills the same duration as itself, neither more nor less, and so neither is nor grows older nor younger than itself. Again, before there can be several things, there must be one to start with. Hence the “one” must have come to be before “the others”; it must be more ancient than “the other things.” Yet we proved that the one has “parts,” beginning, middle, end. Its beginning must have come to be before itself; the one itself will not be there until its end also comes to be. Thus the one is the last thing to come to be; everything else is more ancient than the one. But, after all, each “part” of the one is one part, and thus whenever anything comes to be, the one comes to be, and the one thus comes to be contemporaneously with everything else. Next, if one thing is older or younger than another, the interval in age between the two never grows greater or less. So we may say that the one is more ancient or more recent than other things, but never grows more ancient or more recent. And yet, though the one has been “in being” (γέγονε) longer than “the others,” the difference between their respective ages is steadily being relatively diminished as time goes on, and we may therefore say that, in so far as the one is more ancient than “the others,” it steadily becomes less ancient relatively to them, and they more ancient relatively to it. But, in so far as it is less ancient than “the others,” it is steadily growing, relatively to them, older, and they, relatively to it, younger. And finally, in so far as a time-interval remains the interval it is, the one is neither becoming more nor becoming less ancient than anything else.
In conclusion, the one, “partaking of time,” has past, present, future. It was, is, will be, was becoming, is becoming, will become. It stands, has stood, will stand, in various relations. There can be knowledge of it, belief about it, perception of it, and therefore it
Appendix (155e-157b). The one, then, both is and is not, and its being is “in time.” It is during some intervals, during others it is not, since it cannot be said to be and not to be at once. It must pass through transitions from being to not-being and from not-being to being. It undergoes aggregation and disgregation, assimilation and dissimilation, augmentation and diminution. It begins to move and ceases to move. So these reversals of the sense of a process must also be “in time.” And yet they cannot be “in time”; the reversal must be strictly instantaneous, occupying no time, however paradoxical we may find the conception of an instant (τὸ εξαίφνης) which is strictly without duration. At the instant of the reversal of sense, both members of a pair of antithetic processes must be denied of the one. At such an instant, it is not “coming to be” nor yet “passing away,” neither being aggregated nor being disgregated, neither being assimilated nor dissimilated. As with states, so with processes; both members of an antithesis must be asserted of the one and both must be denied.
Perhaps the most striking feature of this argument to our own minds is this introduction at its close of the notion of an unextended “instant” Plato is plainly stating exactly the paradoxes which beset the founders of the Calculus when they took the notion of the “infinitesimal” seriously and mistakenly supposed that the Calculus really deals either with infinitesimal increments or with ratios between infinitesimals. But the subtlety of some parts of the long development must not blind us to the fact that most of the reasoning throughout 2. is purely sophistical and much of it clearly consciously sophistical, and that the fallacies committed are mostly of a very obvious kind, such as equivocation between “each” and “all collectively.” Plato can and does, in this very dialogue, when it suits his purpose, expose the very confusions in question and therefore must not be supposed to be serious when he commits them. It is enough for his purpose to perplex the “eristics” (debaters) by availing himself of fallacies of the kind which they habitually commit in their own argumentation. His parody of their elenchus is also an exposure of it. The one important point to keep in mind is that the conclusions to which he is led by his application of the Eleatic methods to the Eleatic “hypothesis” are not meant to be asserted as his own. They are simply what happens to the “hypothesis” if you make the Eleatic criticise himself by his own methods. If we wish to know what Plato himself thought of the Eleatic thesis, we must turn from the Parmenides to the Sophistes, where he is really criticising it by the rules of a logic which is his own. For the present it is enough to remark that, just as in 1., the emphasis was laid on the unity of “what is,” with the consequence that being itself has to be denied of it, so in 2, the emphasis is laid on its reality, with the consequence that the unity of the one has to be simultaneously affirmed and denied. So far, and no further, the
3. If the one is, what of “other things”? Since they are “other” things, they are not the one; yet they must “partake of” it. For they must have parts (if they had not, they would be just “the one”), and therefore parts of one complete whole. And each of these parts must again be itself one definite part of the one whole. The “other things” are therefore a manifold or aggregate (πλείω). They must be a numerically infinite manifold, since each “part” participates in unity and therefore is not itself, in its own nature, one. And yet, in the act of participating in unity, each part is “bounded” or “limited” or “determinate” relatively to the whole and to any other part; “something arises in it” which constitutes a bound (πέρας). The “other things” are thus at once infinitely numerous and also bounded. In so far as all are “unlimited,” each is like every other, and again each is like every other in exhibiting “limit.” But in so far as each is at once unlimited and limited, each is unlike itself and the rest, and by similar reasoning we may show that all the antithetical pairs of predicates canvassed in 1. and 2. may be both affirmed and denied of the “other” things.
4. But let us consider the same question once more. “The one” and “the others” form a complete disjunction. Neither is the other, and there is no tertium quid. They are thus completely “separated” (χωρίς). And what is strictly one can have no “parts.” From these two premisses it follows that neither the one as a whole, nor a “part” of it, can be in “the others.” They cannot participate in it in any sense. There is no unity in them, and therefore they are not even a manifold (πολλά), and have no number. They are, after all, not “both like and unlike” one another; if they were, each of them would have in it two opposed forms, and would thus “partake of two,” whereas we have just seen that none of them can even “partake of one,” and therefore we must also deny that either member of the alternative “like-unlike” can be asserted of “the others.” The same kind of reasoning will show that no predicates at all can be asserted of them.
3. and 4. thus answer in inverted order to 1. and 2. In 3., as in 2., the emphasis falls on the reality of the Eleatic ὂν ἕν, in 4., as in L, on its unity. 3. proves for τὰ ἄλλα (the others) what 2. had proved for τὸ ἕν undertakes to prove of them what I had established for τὸ ἕν. The total result of 1.-4. is summed up for us at 160b 2: “If the one is, the one is everything and is nothing at all, relatively alike to itself and to ’the others.’”
5. We come to the second half of the complete dialectical investigation proposed at 136a-b. If the one is not, what follows? When a man says “if the one is not,” or “if magnitude is not,” or generally “if x is not,” he is making an intelligible supposition. Whether we say that “the one” is or that it is not, we mean the
6. And yet again, “if the one is not,” that means that being is wholly denied of it. The denial is absolute and must be understood without qualification. If the one is not, it cannot come to be, nor pass out of being, since it can neither get nor lose what is, ex hypothesi, wholly foreign to it. Neither can it alter in any way, for the same reason, and therefore it cannot move. Nor can it be at rest, for to be at rest is to be “in the same place” at successive times. It can have no predicates or relations, for if it had any, it would be whatever you truly assert of it. Hence it cannot be known, thought of, perceived, spoken of, or named. (Thus what was proved about the one in I. on the assumption that it exists, is now proved on the assumption that it does not exist. In either case nothing can be affirmed or denied of it.)
7. “If the one is not” what must be said of “the others”? They must be “other than” and therefore different (ἕτερα) from something or we could not call them “the others.” As there is no “one” from which they could differ, they must be different from one another. They must also be different infinite assemblages (ὄγκοι), not different units, since, ex hypothesi, there is no unit.
8. And yet, to go over the ground for a last time, “if there is no one,” τὰ ἄλλα obviously cannot be one. And they cannot be many, for then each of the many would be one. They must be zeros, and no multitude can be constructed out of zeros. And they do not even seem to be one or to be many. By hypothesis, “the unit” is just nothing at all, and hence nothing can even seem to be a unit; a fortiori nothing can seem to be many, a collection of units. By carrying the thought out it would follow that τὰ ἄλλα have none of the positive or negative determinations we have ascribed to them, and do not even seem to have any. Nothing can be thought or said of them, (a conclusion which answers to that drawn in 4.). Thus we may summarize the result of our whole series of antinomies by saying that “whether the one is or is not, it and ’the others’ alike, are and seem to be, and also are not and do not seem to be, all sorts of things (πάντα), relatively both to themselves and to one another” (166c 2).
In the four discussions which take for their point of departure the non-existence of the “one” or “unit,” even more obviously than in those which have preceded, the ultimate source of our perplexities is the ambiguity of the word “is.” We get contradictory results according as “is” is taken to be the symbol of predication (Peano’s ε), or that of existence (Peano’s ∃,
Many of the inferences turn simply on this confusion of a predication with what we now call an “existential proposition.” It is legitimate parody to employ this fallacy, because, as we can see from the remains of the poem of Parmenides, the whole point of Eleaticism lies in ignoring the distinction. To make it clear, and to show that Eleaticism had ignored it, is, in fact, the main purpose of Plato’s Sophistes. So long as he is merely undertaking to show that the Eleatic logic would be even more damaging to the Eleatic “postulate” than to the Socratic postulate of μέθεξις, he is fully entitled
See further:
Burnet. Greek Philosophy, Part I., 253-272.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii. 63-96; Platons Dialogs, 1-24. Stuttgart, 1903.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 297-317.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 215-217.
Apelt, O. Beiträge zur Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie, 3-66. Leipzig, 1891.
Stewart, J. A. Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 68-84.
Stallbaum, G. Platonis Parmenides. Leipzig, 1848.
addell, W. The “Parmenides” of Plato. Glasgow, 1894.
Wahl, J. Etude sur le Parmenide de Platon. Paris 1926.
Dies, A. Platon, Parmenide, vi-xix, 1-53. Paris, 1923.
Robin, L. Platon, 119-140.
Hardie, W. F. R. A Study in Plato. Oxford, 1936.
Taylor, A. E. “Parmenides, Zeno and Socrates,” Philosophical Studies, London, 1934, pp. 28-90.
Taylor, A. E. Plato’s Parmenides. Oxford, 1934.
Lee, H. P. D. Zeno of Elea. Cambridge, 1936.
Tannery, P. Pour l’Histoire de la Science Hellene, ed. 2, by A. Dies, Paris, 1930, c. x. Zenon d’Elee.
Chapter XV. Sophistes and Politicus
The dialogues which we have still to consider all reveal themselves, by steady approximation to the style characteristic of the Laws, as belonging to the latest period of Plato’s activity as a writer. In particular they all agree linguistically in the adoption of a number of the stylistic graces of Isocrates, particularly the artificial avoidance of hiatus, a thing quite new in the prose of Plato. They also agree, as regards their form, in two important respects. All of them are formal expositions of doctrine by a leading character speaking with authority; the part of the other speakers is merely to assent, and there is no longer any thoroughly dramatic eliciting of truth from the clash of mind with mind; in every case, except that of the Philebus where there is a good reason for the exception, Socrates is allowed to fall into the background, and in the Laws he is absent. To account for so marked a change in manner even from the Theaetetus and Parmenides, it seems necessary to suppose a reasonably long interval of interruption in Plato’s literary activity, and if, as we have seen reason to think, the Theaetetus was composed just before Plato’s visit to Syracuse in the year 367, we can account for the interruption by the known facts of his life. From 367 down to at least 361-360, the year of Plato’s second and longer sojourn with Dionysius II and his final resolution to take no further direct part in the affairs of Syracuse, he must have been too fully occupied in other ways to have much time for composition. We must probably, therefore, think of this whole group of latest dialogues as written in the thirteen last years of Plato’s life, 360-348/7. Since the Sophistes and Politicus attach themselves outwardly to the Theaetetus, and the former, in fact, contains the critical examination of Eleatic principles which that dialogue had half promised, it is reasonable to hold, as most recent critics do, that the Sophistes opens the series. The curious state of the text of the Laws—it is not permissible to account for it by the arbitrary assumption that our MSS are less trustworthy for the Laws than for other works—seems to show that the work had never received the author’s final revision. Thus Plato’s activity as a writer has no assignable terminus ad quem earlier than his death. Beyond this, we have no special evidence by which to date the composition of the individual dialogues. The main thing which is clear about the whole group is that Plato felt that the
In a biography of Plato it would be necessary to dwell at some length on the precise character of his experiences at Syracuse, as illustrated by his extant correspondence with Dionysius and Dion. I must be content to refer the reader for all details to the excellent accounts of Grote
The chief points which have to be borne in mind are these. Plato’s interposition in Syracusan affairs had from the first a very practical object. The immediate political necessity was to secure the future of Greek civilization in Sicily and the West against the double peril that the work of Dionysius I might be undone by the aggressions of Carthage, or that, under a successor unequal to the position, the Oscans or Samnites whom that vigorous ruler had employed might usurp the sovereignty of Syracuse for themselves. The project of Dion and Plato was clearly that Dionysius II should first be educated into statesmanship himself, and should then use his position to convert the real though informal “tyranny” at Syracuse into a constitutional monarchy embracing the cities which Dionysius I had subdued, and strong enough to hold both the Carthaginians and the Italians at bay. The hope of making a scientific statesman out of Dionysius II appears not to have survived Plato’s experiences of 367/6, and, indeed, had always, according to Epistle vii., been a very remote hope; the more modest anticipation that the personal feud between Dionysius and Dion might be accommodated and that constitutional monarchy might at least get its chance, though an imperfect chance, took Plato back once more to Syracuse in 361. It even outlasted his final disillusionment about Dionysius, as we see from the fact that most of the correspondence with that monarch belongs to the time after Plato’s last departure from Syracuse. For the years between 367/6 and 361/360 we have only one contemporary document (Epistle xiii.). The suspicions which have been felt about the letter have been based entirely on its contents; linguistically it is above suspicion. One or two of the objections commonly raised are curiously captious. It is said, absurdly enough, that the reference to Plato’s mother as still living, and to the existence of four
Read without misconceptions of this kind, the document is a natural one enough, and highly creditable to the writer. Apart from references to certain small commissions undertaken by Plato at the request of Dionysius, and from an introduction to him of Helicon, who had studied under Eudoxus and Polyxenus as well as in the school of Isocrates, as a man who could be serviceable to him in his studies,
Apart from this settlement of accounts between the parties, the letter deals with two other matters. Dionysius had employed Plato’s offices in attempting to obtain a credit on the Aeginetan banker Andromedes, who declined to make any advance, on the ground that he had found it difficult to recover advances made to Dionysius I. Application in another quarter was more successful, and Plato takes the opportunity to administer a courteous homily to the young king on the importance of prompt discharge of money obligations and attention to one’s accounts. The details of the transaction in question are only hinted at, but it can hardly have been concerned simply with the personal settlement between Dionysius and Plato. More probably Dionysius wanted a credit for his own purposes, and found it difficult to obtain one from bankers who had known his father as an unsatisfactory customer. This would explain the emphasis laid in the letter on the necessity to a monarch of a good financial reputation.
Sophistes and Politicus
Though the main interest of the Sophistes is logical, that of the Politicus political, outwardly the two form a single whole, and both are externally linked more loosely with the Theaetetus. The assumption is that we are still in the spring of the year 399. The personages of the Theaetdus have reassembled, as had been suggested in the last words of that dialogue (210d 3), but Theodorus has brought a friend with him, an Eleatic pupil of Parmenides and Zeno, who is—the words imply that one would not have expected it—a really profound “philosopher.” After a brief initial conversation this Eleatic visitor takes the conduct of the conversation into his own hands; Socrates and Theodorus relapse into what is all but unbroken silence. The Eleatic remains throughout anonymous, and in this respect stands alone among the characters in Plato, but for the other example of the Athenian who plays the leading part in the Laws. We could hardly be told more plainly that these two personages are purely fictitious; the object of the fiction seems to be that, as they have no historical character to sustain, they may be used freely as simple mouthpieces for the views of their creator. No one doubts that this is the case with the Athenian of the Laws. We are not entitled to say that he is meant precisely as a portrait of Plato by himself, but he is certainly meant to represent the ethics and politics of the Academy. Our Eleatic, too, turns out to be a respectful but exceedingly outspoken critic of the main thesis of his nominal teacher, Parmenides. The suggestion plainly
Formally there is a further link between the Sophistes and the Polilicus. The question propounded at the opening of the Sophistes is whether sophist, statesman, philosopher, are three different names for the same person, or three names for two types of person, or names for three different types.
The answer of the “Eleatic” is that the three characters are all distinct. The object of the two dialogues is ostensibly to prove this by defining first the sophist and then the statesman; both definitions are obtained by elaborate and repeated use of the characteristically Academic method of subdivision of a genus (εῖδος) into its constituent species. The method itself has consequently to be explained and illustrated by simple and half-playful examples. Incidentally this explains what might at first seem a strange feature of the Politicus. We can understand the silence of Socrates in the Sophistes, where the logical matter of the discussion takes us far away from the circle of ideas commonly represented by Plato as familiar to him. But the problems of politics are precisely those in which the Socrates of the Gorgias and Republic had been peculiarly interested, and we might have expected that here he would be given his old part of chief speaker. What makes this impossible is not so much the particular character of the results arrived at, though they do depart to a marked degree from the uncompromising “idealism” of the Republic, but the necessity of employing the precisely formulated “method of division.” The peculiarity of both dialogues is that each has thus a double function. Each has certain definite results to be arrived at; each is meant, at the same time, independently of its special conclusions, to be an elaborate exercise in the careful employment of logical method. As far as “results\” go, we might say that the object of the one is to explain the true character of a significant negative proposition, of the other to justify “constitutionalism” in politics. But we must not allow ourselves to forget that both have further the common purpose of presenting us with an “essay in philosophical and scientific method.” Hence the chief speaker in both must be a logician; it is because the speaker is a “formal logician,” with a sounder logic than that of the Eleatics of Megara, that he is represented as the true continuator of Parmenides and
I. The Sophistes
The opening words of the dialogue show us how keenly Plato feels that the Megarian formal logic is a departure from the genuine Socratic spirit of pursuit of real truth. He is greatly relieved to learn that the Eleatic friend of Theodorus is a “truly philosophic soul”; from his antecedents he had expected rather to find in him a θεὸς ἐλεγκτικός, a “fiend” in constructing dilemmas, (like those of the Parmenides). But the true philosopher is not always easy to recognize; he is taken sometimes for a sophist, sometimes for a statesman, and sometimes for a downright madman. Now this raises the question whether the philosopher, the sophist, the statesman, are three distinct characters, or two, or possibly are all the same. The genuine Eleatic tradition is that they are three distinct types, though it is hard to define the precise differences between them (217b). The Eleatic undertakes, if Theaetetus will act as respondent, to attempt a precise delineation of one of the three types, the sophist, though he warns his audience that the discussion will be long and tedious, a distinct hint that the name “sophist” will be found to stand for something less readily recognizable than the familiar type of the fifth-century teacher of “goodness.” We discover, as the dialogue proceeds, that the persons meant are, in fact, the Megarian pedants of an uncritical formal logic. They are “sophists” not genuine philosophers, precisely because they have never subjected the principles on which their own logic rests to a thorough critical scrutiny. (In fact, they are “dogmatists” in Kant’s sense of the word.) This special use of the word σοφιστής is a real innovation in terminology, though its adoption by Aristotle, who regarded his Megarian opponents as conscious tricksters, has given rise to the modern conception of sophistry as the deliberate abuse of logic. The length of the discussion is due to the difficulty of analysing so elusive a thing as the spirit of uncritical logical formalism.
Illustration of Method (218d-221c). Our problem, then, is to frame a satisfactory definition, and it is to be solved by a method characteristic of Plato and the Academy, the method of accurate logical division of a genus into its constituent species. As this method was definitely a creation of Plato and his immediate followers, it is necessary to explain and illustrate it for the reader by applying it to a simple and familiar case; Plato chooses that of the angler. Of course, as Burnet has said, the example is half-playful; the very baldness of the illustration chosen is an advantage since the simplest and most obvious illustrations are the best for the purpose of setting the principle of the procedure in the clearest light. In practice the use of the method in the Academy led to results of great importance. Thus the tenth book of Euclid’s Elements, that great repertory of demonstrated propositions about “quadratic surds” is at bottom concerned with the attempt to
In principle the procedure is this. If we wish to define a species x, we begin by taking some wider and familiar class a, of which x is clearly one subdivision. We then devise a division of the whole class a into two mutually exclusive sub-classes b and c, distinguished by the fact that b possesses, while c lacks, some characteristic β which we know to be found in x. We call b the right-hand, c the left-hand, division of a. We now leave the left-hand division c out of consideration, and proceed to subdivide the right-hand division b on the same principle as before, and this process is repeated until we come to a right-hand “division” which we see on inspection to coincide with x. If we now assign the original wider class a, and enumerate in order the successive characters by which each of the successive right-hand divisions has been marked off, we have a complete characterization of x; x has been defined. The Aristotelian rule of definition by “genus and difference, or differences” is simply the condensation of this Academic method into a formula; a still more exact reproduction of it has been given in our own times in W. E. Johnson’s account of the progressive determination of a “determinable” (Logic, i. xi). It is, of course, presupposed that we are already adequately acquainted with the “determinable” or “genus” a itself, and that, at each step in its further determination, we have the “gumption” to select as the character constitutive of the new “right-hand” division one which is relevant to the specification of x and also itself admits of further “division”; finally that we recognize the point at which the process can stop because x has now been sufficiently specified. The satisfaction of these conditions depends on our native acumen and our acquaintance with the subject-matter, and no rules can be given for it, precisely as no rules can be given for the discovery of a promising explanatory hypothesis. The method, like all scientific methods, will not work in vacuo. This is what Aristotle seems to ignore in his depreciatory remarks about the “method of divisions” (Analytics Prior, A 46a 31 ff.). He complains that the method involves a petitio principii [circular argument]. From man is an animal, an animal either is mortal or is immortal, it does not follow that man is mortal, but only that man either is mortal or is immortal; and so with the other
Definition of the Sophist (221c-237a). The actual “division” by which the definition of angling is obtained need not detain us long. So far as it is anything more than a simple illustration of the method to be adopted in characterizing the sophist, its further point lies in the playful suggestion of certain unpleasing features which we shall rediscover in the sophist himself, who is also, among other things, a kind of “angler.” The division itself may be graphically represented by the following tree:
∧
of making – of acquiring
∧
of acquiring by consent – of capture
∧
of open capture – of stealthy capture = hunting
∧
of lifeless things – of living things
∧
of terrestrial animals – of animals which live in a fluid
∧
of birds – of fishes
∧
fishing by nets – fishing by striking
∧
by night – by daylight
∧
by a stroke from above – by a stroke from below
=
angling.
We now proceed to apply this method several times over to the sophist. (Thus Plato is fully alive to the point that the same species may be determined by the division of different genera, the same term may have more than one adequate definition; relevancy to the purpose in hand will be the principle which guides us in the selection of a genus to be divided. Each of the successive divisions is meant to throw some one characteristic of the sophist into strong relief.)
(a) We might follow the precise example we have just chosen down to the point where we divided the art of hunting living things, and then turn our attention to the left-hand division of this. For the sophist is a hunter of “civilized living beings” that is, of men. He hunts them, not like kings, pirates, and kidnappers, by violence, but by the arts of persuasion. Persuasion may be practiced in public, or, as the sophist practices it, on individuals. And the persuading may be done by one who gives a present (the lover), or by one who takes a fee. And the fee may be taken for making one’s self agreeable and amusing (as in the case of the κόλαξ or “parasite”) or got by promising to impart “goodness.” This gives us a possible definition of the sophist as a professional of the art of hunting rich young men individually for a cash payment, on the pretense of educating them (223b). Thus the points brought out are the sophist’s commercialism, the unreality of his “wisdom,” and his suspicious family likeness to the “parasite.”
(b) The sophist, however, has more guises than one. We might detect him again if we started by dividing the left-hand branch of the art of acquisition, namely, acquisition by exchange, and then subdivided exchange into exchange of presents and exchange of commodities (ἀλλακτική). Exchange of commodities again includes the transactions of the man who sells his own produce and those of the middleman who sells that of others. And middlemen may be engaged either in the home retail traffic (καπηλική) or in interstate trade (ἐμπορική). One branch of such interstate trade is traffic in mental wares (ψυχεμπορική), serious or trifling. Under this head falls interstate traffic in sciences (μαθήματα), and one form of this traffic is the selling of scientific knowledge of “goodness.” This enables us to define the sophist again as a retail exporter of the knowledge of goodness (224d), though we must add that he sometimes retails his merchandise in the home market, and occasionally even manufactures some of it himself. As before,
(c) Yet again, we might diverge from our original division at a different point. We spoke of an art of acquisition by open capture. We may, if we please, divide this into two branches, competition and combat. (Plato is thinking of competition for prizes in the great games, at the Dionysia, and the like.) And combat may be physical or mental; the latter being contention, of which “discourses” (λόγοι) are the weapons. When the “discourses” employed are question and answer, we call this sort of contention disputation, and disputation about right and wrong (περὶ δικαίων αὐτων καὶ ἀδίκων) carried on under regular rules of the game is what we call eristic. When eristic is practiced for gain, it is sophistry. Thus the sophist now appears as a man who makes a paying business of contentious disputation about right and wrong (226a). He invents insincere paradoxes about morality for gain.
(d) We have not done with him even now. Making an entirely new start, we observe that there are a host of familiar occupations which are all alike in being ways of separating different materials from one another. Now some of these separate like from like, others aim at separating a better from a worse, and all these we may group together under the common rubric of purifying or refining. Purification or refining, again, may be either of the body or of the soul. And purification of the soul itself may be of two kinds, since there are two “vices” which affect the soul: spiritual disease and spiritual deformity (αἰσχος), villainy, “wickedness” as it is commonly called, and mere ignorance (ἄγνοια). The soul is purified from wickedness by justice, “the art of discipline”; from ignorance by teaching (διδασκαλική = persuasion that teaches). But there are different kinds of ignorance and correspondingly different kinds of teaching. The worst form of ignorance is the self-conceit which believes itself to know what it does not know; the teaching which purifies from this is what we mean by παιδεία, “education,” “culture” and all other teaching is merely subservient to it (229d). There are, again, two forms of παιδεία. There is the old-fashioned method of the pѐre de famille who relies for success on rebuke, mingled with exhortation; this we may call admonition (νουθετητική). But some of us are convinced by reflection that all error is involuntary, and that no one can be expected to “learn better” until he has been convinced that as yet he does not know. They adopt the milder method of trying to convince the man who has a false conceit of his wisdom by asking questions which lead him to discover his ignorance for himself and to feel the longing for knowledge (230b-e). We cannot well give the name sophist to those who practice this kind of teaching (which is, in fact, the familiar “obstetric” of Socrates); the title would perhaps be too high an
There is a certain resemblance between the eristic and these dialecticians, but it is such a resemblance as that of the wolf to the high-bred dog. Still, for the sake of argument, let us waive this scruple and define the sophist once more as a professional of the art of purifying the soul from its false conceit of wisdom (231b). (Here, of course, it at last becomes clear what quarry Plato is hunting. The definitions already suggested would cover Protagoras and his rivals; the specialization of the sophists’ method to “contention by question and answer” definitely indicates that the persons meant are inferior imitators of the Socratic dialectic who abuse its resources for a purpose which Plato regards as at bottom commercial.)
(e) We have still not gone quite to the root of the matter. The sophist has exhibited the guises successively of: (1) a paid hunter of rich youths; (2) an exporter of spiritual lore; (3) a retailer of such lore in the home market; (4) a small manufacturer of it; (5) an “athlete” of controversy; (6) a “refiner” of convictions which are hostile to knowledge (though his title to this last distinction is not uncontested). To penetrate deeper we must ask what one calling there is which can masquerade in all these guises (233a). The answer is suggested by the consideration that, as we have seen, the sophist is, among other things, an ἀντιλογικός, a pitter of discourse against discourse, a contradiction-monger. He undertakes to discover antinomies everywhere—in divinity, in nature, in morals and politics—and writes books explaining how the specialist in all these departments can be reduced to silence. Now obviously one man cannot really be an “expert” in all knowledge. The secret or miracle (θαυμα) of sophistry lies in contriving to appear to be such a universal expert. A clever illusionist might delude children into the belief that he can make anything and everything by showing them pictures of all sorts of things at a sufficient distance. (If a child were young enough, it would, e.g., take the men and horses in a cinema picture for real animals.) Why then should there not be an analogous art of illusion by means of discourses which imposes “imitations” of truth on the youthful mind? May we not say that at bottom the sophist is an “imitator” and
Criticism of Eleaticism (237b-249d). The difficulty must first be fairly stated. If we say seriously “x is not,” it seems clear that the subject of the statement x cannot be anything that is (an ὄν), and therefore cannot be a “somewhat” (τὶ), since “somewhat” always means a “being,” an “existent.” Hence he who speaks of “what is not” seems to be speaking about “nothing.” Yet can we say that he is “saying nothing” (making an “unmeaning noise,” 237e)? This is bad, but there is worse behind. If we are to talk about “non-entity” at all, we must do so either in the singular (μὴ ὄν) or in the plural (μὴ ὄντα). But mere non-entity can have no predicates, and so neither unity nor plurality can be significantly asserted of it. Hence it seems we can neither think nor speak of it at all (238c). Yet in the very act of saying that “it is unthinkable,” by using the word “it” we are talking of nonentity as though it were one thing (239a). It seems then that we must say nothing whatever about “what is not,” and this ruins our attempt to characterize the sophist as an artist in illusion. He would argue that an illusion is “what is not,” and therefore that “maker of an illusion” is a meaningless sound. Unless the sophist really “takes us in” by producing a false belief in us, there is no illusion, and if he succeeds for a moment in producing the illusion, a false belief must be something real; but, as we have just seen, that is what the sophist will not admit. He will say that
We may say that Parmenides and all the early thinkers have dealt with the problem too light-heartedly, almost as though they were merely “telling a fairy-tale” (μυθον (mython), 242c). Some of them have said that what is is three things (?Pherecydes); another (?Archelaus),
Thus we see that the theory of those who
To complete our survey of the difficulties about being, let us consider what “the other side”
We need not say much about the thesis of the “materialists” but we may imagine them to be at any rate so far better than they actually are as to deign to answer our questions civilly. We will then ask them whether there is not such a thing as a soul; whether some souls are not righteous and wise, others wicked and foolish. If they say Yes, as they must, we shall ask whether this does not imply that wisdom and the other “virtues” are something, and whether they are anything that can be seen or handled. Even if they try to save themselves by saying that the soul is a kind of body, they will hardly venture to say that wisdom is a body, nor yet to say that it is nothing at all, though a genuine and persistent materialist would have to take this second alternative. We shall have gained our point with any of them who will admit that anything whatever can be and yet not be a body. To put it most simply, we shall ask them to admit no more than this, that anything which has any “power” however slight, of acting or being acted upon, certainly is—in fact, that “what is” is δύναμις (“force,” power), active or passive (245e-247e).
It is not clear precisely what persons are meant by the “giants” of materialism. They are certainly not atomists, as has sometimes been fancied. The atomists who insisted on the reality of the ναφὴς φύσιςἀ (vacuum) cannot be classed among persons who say that only what can be seen and felt is. Nor could Theaetetus say, as he does (246b), that he has met “lots” of these men; he would not meet many disciples of Leucippus, to say nothing of Democritus, in the Athens of 399 BC It seems to me most probable that Plato has in view the crass unthinking corporealism of the “average man” rather than the doctrine of any particular “school.” We must also be careful not to make the mistake of taking the proposed definition of “being” as “force” for one seriously intended by Plato. It is given simply as one which the materialist could be led to concede if he were willing to reflect, and we are warned that, on further consideration, we might think better of it.
We have now to consider the view of the “friends of forms,” the immaterialists already referred to. They hold that “becoming” and “being” are sharply contra-distinguished. Our body is in touch with “becoming” through sense-perception; our mind in touch with real and unchanging “being” through thought (248a). We have to ask them what they mean by “being in touch with.” Do they mean “acting or being acted on by a force”? Theaetetus may not be able to say, but the Eleatic speaker is familiar with the persons who are being criticised, and consequently knows that they would reject the statement. So far from accepting the identification of being with “the power to act or be acted on” they would say that both action and passion belong to the realm of “becoming”; “being” neither acts nor is acted on.
We cannot seriously think that “what utterly is,” the perfectly real, neither thinks nor lives, or that it thinks but does not live. If it thinks and is alive, it must have a soul, and if it has a soul, it cannot stand everlastingly still; it must have movement. If mind is to be real, there must be both motion and variety and also rest and uniformity in things (248e-249d).
It has been a much-discussed question who are the thinkers to whom the dialogue ascribes the doctrine just criticised. From the statement of their theory, it is clear that they are extreme dualists, who regard “being” and “becoming” as absolutely sundered. They then identify “becoming” with the sensible world, and consequently hold that the sensible world has no real existence. To put the same thing from the epistemological standpoint, they deny that sensation has any cognitive value, or plays any part in the apprehension of truth. This shows that the reference cannot be to the type of theory ascribed to Socrates in the Phaedo and Republic. The whole point of the doctrine of “participation” of sensible things in forms was just to break down the absolute severance between a real world of being” and an illusory world of “becoming,” by ascribing a partial and secondary reality to the sensible. So the doctrine of “recollection” was intended to assign sensation a genuine, if a humble, part in the process of reaching truth; sensation is, on that theory, just what “suggests” or “calls into our minds” the thought of the forms. A fortiori,
Proclus in Parmenides, p. 562 Stallbaum (Cousin, iv. 149); Greek Philosophy, Part I, 91 n. i, 280.
The Meaning of Significant Denial: The Platonic Categories (249e-259e). So far we have reached the result that though movement and rest are contraries, both of them certainly are. There is movement and there is rest, and when I say “rest is,” I do not mean that rest is motion, nor when I say that “motion is” do I mean that motion is rest. Motion, rest, being, are all distinct, and being embraces both of the others; though it is neither of them. It thus seems as difficult to say what “being” is the name for, as we found it to say what “what is not” is the name for. If we can answer the one question we shall probably find that we have learned how to answer the other (250e-251a).
Every one knows that we are always making assertions about, e.g., a man, in which we do not confine ourselves to the statement that “a man is a man,” but say something further about his complexion, his shape, size, good or bad qualities, and the like, and in all these cases we are saying that a man is not one thing only, but at the same time many (not merely a man, but ruddy, tall, lanky, patient, etc.). Raw lads and men who have begun their thinking too late in life
If we consider the three concepts being, rest, motion, there are just three logical possibilities: (a) that they all “partake in” one another, i.e. any one can be predicated of any other; (b) that none of them can be conjoined with any other, i.e. none can be predicated of another; (c) that some of them can be predicated of (“partake in”) others. We can reject (b) at once, since it would forbid us to say both that there is motion and that there is rest. This would make an end of the views alike of Heracliteans, Eleatics, “friends of forms” as well as of all the physicists who account for things as due to the aggregation and disgregation of “elements,” whether infinite in number (Anaxagoras) or finite (Empedocles). The theory is actually self-refuting, since you cannot state it without using such words and phrases as “is,” “apart from everything else,” “by itself,” and the like (252c). You cannot even deny the possibility of “synthetic judgments” except by making such a judgment. The proposition “only identical propositions are true” is not itself an identity; (a) is an even more absurd theory, since it would require us to affirm that rest is motion and motion rest (252d). Thus the only possible alternative is (c) that some “concepts” will “combine” and others will not (252e), just as some letters can be combined to form syllables, others cannot.
This illustration suggests a further point of supreme importance. Vowels hold a “favoured position” among the elementary sounds of language. Every syllable must contain a vowel, and the vowels are thus the “connecting links” which make syllabic composition possible. There is a special art (τέχνη, art or craft), that of the “teacher of letters,” which considers what combinations of consonants by the help of a vowel are possible and what are not, just as another art, music, considers what combinations of notes of different pitch will make a tune and what will not.
So there clearly must be a science which considers what “concepts” will “blend” so as to give rise to “discourses“ (λόγοι = speeches) and what will not, and again whether there is a class of concepts which, like the vowels in spelling, make all combinations possible, and another class which gives rise to distinctions (253c). Thus logic is here, for the first time in literature, contemplated as an autonomous science with the task of ascertaining the supreme principles of affirmative and negative propositions (the combinations and “separations”), But this task of dividing things rightly according to their “kinds,” detecting one “form” (idea = form, appearance) where it is disguised by complication with others, and distinguishing several which form a single complex, is precisely that of “dialectic.” Thus we have unexpectedly identified the true philosopher before
We cannot now work out the whole inquiry into the “communion” between forms, but we may deal with it for the special case of a few of the most important and all-pervading. As we have said, “being,” “motion” “rest,” are three of these universalissima or μέγιστα γένη (greatest kinds). Two of them—rest and motion—refuse to combine. But the third will combine with both of the two, since both motion and rest are. Moreover, each of the three is distinct or different (ἕτερον (another)) from the other two, but identical with itself. And difference and identity, again, are neither motion nor rest. Nor is either of them the same as “being.” We ascribe being alike to motion and to rest, but this is not to assert that motion is identical with rest. For “different from” is always a relative term, whereas being has an absolute sense.
Thus we have five, not merely
Let us now consider the relations between these five all-pervading forms. (It is never said that the list of the universalia universalissima is complete, though later Platonists, like Plotinus in Ennead vi. 1-3, treat them as a complete list of Platonic “highest universals,” or categories.) Motion is not rest, nor rest motion. But both are and are identical with themselves, and thus “partake” (μετέχει) of being and identity, and also, since each is different from the other, of difference. Thus we can say, e.g., that motion is—it is motion; but also is not—it is not rest. But in just the same way we can say that motion “partakes of” being and so is—there is such a thing as motion; but motion is not identical with being, and in that sense we may say that it is not, i.e. it is not-being. The same line of thought shows that “not-being” may be asserted of all the five forms already enumerated, even of being itself, since each of them is different from any of the others, and thus is not any of the others (255e-257a).
Now these considerations enable us to dismiss the difficulties which have been raised about “not-being.” When we say that something “is not so-and-so,” by the not-being here asserted we do not mean the “opposite” (ἐναντίον (against, versus)) of what is but only something different from what is. “A is not x” does not mean that A is nothing at all, but only that it is something other than anything which is x (257b-c). Not-beautiful, for example, is the name not of nothing but of all the things other than the things which are beautiful. And the things which are not-beautiful are just as truly as those which are beautiful. The “not-large” is, every whit as much as the “large” the “not-right” as much as the “right.” In making a denial we are not asserting an antithesis between nothing and something, but an opposition of something and something else different from it (258b). We may say, then, that “not-being” is as real and has as definite a character as being. This is our answer to Parmenides. We have not merely succeeded in doing what he forbade, asserting significantly that “what is not, is”; we have actually discovered what it is. It is “the different” (τὸ θάτερον, the one, the other of two), and since everything is different from all other things, we may say boldly that “not-being” is thoroughly real (ὄντως ὄν, 257b-258e). Henceforth we shall not give ourselves any further concern about the alleged paradox that “what is not” is that unthinkable thing “the absurd,” the “opposite” of what is. It is childishly easy to see that any thing is different from other things and so may be said to be “what is not”; the true difficulty is to determine the precise limits of the identity and difference to be found among things (259d).
Application of Our Result to the Problem of “False Opinion”: Final Definition of the Sophist (260a-268c). Our identification of
And both the statements are about Theaetetus, the false statement no less than the true. A statement which was not about (or “of”) some subject would not be a statement at all (263c). Thus some complexes of nouns and verbs are false. Now thinking is an internal conversation in which the mind asks itself a question; belief or judgment (δόξα) is the statement, affirmative or negative, in which the mind answers its own question, without audible words. Sometimes the internal conversation is accompanied by sensation, and then we call it “fantasy” (i.e. when the debate of the mind is started by the attempt to interpret a present sensation). Hence, from the possibility of false statement or discourse follows the equal possibility of false belief or judgment and false “phantasy” (erroneous interpretation of sensation,
We said that we could divide it into the making of accurate likenesses (ikόnes) and the making of inaccurate images (φαντάσματα, phantasms), both of which are forms of “imitation.” Let us reconsider this more in detail. The making of imitations is a branch of creative art, as distinguished from the arts of acquisition, as we said long ago. We may now divide creative art into divine creative art and human creative art. The difference is that God (not, as the thoughtless say, unintelligent “nature”) creates all real things without any preexisting material (πρόερον οὐκ ὄντα, 265c);
Divine creation of images.
Human creation of images.
The images created by God are such things as dreams, shadows thrown by a light, reflections in a polished surface; those created by man are pictures of things made by man (houses, etc.), and the like. Here we bring in again our former and now justified subdivision of images. Man-made “mages” are either accurate likenesses or phantasms. Phantasms again are of two kinds: those produced by tools of some kind (like the painter’s brush), and those for which the producer acts as his own tool, as when another man (e.g. an actor) imitates the physical bearing or the tone of voice of Theaetetus by his own facial gestures and his own voice, and this kind of imitation is what we call mimicry (μίμησις = mimesis, to imitate). Mimicry, again, is twofold. A man may know what he is mimicking or he may not know it. Many persons who have no knowledge of the true figure (σχημα) of justice or goodness generally try to make their speech and action exhibit the appearance of what they fancy to be goodness and justice, and some of them succeed in conveying the impression they are aiming at. This is a plain case of mimicry by a man who does not know (267d). There is no recognized name for this specific “mimicry by the man who does not know,” so we coin one for the moment and call it δοξομιμητική
One closing remark may be made on the main result of the whole dialogue. Plato’s solution of the old puzzle about “what is not” and the later paradox, grafted on it, of the impossibility of error, turns, as we see, on distinguishing what we should call the use of “is” as the logical copula, or sign of assertion, from the existential sense of “is.” To us the distinction may seem almost trivial, but it only seems so because the work of making it has been done so thoroughly, once for all, in the Sophistes. Though Plato lets us see that he thought the ordinary Megarian a good deal of a conscious impostor, the difficulty about the possibility of error and of significant denial was a perfectly serious one with its originators and remained so until the ambiguity had been thoroughly cleared up. It is impossible to overestimate the service to both logic and metaphysics rendered by Plato’s painstaking and searching examination. We shall realise the magnitude of the issue better if we are careful to remember that, as Plato himself knew, the problem is at bottom one which affects all assertion. His point is that all significant propositions are “synthetic,” in the sense that they are more than assertions of the equivalence of two sets of verbal symbols, and that they are all “functions” of an “argument” which is “not null.” This would be a mere paradox if there were no other sense of “is” than the existential. We can see that a completed logic would have to carry the work of distinction further than it is carried in the dialogue. Notably the “is” which asserts the identity of the object denoted by two different descriptions (e.g. “the victor at Pharsalia is the consul of the year 59 BC”) needs to be distinguished both from the “copula” and the existential “is.” But the first step and the hardest to take is the recognition of the “copula” and its functions for what they are. Since the Sophistes takes this step for the first time, it is not too much to say that it definitely originates scientific logic.
II. The Politicus
We must deal much more briefly with the application of the method of division to the definition of the statesman. We may be content, now that we have grasped the principle of the method, to concentrate our attention in the main on the solid result it is used to establish. Plato’s real purpose in the dialogue is much less merely to continue his lesson in logical method than to deal with a fundamental problem in the theory of government on which men’s minds even now continue to be divided. The issue is whether, as the actual world goes, “personal rule” or impersonal “constitutionalism” is the better for mankind, and Plato means to decide definitely for constitutionalism and, in particular, to commend “limited monarchy.” His reading of the facts of the political situation is that monarchy has to be revived, as it was in fact revived by Philip, Alexander, and their successors, but that whether it is to be a great blessing or a great curse will depend on the question whether it is revived as constitutional monarchy or as irresponsible autocracy. Democracy, with all the defects it has shown at Athens, is the most tolerable form of government where there is no fixed “law of the constitution,” autocracy the most intolerable; where there is such a fixed law, a monarch is a better head of the executive and administrative than either a select “oligarchy” or a “town’s meeting.”
In form, the dialogue is a continuation of the Sophistes, with one change in personnel. Theaetetus is present as a silent character, but, to save him from undue fatigue, his place as respondent is taken by his companion, a lad named Socrates, who has been present without speaking through the Theaetetus and Sophistes. (The great Socrates, as in the Sophistes, is completely silent but for one or two opening remarks.) The “younger” Socrates has been introduced by one phrase in the Theaetetus (147d 1) as studying mathematics in company with Theodorus and Theaetetus. He is known to have been an original member of the Academy. There is one further reference to him in a letter belonging to the later years of Plato’s life, usually condemned by the editors as spurious, though for no obvious reasons (Epinomis x. 358e). We learn there only that he is in poor health at the time of writing. Aristotle mentions him once (Metaphysics B 1036b 25) in a way which shows that he belonged to the Academic group reproached elsewhere by Aristotle for their “pam-mathematicism.”
I think it all but certain that it is he, not the
The dialogue begins (257a-267c) with an attempt to characterize the science or art (τέχνη, ἐπιστήμη) of the king or statesman (πολιτική, βασιλκή) by assigning it a place in the classification of the sciences. Some “sciences” merely provide us with knowledge, others, including all the industrial arts, produce results embodied in material objects (σώματα). So we begin by dividing sciences into the practical (πρακτικαί) and the purely cognitive (γνωστικαί). The science of the statesman involves little or nothing in the way of manual activity; it consists wholly or mainly in mental insight. Thus we class it as cognitive (259c). But there are two kinds of cognitive sciences. Some of them are concerned merely with apprehending truths, and may be called critical (arithmetic is an example); others issue directions or orders for the right performance of actions, and may be called directive (ἐπιτακτικαί), and the science of the statesman is of this kind (260c). Again, some of the arts which direct merely pass on instructions which do not originate with the practitioner (as a “herald” communicates the directions of his commander), others give sovereign directions, are sovereignly directive (αὐτεπιτακτικαί, 260e). Among these we may distinguish those which have the sovereign direction of the production of living beings from those which are concerned with the production of lifeless things (like the science of the master-builder). This puts the king, or statesman, in the class of persons exercising sovereign control over the production and nurture (τροφή) of animals. Next, there is a distinction between the groom, who exercises this calling on a single animal, and the herdsman who practices it upon a whole herd or flock; the statesman, like the latter, has a flock or herd to deal with (261d).
We are thus on the point of identifying the ruler with the shepherd of a human flock (a metaphor as familiar to the Greeks from their recollections of Homer as it is to us from the language of Old Testament prophecy). But it would be a violation of the rules of method to divide “herds” at once into herds of men and herds of other animals. We must observe the rule that a division must proceed in regular order from the highest to the lowest classes, not make sudden leaps. It is unscientific to single out mankind as one class and to throw all the rest of the animal world, irrespective of all differences of structure, into the one ill-constituted group “other animals” just as it would be unscientific to divide mankind into Greeks and “barbarians” (262d) or integers into “the number 10,000” and “all other numbers.” A reflective crane might be
The effect of our division then is to define the statesman as a kind of herdsman of gregarious animals, with a trade of the same kind as the cow-keeper or the pig-drover, except that his herd consists of unusually “kittle” beasts. But there is a difficulty of which such a definition takes no account. In the case of the statesman there are a goodly number of rivals who might challenge this description. Farmers, corn-dealers, physicians, professors of “gymnastic” might all urge that the definition “raiser of the human herd” applies to themselves as much as to the ruler. This difficulty does not arise in the other analogous cases of the shepherd, ox-herd, swine-herd, because every one of them is at once breeder, feeder, and physician of his herd. As this is not the case with the ruler of men, there must be something faulty about the classification we have followed; our business is next to see where the error has come in. We may get a hint from a tale we all heard as children, the story that the sun reversed his daily path in horror when Thyestes started the series of crimes which disgraced the line of Pelops by stealing the “golden lamb” (268e).
The imaginative myth which now follows (268e-274e) is built up on the basis of ideas of which we may find traces in the early cosmogonists, combined with fancies known to have been specially affected by the Pythagoreans. From the cosmogonists we have the notion of a past “golden age” before Zeus had dethroned Cronus; many of the details about this age of gold seem to be “Hesiodic.” The conception of the life of the universe as an
Thus dramatic propriety is observed by making the Eleatic visitor utilize for his story precisely the materials which would be specially familiar to a native of Magna Graecia. The tale is told simply to make an immediate point. It is wrong on principle to take any part of it as scientific cosmology meant seriously by Plato, and to attempt, like Adam, the impossible task of fitting the story into that of the Timaeus. In outline the story runs as follows. The tale of the sun’s return on his track, like much of the existing mythology, is a fragment of a very ancient tradition about the transition from the age of Cronus to the age of Zeus. The whole may be reconstructed thus. Only God has complete immortality. The universe as a whole, being corporeal, cannot be quite immutable, but makes the nearest approximation it can to immutability by alternately revolving round the same axis in opposite senses. There are periods when God himself is at the helm of the world-ship with his hand on the rudder, and there are alternate periods when he “retires” to his look-out (περιωπή, 272e) and leaves the ship to follow its own course. The immediate result is a complete reversal of sense of all biological as well as cosmological processes. Life runs backward, in “looking-glass” fashion. The reversal of sense is attended by gigantic cosmic catastrophes, but when the first confusion is over, the ship settles down once more to a uniform course, though with a reversed sense; at first the regularity of its processes is almost as complete as when God was steering. But as time goes on, the world “forgets God, its Maker” and the irregularities due to the “lusts” inherent in its bodily frame accumulate; all regularity is on the point of vanishing, the ship nearly founders in the “sea” of the “infinite,” when God puts his hand to the tiller again, and once more reverses the sense of the cosmic movements.
The stories of the golden age, when men lived peacefully, without agriculture, clothes, or laws, are reminiscences of the condition of the world “under Cronus,” when God was actually steering the ship, and acting literally as the “shepherd” of mankind, with departmental gods under him as “deputy shepherds.” Our own age, that of Zeus, belongs to the period when the world is left to itself,
Were the men of the golden age really happier than ourselves who belong to the “iron time”? It depends on the use they made of their immunity from the struggle with nature for physical existence. If they used their freedom from the cares of life to glean wisdom from the beasts and one another, no doubt they were happier. If they used it merely to fill themselves with meat and drink, and to tell idle stories to the beasts and one another, we know what to think about that kind of life (272c).
The moral of the story is that our attempt to define the statesman as the “shepherd of men” has involved two errors—one serious, the other comparatively light. The serious error is that we have confused the work of a statesman in our historical world with that of one of the gods of the “age of Cronus.” They actually “fed” their flock; the statesman of the historical world does not. The minor fault was that we said truly that the statesman is a ruler, but made no attempt to specify the kind of “rule” he exercises. We ought to have reserved the work of “feeding and breeding” the flock for a god; of the statesman, who is a man among men, we should have said more modestly that his business is the “tendance” (ἐπιμέλεια, θεραπεία) of the flock (275b-276b). (The object of the remark is to eliminate the “superman” from serious political theory, and so to strike at the root of the worship of the “man who can,” the autocrat or dictator paternally managing the rest of mankind without the need of direction or control by law.) If we had made this clear, we should not have found the provision-dealers and others claiming that our description was as applicable to them as to the statesman. As to the other fault, it arises from overlooking an important step in our division. We forgot that the “feeding,” or, as we now propose to say, the “tendance,” may be either forced on the flock (βίαιον) or freely accepted by them (ἐκούσιον). This is what makes all the difference between the true “king” and the “tyrant” or “usurper.” The “tyrant”
Yet we must not be too much in a hurry to accept this as an adequate account of statesmanship. We have, it may be, drawn the outline of our portrait of the statesman correctly, but we still have to get the colouring of the picture right (277a-c). To explain what we mean by this, we shall do well to illustrate our point by a familiar example. And before we do this, we may even illustrate the use of examples by a preliminary example. This preliminary example shall be taken from the way in which small children are taught their letters. At first they may be given a set of very simple syllables which they soon read off exactly. But they still make mistakes in recognizing these very same combinations when they meet with them elsewhere. We correct their mistakes by making them compare the combinations they have misread with the standard alphabet or syllabary they have already mastered. This is their exemplar; the purpose of repeatedly referring them back to it is to make them able to detect unerringly any combination given them when they meet with it again in a new setting. This is the function of every example (277c-278d).
Now for our example of the kind of discrimination which will be necessary, if we are to distinguish the statesman’s “tendance” of the community from all cognate or analogous occupations. We may take it from the humble industry of weaving woolen garments. If we set to work to distinguish the weaver’s industry from every other, a series of obvious “divisions”—we need not repeat them, though Plato gives them—soon leads us to the result that it is the industry of fashioning defenses against climate and weather by the intertexture of wools (279b-280d). But this statement, though true, is not sufficiently precise. If we described the weaver as occupied with the “tendance” of clothes, wool-carders, fullers, stitchers, and others, to say nothing of the makers of the implements they all use, might put in a claim to be called “weavers.” If we are to avoid this difficulty, we must, in the first place, distinguish carefully between the art which actually makes a thing, and those which only contribute in a subsidiary way to its production—the principal and the subordinate arts (281d-e). Next, among principal “arts” concerned with clothes, we must set aside those which have to do with cleansing, repairing, and adorning the material; this is “tendance of clothes” but not the kind of tendance exercised by the weaver (282c). Next, if we consider the work of actually making the clothes, which we will call “working in wool” (ταλασιουργική), we can divide it into two kinds, each of which may be subdivided again. Part of the work consists in separation of the composite (the carding of the wool is an illustration); part consists in combining the separate into one. And this work of combining may take either of two forms, twisting or interlacing (282d). Both the warp and the woof of the intended web are made by twisting (or spinning), the one being spun closer and
We may distinguish two kinds of measurement (μετρητική) and two standards of measure—one extrinsic and relative, the other intrinsic and absolute (the actual names are mine, not Plato’s). We may measure things as great and small simply by reference to one another, or by reference to the standard of τὸ μέτριον (moderate), the right amount, or, as it is also expressed, in words meant to sound paradoxical, κατὰ τὴν τὴς γενέσεως ἀναγκαίαν οὐσίαν (“by the standard of the being which is indispensable to the production” 283d). (The meaning is, to take a simple example, that a teaspoonful of a liquid may be “very little” by comparison with a bucketful; but it is dreadfully “too much,” a dreadful “overdose,” if the liquid contains a concentrated poison, medicinal in minute doses.) The arts and their products, for example both statesmanship and the art of weaving, of which we have just spoken, are constantly employing this standard of the “just proportionate” in estimating excess and defect; it is by adhering to it that “all good things” are produced and preserved. To demonstrate the reality of this intrinsic standard of measurement might prove as long a business as we found it to demonstrate the reality of “what is not,” and, as we do not wish to be led too far away from our immediate topic, it is sufficient for our purpose to point out that unless we recognize it we shall have to deny the very possibility of applying science to the regulation of action (284a-d). (This thought of a “just right mean” and its significance for action will meet us again still more prominently in the Philebus. From the use made of it in the Ethics it has come to be spoken of familiarly as the Aristotelian principle of the Mean. In justice to both Aristotle and Plato it is necessary to point out that the whole doctrine is Platonic, and that Aristotle never makes any claim to its authorship, though he is careful to call attention, throughout the Ethics, to the points on which he believes himself to be correcting Plato and the Academy.)
Thus the sciences generally fell into two classes—those which measure numbers, lengths, areas, velocities, etc., against one another, and those which take as the standard of their measurements the right mean (μέτριον), the appropriate (πρέπον), the seasonable (καιρός), the morally necessary (δέον). The saying that “all science is measurement” is only true on the condition that we remember this distinction between two kinds of measurement. (Thus Plato combines the view that “science is measurement” with strict adherence to the principle of the absoluteness of moral and aesthetic values.) As an illustration of the point, we
We now return to the main argument. The example has impressed it on us that in defining a science it is indispensable to discriminate it from others which are (a) subsidiary to it; (b) analogous, but not identical with it. We must try to make this double discrimination for the case of the statesman (287b-305d).
Arts or callings subsidiary to a principal “art” will, with a little forcing, come under one of the following heads:
1. Those which make the instruments used by the principal art as its implements;
2. Those which make vessels for the safe keeping of products of all kinds;
3. Those which make stands and vehicles (ὀχήματα)
4. Those which make coverings and defenses of all kinds;
5. Those which ornament and embellish a product, and make it tasteful—arts of “play”;
6. Those which fabricate what the principal art uses as its “raw material”;
7. Those which provide nutriment of all kinds (287c-289c).
If we add one other branch of art, “the rearing of herds” already often mentioned, this classification will cover all our “property” (κτήματα), except slaves and personal servants (i.e. except those human “chattels” who directly assist a man, in a subordinate way, in the actual living of his life). (The thought is that the only piece of “property” which cannot be reckoned, roughly speaking, under the head of “implements” or “provisions,” is the “chattel” who is also your assistant in the work of living. You could not well apply to the services of your confidential clerk—who at Athens would have been your “property”—the formula that his business is to make, or to take care of, that which you use. He really is, in his degree, contributing to the actual “tendance” of your soul.) Thus there is the same sort of analogy between the work of the king and that of a personal servant or slave as between the work of the weaver and that of the carder or spinner. The person whom it would be most excusable to mistake for the king—the irony is characteristically Platonic—is the “menial” (289c). For all his pomp and circumstance, the king really is very much like a “menial servant.”
We should expect, then, that the most plausible false pretender to the functions of the king would be some class of menials. On inspection we find, however, that most menials never dream of advancing such pretensions. If we extend the range of the term
There are three well-known types of government: monarchy (the rule of a single person), oligarchy (rule by a small select group), democracy (rule by the general citizen body). But we may add that the first two have two forms, so that the whole number of types should be reckoned as five. The single person may rule in accord with law and with the consent of the ruled,
So the rule of the few, based on law, is aristocracy; the lawless rule of the few by mere force is oligarchy. Democracy commonly retains the name whether it is based on law or on mere force (291d-292a). This is the current popular classification of forms of government. (It is, in fact, that regularly insisted on by Isocrates, a good representative of “popular culture.”) But is the classification really scientific? We have already seen that kingship or ruling is a directive science. The one relevant distinction between claimants to be rulers is therefore their possession or want of this science, not the distinctions between rule by the rich and rule by the poor, rule by fewer or more persons, on which the current classification is founded (292c). Now real knowledge of the science of ruling men is a very rare thing—rarer even than first-rate knowledge of draughts, though even that is rare enough. The number of genuine statesmen must be exceedingly few (293a). Those few, because they have scientific knowledge of principles, will be. true kings or statesmen, whether they exercise their profession with the popular consent or not, with a written law as a control or not, just as the man who knows the science of medicine is the true physician whether his patients like his treatment, whether he follows the prescriptions of a textbook, or not (293a-b). In any case, he, and only he, does the work of the physician, preserves the bodily health of the patients he “tends.” So the one ideally right form of statesmanship is rule by the man who has true scientific knowledge about the “tendance of the soul,”
Yet it is a hard saying that it is indifferent whether government is carried on by law or without it, and our position requires further examination. Legislation is, in a sense, part of the work of a statesman, and yet the ideally best thing would be the supremacy not of the laws but of the embodied wisdom of the true king. For no law can be trusted to produce the best effects in every case; this is impossible, since the law cannot take account of the infinite variations of individual character, situation, and circumstance. Any law will give rise to “hard cases” (294b-c). Why, then, is legislation indispensable? Because it is impossible for the ruler, who is a man with the limitations of humanity, to give individual direction in each of the countless cases which have to be considered. He has to fall back on giving general directions which will suit the “average” man and the “average” situation (295a).
Now suppose that, over and beyond this, any practitioner of a directive science, e.g. a physician, were compelled to absent himself from his patients for long and frequent intervals, how would he meet the risk of their forgetting his directions? He would provide them with written memoranda of the regimen they were to follow in his absence; but if he came back sooner than he had expected, he would have no scruple about changing these written regulations if the case demanded it. So the true statesman, if he could return after an absence, would have no scruple in modifying his institutions and regulations for similar reasons, nor a second true statesman in changing those of a first (295e). It is popularly said that an innovation in the laws is permissible if the proposer can persuade the city to adopt it, but not otherwise. Yet we should not say that a medical man who insisted on breaking through a written rule of treatment when he thought it necessary to do so had committed a fault in medical treatment because the patient had objected to the departure from the “books”; so if a statesman makes the citizens better men by forcing them to innovate on their written and inherited laws, we must not say that he has committed a fault in his science, a “crime” or a “wrong” (296c). Nor does a man’s claim to make such innovations depend on superior wealth; the one and only relevant qualification is his wisdom and goodness. If he has these qualifications, he is entitled to save the “vessel of the State” as his goodness and wisdom direct, just as an actual pilot shapes his course by his living “art,” not by a written rule. The wise ruler has only one rule which is inviolable, the rule of doing what is wise and right (τὸ μετὰ νου καὶ τέχνης δικαιότατον, 297b) (“following the dictates of mind and art”). The one perfect “form of government” would be government by the living insight of such an ideal ruler; all others are mere imperfect “imitations,” of varying degrees of merit.
In the absence of such an ideal ruler, that is, in the actual circumstances of human life, the best course is the very one we have just pronounced absurd where the ideal ruler is presupposed. The
The laws are at least an approximate “imitation” of the principles on which the living ideal “king” would act. As we said, such a man would refuse to be bound by formulae when they do not really apply. In this one respect of departing from formula and precedent, the politicians who disregard the law are like the true statesman. But, since they are by hypothesis ignorant of the principles of statesmanship, they imitate his “innovations” badly they depart from law and precedent in the wrong cases and for wrong reasons. In any community where the ruler is not the ideal scientific statesman, and that means in every society where the “sovereign” is a body of several men, and most, if not all, when he is one man, the law ought to be absolutely paramount (301a). (This means that we must eliminate from “practical politics” the “rule of the saints” at which the Pythagorean brotherhood had aimed in the cities of Magna Graecia. The infallible ruler would be a god or a superman. Supermen are not found in the historical world; there, the sovereignty of law is the succedaneum for an actual theocracy, as is further explained in the fourth book of the Laws.)
These considerations explain why in actual fact we find five, not merely three, distinguishable forms of government. When the “well-to-do” govern with strict regard for law we have aristocracy; when they disregard law, oligarchy. One person ruling with
It is an important, if not strictly relevant, question which of these various constitutions is least unsatisfactory. We may say at once that monarchy, the rule of a single person, is the best of all, if it is strictly subject to good fundamental laws; in the form of sheer personal rule without laws, “tyranny,” it is worst of all. As for the “rule of a few,” it is “middling”; the rule of the multitude, from the inevitable subdivision of the sovereign power, is weakest of all for good or evil. Thus, where there is a fundamental law, monarchy is the best constitution, aristocracy the second, democracy the worst; where caprice rules instead of law, democracy is least bad, oligarchy worse, despotism worst of all. (There is likely to be more “fundamental decency” in a big crowd than in a little “ring,” and least of all in an uncontrolled autocrat, 302b-303b.)
We can now at last say who are the serious pretenders to the name of the statesman or king, from whom it is so important to discriminate him. They are the men of affairs in the imperfect constitutions, who delude themselves and their admirers into false belief in their practical wisdom; they call themselves πολιτικοί (statesmen), but are really στασιαστικοί (party politicians). These are the supreme “wizards” and “sophists” of the world (303c).
We have now, so to say, purged away all the dross from our concept of statesmanship; only good ore is left. But as “adamant,” itself a precious thing, is separated from gold in the last stages of the process of refining, so we have still to distinguish statesmanship from the tasks of the soldier, the judge, the preacher of righteousness who “persuades men” into goodness by the noble use of eloquence. Reflection satisfies us that the business of the statesman is not to persuade or to win battles, but to decide whether persuasion or enforcement shall be adopted, whether war shall be made or not. So his business is not to administer the laws but to make the laws which the courts then administer. Each of the callings just mentioned has charge of one action, the proper performance of which is its contribution to the “tendance” of the city; the statesman’s superior function is to control and coordinate all these inferior activities (303d-305e). His task is to weave together all classes in the State into the one fabric of the life of the whole.
Just as a web is made by the inter-texture of the stiffer threads
The statesman then proceeds to give instruction for the interweaving of the threads he has selected, the characters who can be trained into the combination of valour with sophrosyne. He will regard as the threads of his warp the temperaments in which the original bias is to action and adventure, as the threads of the woof the tamer and quieter. The actual weaving of the two together is a double process; the “everlasting” in the souls of the citizens will be knit by a “divine” bond, the merely “animal” by a “human.” The “divine” bond is constituted by “true and assured beliefs” about good and right, bad and wrong. These the statesman will look to the educator to provide. The effect of such an education is to make the naturally daring soul gentler by teaching it respect for the rights of others, and to develop the natural orderliness of the quiet and unambitious into sophrosyne and wisdom. This education, which corrects the bias of each type, is the “divine” bond which most effectively produces unity of life and character, but it will only produce its full effect in the finest souls. The “human” and inferior way of producing unity in the society is to take care that marriages are contracted on the right principles.
At present, to say nothing of marriages based on equality in fortune or rank, the tendency is for persons of the same type of temperament to mate with one another, the adventurous with the adventurous, the quiet with the quiet. But this is a false principle,
It will be observed that the dialogue is peculiarly rich, apart from its immediate political teaching, in ideas which have passed over into the substance of Aristotelian ethics. Thus, in addition to the conception of the “intrinsic” standard of the Right Mean, we may mention the distinction between Cognitive and Practical Science, which corresponds to Aristotle’s fundamental distinction between Theoretical and Practical Philosophy;
All these conceptions happen to be more familiar to us from the Ethics and Politics than from the Politicus, but it is from the Politicus that
See further:
Burnet. Greek Philosophy, Part I., 273-301; Platonism. 1928, c. 5.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii. 120-165, 185-258, 642-657; Platons Dialoge, 25-67; Neue Untersuchungen ueber Platon, 1-94.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 317-354.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 271-296, 331-338.
Apelt, O. Platonische Aufsatze, 238-290. 1912.
Apelt, O. Platonis Sophista. Leipzig, 1897.
Stewart, J. A. Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 84-91; Myths of Plato, 173-211 The Politicus Myth.
Dies, A. Autour de Platon, ii., 352-399, 450-522.
Barker, E. Greek Political Theory: Plato and his Predecessors, 276-291.
Campbell, L. Sophistes and Politicus of Plato. Oxford, 1867.
Dies, A. Platon, Le Sophiste, Paris, 1925, and Platon, Politique Paris, 1935.
Cornford, F. H. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge. Translation of Theaetetus and Sophistes with Commentary, London, 1935.
Stenzel, J. Zahl und Gestalt bei Platon und Aristoteles, 10-23, 126-133. Leipzig, 1924.
And for the history of Plato’s relations with Dion and Dionysius II, the full treatment in Meyer, E. Geschichte des Altertums, v. 497-528.
Chapter XVI. The Philebus
In the Philebus we are once more dealing with “practice,” and more specifically with “individual” morality. The dialogue is a straightforward discussion of the question whether the “good for man” can be identified either with pleasure or with the life of thought. Socrates once more takes the part of chief speaker, a place given him in no other dialogue later than the Theaetetus. The explanation of this is no doubt, as Burnet has said, that the subject-matter, the application of Pythagorean “categories” to problems of conduct, is precisely that which Plato represents as having always been his chief interest. I think it significant that, as we shall see, all through the discussion the “categories” with which Socrates works are the Pythagorean concepts of the Unbounded, the Limit, and their synthesis. We know from Aristotle that one of the characteristic divergences of Plato from the Pythagoreans was that he substituted for their antithesis of the Boundless and the Limit that of the Boundless, conceived as “unbounded in both directions” (the Great-and-Small), and the One.
(On the Pythagorean view, the One, or Unit, was the simplest synthesis of the Boundless with Limit.) It is clear, since Aristotle never hints at any change in Plato’s teaching, that the doctrine he calls Platonic must have been taught in the Academy as early as his own arrival there in 367; the Philebus is certainly one of the latest works of Plato’s life, and must have been written years after 367, but it still uses the Pythagorean, not the Platonic, antithesis. I can see no explanation except the simple one that for the purposes of the discussion the Pythagorean categories are satisfactory, and that Plato is unwilling to make Socrates expound what he knows to be a novelty of his own.
There are no data for determining the relative dates of composition of Philebus, Timaeus, Laws. Presumably the composition of the Laws was going on when the other two were written. The dramatic date of the conversation cannot be fixed, except that from Philebus 58a 7 we see that it is later than the first visit of Gorgias to Athens; the scene is also left unspecified, though it is, no doubt, “somewhere in (or about)” Athens. The two young men who figure as interlocutors, Protarchus and Philebus, are entirely
If we know so little about the date of the dialogue, we seem able to say much more definitely than for most of the dialogues what were the circumstances which occasioned its composition. The object of the discussion is to examine two rival theses about the “good”: (a) that it is pleasure (), (b) that it is “thinking” τὀ φρνειν, τὀ νοειν. The way in which the theses are formulated at the outset (11b) suggests at once that we are dealing with a quaestio disputata within a regular philosophical school. When we find that the purpose of the dialogue is to criticise both, to dismiss both as inadequate, and to suggest a via media, the impression naturally arises that Plato, as head of the Academy, is acting as “moderator” in a dispute within his own school. The evidence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics seems to convert the possibility into a certainty. As is well known, Aristotle there deals twice over with the problem of the relation between good and pleasure. In the discussion of the seventh book, he starts with an anti-Hedonist thesis that pleasure is not good at all, examines the arguments adduced by its defenders, and urges that they are so inconclusive that they do not even prove that pleasure is not the supreme good.
Aristotle’s “arguments are all taken from Platonic dialogues,
including the Philebus itself, but employed to prove something
different from the conclusions drawn in Plato.”
The arguments are all taken from Platonic dialogues, including the Philebus itself, but employed to prove something different from the conclusions drawn in Plato. Since one of these is that “pleasure must be bad, because it hinders thought”—a misrepresentation of the argument of Phaedo 66a ff.—the persons who advanced them clearly held that the good is “thinking” (τὀ φρονειν), the thesis pitted against the identification of good with pleasure at the opening of our dialogue. Aristotle incidentally mentions among their arguments the contention that pleasure cannot be the good because pleasure and pain are both bad things which a wise man avoids, and names the author of the doctrine, Speusippus.
In the second discussion of the subject, he also tells us who the person who identified “the good” with pleasure was; it was the famous
The attitude taken by Plato in the dialogue to this discussion is, to all intents and purposes, precisely that of the “moderator” in the schools of the Middle Ages “determining” a quaestio disputata. The arguments produced by both parties are reviewed and weighed, and the balance is struck between the disputants. It is decided that the issue shall be narrowed down to a consideration of the “good for man” in particular. When the question has thus been delimited, it is “determined” by the answer that neither pleasure alone nor thought alone is the “good” or best life for men; the best life must include both thought and grateful feeling; bat of the two, thought is the “predominant partner.” This is, in fact, the conclusion to which the discussion is made to lead; it is also the verdict given on the same issue in Aristotle’s Ethics, which owe more of their inspiration to the Philebus than to any other Platonic dialogue.
The Question Propounded (11a-20b). What is “the good”? Philebus has an answer to this question: “pleasure, joy, delight,” this is the good for all living creatures. Socrates disputes this: “thought, intelligence, memory, true judgment,” are better than pleasure “for all who can share in them” (11b). Thus Philebus originally makes an assertion not simply about the good for man in particular, but about good universal, “the” good. Socrates commits himself to no assertion about good universal, but asserts that for an intelligent being, like man, there is something better than pleasure, namely, the exercise of intelligence. If we are to decide between those conflicting views, we must at least agree on the sense to be put on the phrase, “the good for man.” We may take it that both of us mean by this phrase “a condition and state (ἕξις καὶ διάθεσις) of soul which can make any man’s life happy” (11d).
The question is whether pleasure, or again, thought, or possibly something better than either, is that “state and condition.”
Now “pleasure” is a word with many shades of meaning. A “life of pleasure” often means a vicious life, yet we say that the continent man finds his very continence pleasant; we talk of the “pleasures” of folly and extravagant daydreams, but we also say that the “thinking man” finds his thinking pleasant. Thus there may be pleasures of many kinds, and we have no right to assume that all must be good (12d). You may say, as the Hedonist does, that the difference of which Socrates speaks is a difference in the sources from which pleasure is derived, not in the pleasure yielded, but this would be evading the real issue. All pleasant experiences agree in being pleasant, just as all coloured surfaces agree in being coloured. But there are more or less marked colour-contrasts also. Why then may there not be pleasure-contrasts within the genus pleasure? If there are, this will be a reason for hesitating to ascribe the predicate good to all pleasures.
“Pleasure is good” is, in fact, a synthetic proposition (13a), and therefore we cannot assume the impossibility of regarding some pleasures as good, but others as bad. They are all, of course, pleasant, but pleasantness might be present both in good and in bad experiences. Similarly, if we consider the rival thesis, that thought is “the good” we can see that it is one thing to make the analytic propositions “science is science,” “knowledge is knowledge,” another to say that “science (or knowledge) is good.” If there are a plurality of “sciences,” or other activities of intellect, some of them may conceivably be good, others bad (14a). Thus we see that our present discussion raises the old and eternally recurring problem of the one and the many (14c).
One form of this problem may now be regarded as long ago disposed of, the ancient difficulty of the possession of many qualities or parts by the same individual (14d-e). This was the form in which the problem had arisen, e.g. in the Phaedo; presumably Plato means that the solution given there is sufficient to dispose of the question. The case which still needs investigation is that in which the “one” is not a thing which comes into or passes out of being, but belongs to the non-phenomenal order. This case gives rise to three questions: (a) whether there really are such non-phenomenal “units”; (b) how we are to reconcile their unity with their reality or being;
(c) how we can think of such units as being at
We certainly cannot evade these problems; they are perpetually turning up in all our “discourses” and we must meet them as best we can (15d-16b). There is no better way of dealing with them than that of which Socrates has always been a lover. (Compare the way in which he speaks in the Phaedrus of his reverence for the true dialectician who knows how to “divide” a subject rightly.) There was long ago a Prometheus—Pythagoras is the person meant—who revealed the art by which such problems may be treated. His followers have handed down to us the tradition that “whatever is at any time said to be” is composed of the constituents limit and the unlimited. No matter what subject we study, we can find these elements in it. We can always find a single form (the allusion is to the Pythagorean doctrine that the “unit” is the first combination of limit and unlimited)—and on inspection we shall, with care, be able to discover two, or three, or some other number of definite further forms included in it. We should next take each of these forms and look for a definite number of forms included in them, and continue this process as long as fresh forms are to be found. It is only when we can no longer repeat the process that we should let things “go to infinity.” In this way, the only way worthy of a dialectician, we shall discover not only that every form is at once one and infinitely many, but also how many it is (16c-17a). (That is, we must not be content to say, for example, that animal, or anything else, is one kind and also that there are an indefinite number of animals; we must attempt to make a logical division which will show us exactly what and how many species of animals we can distinguish. It is only when we have reached an infima species incapable of further logical subdivision that we may consider the indefinite multiplicity of individuals. So long as you can go on with the logical division, each genus has not an indefinite plurality but a determinate number of constituents.) Thus the grammarian must not say that articulate sound is in a sense one, and yet that there are “any number” of different articulate sounds; he must know how many distinct sounds his alphabet has to represent. To do this he has to divide articulate sounds into vowels and consonants, and the consonants again into “stops” and “sonants” It is only if he finds that these classes cannot be subdivided into sub-classes that he may then enumerate the individual vowels, stops, or sonants. Thus definite number (the number of the constituent species and sub-species) is everywhere the intermediate link between the one genus and its indefinitely numerous members (17b-18d).
We must apply this consideration of method to our special moral problem. Before we can decide whether all pleasure or all thinking is good or not, we must know not only that pleasure is one
Preliminary Delimitation of the Problem: Neither Pleasure nor Thought Alone Is the Good for Man (20c-22c). Socrates, as we shall see, has no serious intention of allowing the question whether there are “kinds” of pleasure to be shirked. But we can get rid of one of the issues raised without going so deep into the matter. He seems to remember hearing—perhaps in a dream—that “the good” is neither pleasure nor thought, but something better than both. If that should be true, we can, at any rate, dispose of the doctrine that pleasure is the good, and we can deal with this point without going into the question about “kinds” of pleasure (20c), if we can agree on certain “notes”
We may thus make it a criterion of the good for man that it is what any one of us who knows what it is would choose in preference to anything else, and would be completely satisfied by. Judged by this criterion, neither pleasure nor “thought” can be that good. Even a professed Hedonist would not choose by preference a life simply made up of moments of intense pleasurable feeling and nothing else. He would want to be aware that he is feeling pleasure in the present, to remember that he has felt it in the past, and to anticipate that he will feel it in the future. Thus he would demand intellectual activity as well as feeling to make him happy; a life all feeling would be that of an oyster rather than of a man. The same thing is true about a life which is all thinking and no feeling. No man would choose a life of mere intellectual activity entirely neutral in feeling-tone. Any man would prefer a “mixed” life, which contains both “thought” and pleasant feeling. The “mixed life” is thus better for man than the unmixed. A life of “unmixed” feeling would only be “complete” and “sufficient” for a brute, or perhaps a plant; a life of “unmixed” intellect may perhaps be suitable to
The Relative Significance and Place of Pleasure and Thought in the Good for Man (23c-66d). Formal Character of Each (23c-30e). Anything which is actual can be placed in one of four classes: (a) infinite or unbounded (τὸ ἄπειρον); (b) limit (πέρας); (c) the “mixture” or combination of both these constituents; (d) the cause which brings them together (23c-e). To explain a little more precisely: “temperature” or, in the Greek phrase, “hotter and colder,” is an example of what we mean by (a). We can call it “infinite” or “boundless” because anything can always be made hotter or colder than it is; there is no temperature which is the maximum or minimum conceivable, and again, if you have two different degrees of temperature, you can insert between them an endless number of intermediate temperatures different from both. Since temperature may be increased or diminished, we may also call it a “great and small” or “a less and more” (a μέγα καὶ μικρόν), and this, as we know from Aristotle, was Plato’s own name for what the Pythagoreans, whose language Socrates is using in our dialogue, called the ἄπειρον. And what we can say about temperature, we can equally say about everything which allows of indefinite variation in magnitude or in degree, admits of “more and less,” or such qualifications as “intense,” “slight.” We may thus class together all that admits of such variation under one single head as the “infinite” (24e). The “infinite” is thus what we should call quality with a continuous range.
By the “limit,” again, as a single “form” we mean whatever does not admit “the more and the less,” but admits such predicates as “the equal,” “the double,” in a word, whatever is “as an integer to an integer or a measure to a measure” (25b). The limit (πέρας) means thus precise mathematical determination, number, ratio, measure. (The last is added to cover the case of “surd” ratios, like that of 1: √2 or side of square: diagonal.)
The “mixed” class, or “mixture of the two,” means a precise and definitely determined magnitude or intensity of any quality. (Thus, e.g., temperature is an ἄπειρον, 20° is a πέρας, a temperature of 20° C. is an instance of the “mixture”; rainfall is an ἄπειρον, 6 is a πέρας, but a rainfall of 6 inches is a μεικτόν, and so on,) The introduction of determination into a “more and less” is precisely what we call a genesis, or process of becoming. (E.g., to raise water to a temperature of 100 C. is the “process” of making it boil, it is also the introduction of the “limit” 100 into the ἄπειρον, temperature.)
As for the “cause,” we mean by it the agent which sets up such a process as we have described, τὸ ποιουν (26e). We have therefore to distinguish it both from that which it produces, the process or genesis, and that which “subserves it for the process,” the “matter” of the process. The process we have already referred to our third class; the “matter” of the process is just the factors which are brought into combination, the unlimited and limit. This is why we had to add the fourth class to the other three. We note here that the account of the “…mixed” class is the direct source of the “right mean” in Aristotle’s Ethics. “Moral” goodness, according to Aristotle’s familiar account in Nicomachean Ethics ii., is a fixed and habitual right “mean” or proportion in our appetitions and tempers, and the process of becoming good is one of “qualifying” them, i.e. training them to exhibit just the proportion demanded by the “right rule” (ὀρθὸς λόγος).
But all the examples of the “mixed” class in the Philebus are taken from the world of “events,” and the forms clearly are not “mixtures” of that kind. Not to dwell on the further point that the πέρας of the Philebus stands for any definite ratio, whereas the πέρας element in the forms, according to Aristotle, was the “one,” and the “one” in the Philebus is only spoken of as equivalent to any genus regarded as a single whole. It is clear that the line of thought which leads to the classification in the Philebus brings us nearer to what Aristotle knew as the central doctrine of Platonism than anything else in Plato’s writings. But it seems equally clear that Plato’s final thought is not disclosed even here. From his own language in Epistle vii. we may infer that he never intended the reading of a written work to do more than supply hints which might put a really original mind in the position to discover his thought after a great deal of hard personal thinking, and that he did not expect even as much as this apart
The Psychology of Pleasure and Pain (31a-53c). We have seen to what class pleasure and pain themselves belong; they are ἄπειρα. We must next consider “that in which they arise” (the subject of them), and the πάθος, or state of things, which gives rise to them, in other words, the actual conditions of their occurrence. To begin with pleasure. “That in which pleasure (or pain) arises” is always a living creature, the creature which feels the pleasure (or pain), and as such it belongs to the “class of the mixture,” since its organism is a complex of a plurality of ingredients (31c). The way in which they arise, the πάθη which occasion them, are that “when the attunement (that is, the proper balance between the ingredients of the organism) in an animal is disturbed, pain is felt, and when it is restored after disturbance, pleasure is felt.” Disturbance of organic equilibrium is attended by pain, restoration of the equilibrium by pleasure 31d-e). Thus when the body is unduly heated or chilled, we have a λύσις της φύςεως disturbance of the normal organic equilibrium, and it is painful; the antithetic process of recovering the normal temperature, which is a return to the οὐσία (the “natural state”), is pleasant. This defines for us one kind or form (εῖδος) of pleasure, namely, the agreeable processes of return to the normal condition of the organism after disturbance, or, as the defenders of the same type of theory in modern times usually say, the process of recovery from organic waste (22a-b).
Next, there is a second “form” or “kind” of pleasure which depends on processes purely mental, and is not attended by either disturbance or recovery of the balance in the organism. A simple example is that the mental anticipation of a painful disturbance of the organic balance is itself painful, the expectation of the agreeable antithetic recovery from disturbance is itself pleasant, and in these cases there is no actual accompanying organic process, the pleasure and pain belong in a special way to “the soul by herself” (320). These are the two distinct εῖδος of pleasure and pain it is necessary to begin by discriminating, if
Next, if there are antithetic processes of disturbance and recovery of the organic balance, and these are respectively painful and pleasant, there must also be an intermediate case, that in which the balance is maintained without deflection in either direction, and this, on our theory, must be neutral in respect of feeling-tone, neither pleasant nor painful (32e). This would be the condition, so far as feeling-tone is concerned, of the life of thought unmixed with pleasure or pain already spoken of, and there is no impossibility in the notion that there might be such a life, a life of permanent maintenance of equilibrium. Very possibly it is the life appropriate to a god (33b) and so the best of all. But we are discussing a different matter, the part which thought and pleasant feeling should play in the life of men like ourselves (for whom such an existence without any rhythmic alternation is out of the question). For our purposes, we must pursue the psychology of the second class of pleasures and pains further. They are all dependent on memory (since, of course, without memory we could have no anticipations), and this makes it necessary to explain briefly what memory is and what sensation itself is. We may say that some bodily processes die away before they can reach the soul, but others penetrate to the soul: the first we may call unconscious; the second are conscious. This enables us to define sensation as a movement (κίνησις) which affects the body and soul together (κοινη, 34a). Memory (i.e. primary memory) is the retention (σωτηρία) of sensation as thus defined (ibid.); and, finally, recollection (ἀνάμνησις) is the recovery (reproduction) by the soul “by herself” of a lost memory or sensation (34b-c). These considerations will make it clearer what we mean by a “purely mental” pleasure, and also throw light on the nature of desire (ἐπιθυμία, 34e). To understand what desire is, we may consider it in its simplest form, such as hunger or thirst. A thirsty man desires, or lusts after drink. To speak more precisely, the thirsty man is in a state of depletion, his organism has been depleted of its normal supply of liquid, What he really desires is not simply “drink,” but to be “filled up” with the liquid he will drink. (He desires not the water, but the drinking of it.) Thus he actually is in one state (a state of depletion), but desires the antithetic state (the corresponding repletion). To desire to drink the thirsty man must “apprehend” (ἐφάπτεσθαι) repletion. He does not “apprehend” it with his body. That is just what is undergoing the unnatural depletion, and it cannot be passing through two antithetic processes at once. Thus it must be with his soul that he “apprehends” the repletion he lusts after. The importance of the example is that it shows that (in spite of popular language), there is really no such state as a “bodily” desire or lust. All desiring is a state of soul (35c), since desire is endeavour towards the opposite of the present state of the organism, and it is in virtue of memory that this “opposite” is apprehended.
They also suggest an important problem. When a man is actually in a state of pain due to organic “depletion,” but remembers and thinks of the pleasant experiences which would remove the depletion, can we say that his condition is either purely painful or wholly pleasant? If he despaired of ever realising the anticipation of “filling up” no doubt, he would be doubly wretched, but suppose he is feeling the painful depletion but expecting the repletion (like a really hungry man who expects to be fed)? The anticipation that his want will be removed is pleasant, but the felt want must surely be painful, and thus it appears that we must say that, in the case assumed, the experience is a mixed one, pleasurable and painful at once (36b).
(The conception of “mixed” states which are half pleasant, half painful, is so characteristic of Plato and so important in itself that it cannot be passed over without some comment. Hedonists naturally refuse to accept it, since it is quite inconsistent with the treatment of pain as equivalent to subtraction of pleasure which lies at the root of the Hedonic calculus. They have, accordingly, to explain the facts to which Plato appeals in one or other of two ways. They have to hold that the total feeling-tone of any moment of life is either simply pleasant or simply painful. It is then open to them either to interpret the facts about still unsatisfied craving by holding that the experience is one of rapid alternation between pleasure and pain, or by holding that it is, according to circumstances, one of a low degree of pleasure, or one of pain, though of a moderate degree of pain. Neither view seems to me to be in accord with fact. When I am genuinely and acutely thirsty, e.g. in the course of a long tramp in hot weather, but confidently anticipating arrival at a place of refreshment in an hour’s time, it is not the fact that I oscillate rapidly between pure misery and pure delight according as my attention is directed to my present condition or to the condition I anticipate; nor yet is it true that I am continuously feeling a qualified pleasure or a qualified pain. I certainly feel the tension between the pleasant anticipation and the actual pang of thirst in a single pulse of experience. And there is no real difficulty in understanding why this is so, if we remember that the physical correlate of my mental condition is made up of a great complex of neural excitations. No one of the constituent neural excitations can have two antithetic senses at once, but the complex may perfectly well contain elements with opposite senses. Hence it seems to me that Plato’s doctrine of “mixed states,” which coincides with the standing thought of great poets about the “unrest which men miscall delight,” is strictly true to the facts of common experience, and that the criticisms leveled against it are all based on false simplification of the facts.)
True and False Pleasure (36c-53c). We have thus distinguished two “kinds” of pleasures: (a) those directly due to an
There is such a process as judging, and such a process as feeling pleased. When we judge, we make a judgment about something, and when we feel pleased, we are pleased with something. And a judgment does not cease to be an actual judgment because it is false; similarly a false feeling of pleasure would still be an actual feeling of pleasure (37b). (This last remark, of itself, shows that Plato has no intention of denying that a “false” pleasure is a pleasure; it is its worth, not its actuality, which is in question.) The question is whether pleasure and pain, like judgment, permit of the qualifications true and false. They certainly permit of some qualifications, such as “great,” “small,” “intense”; and Protarchus
Let us look at the facts. Pleasure and pain sometimes accompany true beliefs or judgments, sometimes false. Now these beliefs may be regarded as answers given by the soul to questions which she has put to herself; sometimes the answer is right, sometimes it is wrong. We have, so to say, a scribe and a painter within our souls. The interpretation of present sensation by the aid of memory involved in all perception is the work of the scribe writing “discourses” in the soul; the painter (imagination) designs illustrations (εἰκόνες) to the scribe’s text (39d-e), and his pictures may be called true or false “imaginings” according to the truth or falsity of the “discourse” they illustrate. These discourses and pictures concern the future as well as the present or the past; we are all through life full of “fancies” (ἐλπίδες) about the future, and when we anticipate pleasure or pain to come, we take an “anticipatory” pleasure or pain, which has already been classed as strictly “mental” in entertaining such expectations (39d-e). This is true of good and bad men alike, but, since the good are “dear to God,” their pleasant anticipations are commonly fulfilled, those of the bad are not (40a-b). (The good man gets pleasure in anticipating sequences which are in accord with the order God maintains in the world; the bad man gets his pleasure from daydreams of sudden enrichment and other events which do not come about in the “world as God made it.”) Thus the bad man’s pleasure in his anticipations is as actual as the good man’s, but the good man, as a rule, gets the pleasure which he anticipates, the bad man does not. This affords one sense in which the bad man may be said to have false, or unreal, pleasures; he derives present pleasure from anticipations which will not be realised, and this pleasure may rightly be said to be deceptive, a caricature of true pleasure, and the same argument will apply to pains due to anticipation (40c) as well as to emotions—fear, anger, and the like—generally (40e). Like beliefs, all these states may have a foundation in reality or may have none. Now the goodness of a belief lies in its truth, and its badness in its falsity; only true beliefs are good, and only false beliefs are bad. (For, of course, the raison d’etre of a belief is that it should be true; that is what every belief aims at being.) May we not say then that the badness of bad pleasures—Protarchus has allowed that there are such states—is simply falsity and nothing else? a bad pleasure means a “false” or “deceptive” pleasure.
Protarchus is unconvinced. There may be “wicked” (πονηραί) pleasures or pains, but pleasures and pains are not made wicked by being “false.” We will, however, reserve the consideration of wicked or sinful pleasures for a moment, and call attention to a second sense in which it might be possible to speak of many
The illusion is still more marked in other cases. As we said before, disturbance of the organic balance is painful, restoration of the balance is pleasant. But suppose the organism is undergoing neither process. It is true that many of the wise deny that this case actually occurs; they say that “everything is always flowing either up or down” or, in Leibniz’s phrase, that the “pendulum never is at rest.” But they must concede at least that we are not always conscious of its oscillations. Small oscillations either way are “infinitesimal.” It is only considerable oscillations which are attended by pleasure and pain (43c). Thus we have to admit the possibility of a life which is neither pleasant nor painful, but just painless. There are persons who actually say that this painless life is the “most pleasant” of all (44a). But this statement cannot be strictly true. To feel no pain is manifestly not the same thing as to feel pleasure, though this is the thesis of the real “enemies of Philebus,” the downright anti-Hedonists. These anti-Hedonists are eminent scientific persons, who maintain that there really is no such thing as a pleasure and that the experience Philebus and his friends call pleasure is merely “relief from pain (44c).
Though we cannot accept this doctrine, which is really due to the scorn of fastidious souls for vulgar pleasures, it will yield us a useful hint towards the discovery of the kind of pleasures which deserve to be called “true” (44d). Their thought is this. If we want to
Now let us consider one or two examples of these exciting experiences. A man who has an itching spot on his body gets great enjoyment from scratching or chafing it; but, of course, he is only stimulated to do so by the irritation of the itching. This is typical of a host of experiences which language calls “bitter-sweet.” They depend on a tension between antithetic processes; these processes may be both bodily, or one may be bodily and the other purely mental, or both may be mental. In all cases the violently exciting character of the experience depends on the tension. There must be a highly painful factor in order that the rebound may be intensely pleasant (46b-c). (Thus the difference between this case and that of the “illusions of perspective” already mentioned is that the element of contrast and antithetical tension is now an ingredient in the actual concrete single experience.) The point, then, is that in such a “mixed” experience, there may be an exact balance of pleasurable and painful ingredients, so that, exciting as it is, its “net pleasure value” would be nil, or pleasure may predominate, or pain may predominate. But in no case is the “pleasure value” simply measured by the intensity of the excitement, and the “ticklish” person, for example, who gets so excited when he is tickled that he says he is “dying with pleasure” is not really getting anything like the “quantity of pleasure” he supposes. For the intensity of the excitement is due to the simultaneous contrast between the fully stimulated region of the skin and a neighboring region which is uneasily aching for similar stimulation, 46d-47b). Here is a plain case where a man’s own estimate of the pleasure he is getting is erroneous. The cases of tension already mentioned, where the antithesis is between the actual condition of the body and a mentally anticipated “opposite” condition, may, of course, give rise to the same “mixture” of pleasure with pain and the same errors in estimation (47c).
Now to explain why the feeling this spectacle rouses in the audience is “mixed.” It might seem that it is wrong to enjoy the misfortunes of our friends; yet we do find self-conceit in persons we like “funny,” when, as has just been explained, it is quite harmless. (The connexion with comedy, I take it, is that, if we are to enjoy a comedy, we must feel that we “like” the person who is being exposed, for all his failings. If we could not find him likeable, the comedy would cease to be comic, as Tartuffe does, for the simple reason that we detest Tartuffe seriously.) Thus our sense of the “comic” is a kind of malice (φθόνος), and this is, in its nature, a painful emotion; yet our laughter shows that we are enjoying the experience, which must therefore be a “mixed” one (49e-50a). (The observation appears true and subtle; when, for example, we see Malvolio on the stage, there is an element of the painful in our mirth. It is, in a way, humiliating to see another man “make such a fool of himself.” If the absurdity were carried a little further, or the exhibition of it a little more prolonged, the painful would distinctly predominate. Even as it is, we can detect its presence by a careful examination of our feelings.) Now this
We may now consider the question what experiences are purely pleasant without any admixture of painfulness. On our general theory of the connexion of feeling-tone with organic process, we can see at once that in any case where a “subliminal” or unconscious process of “depletion” is followed by a conscious process of “repletion,” there will be an experience which is wholly pleasant. This may explain the case of the pure aesthetic pleasure we get from the contemplation of pattern (σχήματα), colour (χρώματα), tone (φθόγγοι), and the great majority of odours (51a-b).
Again the “intellectual pleasure” which we get from the “sciences” (μαθήματα) is of this “unmixed” kind. There is no felt pain antecedent to it; merely not to possess geometrical knowledge, for example, is not painful as hunger is painful; and again, the process of forgetting something we have learned is not attended by pain. Of course it may be disagreeable to find that we have forgotten something which it would now be advantageous to know, but the process of forgetting itself is not painful, as the process of growing hungry again, after we have eaten, is (52a-b).
The Metaphysics of Pleasure—Can it be an End? (53c-55c). We may remind ourselves of a second doctrine of the “wits” (κομψοί), which we shall find suggestive. They say that pleasure is always a “process of becoming” (γένεσις; that it has no stable and determinate being (οὐσία, 53c). That is, the theory is that pleasure is an accompaniment of transitions, incompleted developments. It is felt while the development is going on, but falls away when the definite and permanent goal of the “evolution” is reached. We must not be misled into identifying the “wits” of this passage with the third-century Cyrenaics who called pleasure a “gentle motion,” nor have we any right to ascribe their doctrine by anticipation to the elder Aristippus. We meet it again in Aristotle’s Ethics, where one of the string of arguments against the goodness of pleasure, all taken from recognizable passages in Plato, is said (1152b 13) to be that “every pleasure is a sensible transition (or development) into a natural condition” (γένεσις εἰς φύσις αἰσθητή), an obvious allusion to the section of the Philebus we are now considering. We may take this as an indication that the κομψοί to whom the doctrine is due are the anti-Hedonist party in the Academy, a view which, as we shall see, is borne out by the language of Aristotle in dismissing their doctrine. The thought arises by a natural, though illegitimate, extension of the depletion-repletion formula to cover all cases of pleasures. On this theory, the good, healthy, or normal state is, of course, that of balance or equilibrium; pain and pleasure are both felt only when there is a
We can now express this thought in a general formula. The end or goal is always of more worth and dignity than the means or road to it. The means is “for the sake of” the end, not the end for the sake of the means. And a process which culminates in the establishment of a permanent condition is to that condition as means to end. Thus the processes of shipbuilding and all the appliances and raw material they employ are “for the sake of” what comes out of them, the vessel. (E.g. the naval architect’s skill, his implements, the timbers of which he makes the vessel, all of them only have worth because the vessel itself has worth—in this case, an “economic” worth (54c).
If pleasure is a “becoming,” then it must be relative to an end in which it culminates, must be the coming-to-be of something. That something will be in the μοίρᾳ or category of the good, i.e. will have “intrinsic value.” But the end and the process by which it is reached are never in the same category, and therefore, on the hypothesis, pleasure will not be a good. The “wits” from whom we have borrowed this suggestion will therefore think it ridiculous to say that life is not worth having without pleasure. This would amount to saying that life is worth having when it is an alternation of aspiring after a good we have not yet attained and losing one we have attained, but not when it is the fruition of present good (54c-55a).
We note that Socrates is not made to accept the doctrine that pleasure is only felt in the transition from an “unnatural” to the “normal state” as his own. He clearly does not accept it without reserve (as Spinoza does in his definitions of laetitia and tristitia, Ethics, iii. Appendix, def. 2, 3). He cannot do so because he holds, as we shall see, that some pleasures, the “pure” or “unmixed” class, are themselves good, whereas the theory under criticism, as he is careful to point out, compels us to hold that no pleasure is good, since no pleasure, according to it, can be an end. The criticism of Aristotle on the theory is based on the same conviction of the
We may add the further consideration that it is a paradox to hold that all goods are mental, that pleasant feeling is the only mental good, and, by consequence, that, e.g., beauty and strength, valour, temperance, intelligence, have no inherent value, and that a man’s intrinsic worth depends on the question how much pleasure he is feeling (55b). This, we see, is a valid argument against the Hedonist, independently of the worth of the contention that all pleasure is a genesis.
The Intellectual Values (55c-59d). We have seen that there are two types of pleasures, the “pure” and the “mixed,” and we shall expect to find that they have different values for human life. We must now consider intellectual activities and their worth in the same way. As with pleasures, so with forms of knowledge, we have to discover which are “truest to type,” most fully deserving to be called knowledge. We may begin by dividing “knowledges” or “sciences” into those which have to do with making things, the “industrial” arts (χειροτεχνικαὶ ἐπιστημαι), and those which are περὶ παιδείαν καὶ τροφήν, have to do with the cultivation of the soul itself, the “cultural” arts and sciences. (This is, in effect, the Aristotelian distinction between “theory” and “practice.”) We may begin by considering the “industrial,”
Again, if we consider the “exact” sciences themselves, we have to make a similar distinction. There are two “arithmetics”: that of the “many,” and the much more scientific arithmetic of the “philosopher.” The former operates with “concrete” and very unequal units, such as one man, one army, one ox, and disregards the fact that the men, oxen, armies, counted may be unequal; the other operates with units which are absolutely and in every way equal—in fact, with numbers, not with numbered things. So there are two forms of “mensuration”: the loose measurement of the architect or the retail trader, and the accurate measurement of the geometer and calculator.
Thus one “knowledge,” no less than one pleasure, may be “purer,” truer to type, than another. The “exact” forms of knowledge which are concerned with number, measure, weight, are much more exact and “truer” than all others, and the “philosopher’s” or “theorist’s” arithmetic and geometry are much more exact and true than those of the mechanician or engineer (56d-57e). And we cannot, without blushing, deny that dialectic, whose business it is to study the absolutely real and the eternal, must insist on a still more rigid standard of exactness and truth than any other kind of knowledge. It must be still more intolerant of mere approximation than any other science. Gorgias, to be sure, used to claim the first place among the sciences for rhetoric, on the ground that it can secure
The Formal Structure of the Good Life (59e-66d). The best life for men, we saw, must be a blend of two constituents—intelligent activity and pleasant feeling. We have now examined each genus of the two apart, and distinguished in each a variety which is truer, and one which is less true, to type. We have now to consider on what principle the two ingredients should be blended. What will be the formula which appears as the πέρας in this “mixture”? Our task is like that of the man who mixes the ingredients of a sweet drink; pleasure is the honey for our mixture, intelligent thought the water; the problem is to mingle them in just the right proportion (61c). It would be rash to assume that we shall succeed in doing this by simply blending every form of pleasure with every form of “thought”; we need to proceed more cautiously. It will be prudent to begin by considering first those pleasures and those forms of knowledge which we have found to be most genuine, most true to type (ἀληθέστατα); if we find that the blend does not completely satisfy our original condition that the “good” must be “sufficient” all a man’s life requires, we can then consider admitting the inferior pleasures and arts into the mixture (61e). There can be no dispute about stipulating that the good is to include all knowledge of the “truer” type, the exact knowledge of the timeless things; we shall certainly require for the best life a knowledge of “righteousness itself” and the intelligence to use the knowledge, and the same considerations will apply to all such knowledge of the “absolute.” But will this be enough for the purposes of life? If a man is to live a life among men, he must have some at least of the inferior knowledge which is inexact. A man who knew only the “absolute” and exact lines and circles of the geometer, but knew nothing of the rough approximations to them with which life presents us, would not even know how to find his way home. (As we might say, a chemical balance is a beautiful thing, but it won’t do to weigh your butter and cheese in.) So the intervals we make on our musical instruments are only approximations, they are not “true”; but a man must be conversant with them, as well as with the mathematical theory of harmonics, unless he is to go through life with none but the “unheard” melodies for
Thus we have let all the “water” go into the bowl in which the draught of “happiness” is to be brewed. We must now consider what we are to do with the “honey.” Here, again, it will be safer to consider the “unmixed” pleasures first and the “mixed,” which, as we have seen, are not wholly true to type, afterward. It is clear that we shall not be able to let in all this second class without reflection. If there are any of them which are “unavoidable” (ἀναλκαια, sc. such as arise directly from the functions of sound and healthy life themselves), they must, of course, be admitted. But whether we can admit all the rest depends on the question whether all pleasures, like all knowledges, are profitable, or, at worst, harmless (63a). To decide this question we may ask the pleasures themselves whether they would prefer to keep house with all wisdom and knowledge, or by themselves. We may be sure (since we have seen that the best life is the “mixed” one) that the pleasures would reply that it is not good to live alone, and that the best companion with whom to keep house would be “knowledge of all things and in especial of ourselves” (63c).
Now we put the same question to the various knowledges. “Do you need the company of pleasure?” “In particular, do you need, over and above our class of true pleasures, the company of the intense and violent pleasures?” knowledge would say that, so far from desiring these exciting pleasures, she finds them a perpetual hindrance; they vex the souls in which she has taken up her abode with mad frenzies, and destroy her offspring by producing forgetfulness and neglect. She would claim kinship with Socrates’ class of “true” and “unmixed” pleasures; of the rest—those which are “mixed” satisfactions—she would accept such as accompany health and a sober mind and any form of goodness, but reject those of “folly and badness” in general, as obviously unfit to find a place in such a “blend” as we are contemplating (63d-64a).
There is only one further ingredient for which we must stipulate—ἀλήθεια, “truth,” “reality,” “genuineness.” If this is left out, the result of the blending itself will not be real or genuine. (The bearing of this remark is a little obscure, but it is probably meant to lead up to the next stage of the argument, the consideration of the relative importance to be laid on the different constituents of the “mixed life” for man and the assigning of the first place in it to its rational structure, the last, to the “harmless” pleasures.
We have now tracked down the good, so to say, to its very
We may now draw our conclusion. Pleasure is neither the best nor the second-best thing. We must give the first place to “measure, the measured, that which is ‘in place’” (τὸ καίριον);
Formal Epilogue to the Discussion (66d-67b). Philebus had originally said that the good for us is the plenitude of pleasure (ἡδονὴ πασα καὶ παντελής), Socrates that “intelligence” (νους) is at any rate (γε) a far better thing for man’s life than pleasure. We long ago convinced ourselves that neither can be the whole of human good, since neither would be “all-satisfying,” apart from the other. But our investigation has shown us that “intelligence” is at any rate infinitely (μυρίῳ) more closely related to the “victor” (the “mixed life” which proved to be the best of all for a man) than pleasure. (The point is that though the best life includes both elements, it is the element of rationality which gives it its specific character. A man is not a creature who uses an intellect to contrive ingenious devices for getting pleasures, but a creature who finds it pleasant to practice intellectual activities. Hume’s view that in action reason “is and ought to be the slave of the passions” just inverts the true relation. Human “passions” should be the servants of intelligence.) Pleasure is not the good, even though all the horses and oxen of the world should say it is, with the assent of the “many” who think the “lusts of beasts” better evidence than the discourses of philosophers (67b).
The last sentence obviously alludes, in its reference to the θηρίων ἔρωτας, to the argument of Eudoxus, afterward adopted by Epicurus, that pleasure must be “the good” because it is that which “all living creatures” pursue when left to themselves (Nicomachean Ethics x. 1172b 9 ff.). The supposed unmannerly reference to Aristippus in the remark about the “horses” (ἵπποι) is a mere unhistorical fancy. Even if Aristippus had been aimed at in the criticism of Hedonism, such an allusion would be impossible, for the simple reason that the leading anti-Hedonist of the Academy, Speusippus,
See further:
Burnet. Greek Philosophy, Part I., 324-332.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii. 165-258, 497-554; Platons Dialog, 68-97; Neue Untersuchungen ueber Platon, 95-173.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 357-374.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 296-331.
Nettleship, R. L. Plato’s Conception of Goodness and the Good. Works, i. 307-336.
Baeumker, C. Das Problem der Materie in der Griechischen Philosophie, 193-196. 1890.
Poste, E. The “Philebus” of Plato. Oxford, 1860.
Bury, R. G. The “Philebus” of Plato. Cambridge, 1897.
Dies, A. Autour de Platon, ii., 385-399.
Stewart, J. A. Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 92-100.
Robin, L. Platon, c. iv.
Chapter XVII. Timaeus and Critias
The Timaeus stands alone among the Platonic dialogues in being devoted to cosmology and natural science. Owing to the fact that the first two-thirds of it were continuously preserved through the “dark ages” in the Latin version and with the commentary of Chalcidius, it was the one Greek philosophical work of the best age with which the west of Europe was well acquainted before the recovery of Aristotle’s metaphysical and physical writings in the thirteenth century; it thus furnished the earlier Middle Ages with their standing general scheme of the natural world. In the present volume it is impossible to deal with the contents of the dialogue in any detail; I have tried to perform the task in my Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (Oxford, 1928), with which the later commentary of Professor Cornford (Plato’s Cosmology, London, 1937) should be compared.
The date of composition cannot be precisely determined. There is no external evidence, and the internal evidence of style only serves to show that the dialogue belongs to the last period of Plato’s authorship; thus we must place the composition at some time after the Sophistes, i.e. within the years 360-347. It is quite uncertain, so far as I can see, whether we should regard the Timaeus or the Philebus as the later work. As to the date of the imagined conversation I think it is possible to be more precise. We have to consider (a) the internal evidence of the Timaeus itself, (b) the evidence supplied by the Republic, (a) The interlocutors in the dialogue are Socrates, Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates. Of Timaeus nothing is known except what we learn from Plato, that he is a Locrian from South Italy, with a career of eminence in both science and politics behind him (20a). From the fact that the doctrine he is made to expound is recognizably a version of Pythagoreanism in which the biology and medicine of Empedocles is grafted on the original Pythagorean mathematics, we can really have no doubt that he is meant to be a Pythagorean of the same type as the more famous Philolaus. This suggests that he is at least as old a man as Socrates, and that we may perhaps connect what we are told of the magistracies he has filled with the facts about Pythagorean political ascendancy in Magna Graecia in the first half of the fifth century.
Hermocrates is plainly the famous
If we were right in our view of the dramatic date of the Republic, this brings us to the time of the peace of Nicias or very shortly before it, the year 422 or 421. Such a date fits all the indications of the Timaeus itself. It enables
The dialogue falls into three distinct parts: (a) introductory recapitulation of the contents of Republic i-v by Socrates (17a-19b), with expression of a strong desire to see the doctrine there laid down embodied in a dramatic story of concrete achievements (19b-20c); (b) relation by Critias of the alleged heroic exploit of Athens in resisting and defeating the kings of Atlantis (20c-26d); (c) the cosmological discourse of Timaeus, which extends unbroken, but for an occasional word of assent from Socrates, to the end of the dialogue (27c-92c). We may consider these divisions in their order.
(a) Introduction (17a-20c). There is not much on which we need make any comment. It is useless to speculate on the identity of the unnamed person who has been kept away from the conversation by indisposition and whom Timaeus agrees to replace as speaker. As Timaeus takes his place, we are no doubt to understand that he belongs to the same group of “Italian” philosophers. Philolaus, as Burnet suggests, would suit the part, or we might perhaps even think of Empedocles. Plato is merely intending a graceful expression of the debt of his dialogue to fifth-century “Italians.” The most striking feature of the recapitulation of the Republic is that it covers only the ground of Books I-V. Nothing is said of the philosopher-kings and their education in mathematics and dialectic, of the Form of Good, or of the contents of Republic viii-x. I suggest that the most likely explanation of this silence is that which is also the simplest. Just so much of the Republic, and no more, is recalled as will be an appropriate basis for the story of the Athenian victory over Atlantis. Plato is quite alive to the fact that the philosopher-king is an “ideal” which has never been realised, and therefore abstains from an attempt to exhibit a society of
The remarks with which Socrates closes his recapitulation are interesting as showing that Plato fully understood that his own hero had his definite limitations. Socrates, as he says, can give us a picture of the really healthy society, but he cannot “make the figures move” He cannot tell an actual story of the behavior of such a society in a life-like way, and the reason is that he has not enough personal experience of the work of the active statesman. He remains, after all, something of the theorist and doctrinaire (19b-e). This was, in fact, true of Socrates, and it helps to explain the fact that his influence on many of his associates was not wholly beneficial. Association with him in early life was not an unmixed good for the average lad; so far, there was just a slight basis of foundation for the distrust with which practical workers of the democratic constitution, like Anytus, regarded him.
(b) The Story of Atlantis (20c-25d). The story told by Critias is to the effect that nine thousand years before the time of Solon Athens had enjoyed just such institutions as those described in Republic i-v. Her soil was then wonderfully rich and fertile, as it had not suffered from the denudation which has since reduced the district of Attica to a rocky skeleton. The prehistoric Athenians, strong only in public spirit and sound moral, encountered and defeated the federated kings of Atlantis, an island lying in the Atlantic outside the Straits of Gibraltar, who had already successfully overrun all Europe as far as Italy, and all Africa as far as the Egyptian border. Afterward both the prehistoric Athenian victors and the island Atlantis were overwhelmed in a single day and night of earthquake and inundation. The story only survived in the records of Egypt, where Solon heard it when on his travels.
It should be clear that this whole tale is Plato’s own invention. He could not tell us so much more plainly than he does in the Critias (113b), when he makes Critias appeal to the testimony of “family papers” as his sole evidence for the narrative. Not only the existence of the island-kingdom, but the statement that Solon had ever contemplated a poem on the subject is represented as a “family tradition"; in other words, nothing was ever really known of any such intention. It is not hard to see what the materials for the tale are. The alleged shallowness of the sea just outside the “pillars of Heracles” and perhaps tales of Carthaginian sailors about islands in the Atlantic, are the foundation for the story of the lost island; the account of its destruction is manifestly based on the facts of the great earthquake and tidal wave of the year 373 which ravaged the Achaean coast. The main conception of the successful conflict of a small and patriotic nation in arms against an invader with vast material resources and immense superiority in the art of military engineering—a point on
(c) The Discourse of Timaeus (27c-92c). The lecture which Timaeus now delivers covers the whole ground of natural knowledge from astronomy to pathology and psycho-physics. It will be impossible to deal with more than its most outstanding features. It starts with two fundamental positions: (a) that the sensible world, being sensible, “becomes,” or, as we might say, is a world of “happenings” or “events"; (b) that whatever “becomes” has a cause, by which Timaeus means that it is the product of an agent (28a-c). The “artisan” or “craftsman” (δημιουργός) who makes the world thus comes into the story, and it is assumed that this maker is God. Now a craftsman always works with a model or archetype before him, and so we must ask whether the model on which the world has been made is itself something that has “become” or something eternal. Since the maker is the best of all causes and the thing he makes the best of all effects, clearly the model of which the sensible world is a “copy” or “likeness” (εἰκών) is eternal (29a). (In more modern language, it is meant that the natural world is not constituted by “events” only, but by events and the objects (in Professor Whitehead’s sense) situated in the events, and this is why it is intelligible and can be known.) This leads us to lay down an important canon of the degree of truth to be expected in natural science. Discourse about the fixed and unchanging archetype, or model, can be exact and final; it has the definitiveness of its
Next we may ask ourselves why the Maker produced a world at all. He was perfectly good, and for that very reason did not want to keep his goodness to himself, but to make something like himself. So he took over the whole of the “visible” which was in a condition of chaotic disorder, and made it into an ordered system, since order is better than chaos. For the same reason, he put mind (νους) into it, and, as mind can only exist in a soul (ψυχή), he gave it a soul, and thus the sensible world became “by the providence of God, a living being with soul and mind” (30b). The model in the likeness of which he made it was, of course, a νοητόν or “intelligible,” something complete and whole (τέλεον), and something living. The sensible world, then, is the sensible embodiment of a living creature or organism (ζῳον) of which all other living creatures are parts. And there is only one “world” of sense (as against the Milesian tradition of the “innumerable” worlds). For the model is one, and a perfect copy of it will reproduce its uniqueness (30c-31b).
Thus, in the scheme of Timaeus, we see that the “efficient cause” of the world is thought of definitely as a “personal” God, and this “creator” or “maker” is, strictly speaking, the only God,
It may naturally be asked how much of this can be conceived to be serious Platonic teaching and how much is mere imaginative symbolism? No one, of course, could answer the question precisely; possibly Plato himself could not have made a hard-and-fast distinction between philosophical content and mythical form. But one or two points are important. It would stultify the whole story to follow the example of some interpreters, who wish to find something like the philosophy of Spinoza in Plato, by making the “artisan” a mythical symbol of his “model” the νοητὸν ζῳον. This may or may not be good philosophy and theology, but it is not the thought of Plato, as we shall see more clearly when we come to deal with the doctrine of God in the Laws. God and the forms have to be kept distinct in Plato for the reason that the activity of God as producing a world “like” the forms is the one explanation Plato ever offers of the way in which the “participation” of things in forms is effected. If “God” simply meant the same thing as the forms, or as a supreme form, it would remain a mystery why there should be anything but the forms, why there should be any “becoming” at all. How far the explanation that God “makes” a world on the model of the forms was taken by Plato to be a literal statement of truth is a question that may be left to anyone who is bold enough to pronounce exactly how literally Leibniz intended his similar language about God’s “choice of the best” as the reason why the actual world is actual. The one thing which is clear from the Laws is that God, in Plato, is a “soul” not a form.
A more legitimate question is whether God in the Timaeus is quite all we mean by a “creator.” Are we to take seriously the representation, which runs through the dialogue, of God’s action as the imposing of order on a preexisting chaos? Does Plato mean that the world was formed out of preexisting materials? On this point we find a discrepancy of interpretation springing up in the first generation of the Academy itself. Aristotle, as is well known, insists on finding in the Timaeus the doctrine that the world is γεννητός ("had a beginning), and is severely critical of this error, as he regards it. On the other hand, the Platonists for the most part—the Neoplatonists unanimously—adopt the view, originally propounded by Xenocrates, that the representation of
Thus, on their view, the account of the world, or rather its constituents, as they were before God began his work, is merely a picture of the sort of thing you would have left on your hands if you tried to do what you never can do successfully, to think away all traces of the order and structure in which God’s authorship of things reveals itself. The only two Platonists who are known to have taken Aristotle’s view on this question are Plutarch and Atticus, a writer of the Antonine age. It is significant that their attempt to take the words of Timaeus literally gets them into very grave difficulties. Since the undoubted Platonic doctrine, expounded most fully in the Laws, is that “soul” is the cause of all movements, Plutarch finds himself bound to discover in the Laws, the doctrine that there is an “evil” world-soul, which he supposes to have animated the original chaos. Though this discovery has been followed in modern times by such scholars as Zeller, it is certainly a mere “mare’s nest.” The words of the Laws say no more than that, since there is disorder in the world as well as order, there must be some soul or souls other than God to cause the disorder.
If we look at the text of the Timaeus, we shall see that at any rate Plato does not mean to say that there ever was a time before God constructed the world, since he tells us, as Aristotle allows,
Thus the language which seems to imply a primitive state of pure chaos cannot be meant seriously, and so far Xenocrates seems to be right in his interpretation. (This would leave it a logical possibility that the series of events had a first member, and that the interval between the first member and the event which is my writing of these words, is a finite number of years, but I do not think any scholar acquainted with Greek thought is likely to suppose Plato to be contemplating this alternative.) Again, as will be clearer from what we shall have to say later on about the use of the notion of “necessity” it seems plain that the
The story of the making we cannot here follow far into its details. Since natural things can be seen and grasped, fire (light) and earth must be among their constituents. To combine two such terms in a stable way, there must be a “mean” between them. But fire and earth are volumes and have three dimensions. Hence you cannot insert a single mean proportional between them, but need two.
This need is met by air and water. Fire is to air what air is to water and water to earth. This playful application of the doctrine of the geometrical mean effects a transition from Pythagorean mathematics to the four “roots” of Empedocles. We shall see shortly that for Timaeus they are not “elements” (31b-32c). God used up the whole of these materials in making the world. It excretes nothing and assimilates nothing, and this secures it against age or disease. Its form was appropriately made spherical, since the sphere has the greatest volume of all bodies with the same perimeter, and is therefore the right figure for that which is to contain everything. It was given no sense-organs, since there is nothing outside itself to be apprehended, no digestive organs, as there is nothing it can take in as food, and no organs of locomotion, for it has nowhere to travel. It needed no hands, for there is nothing for it to grasp or repel. Being alive, however, it moves with the most uniform of all motions, uniform rotation on its own axis. Finally, we must add that it was animated all through with a ψυχή, and this was the generation of a “blessed god” (32c-34b).
We have begun, however, at the wrong end. We should have described first the fashioning of the world’s soul, since soul takes precedence of body in order of “production” as well as of worth
(Apparently we are to imagine a long ribbon with intervals marked on it at distances corresponding to the numbers indicated by the directions for making the notes of the scale.) Next, the ribbon was split longitudinally into two halves, which were laid cross-wise, thus +. Then each ribbon was bent into a circle so as to give two circles, in planes at right angles to one another, with double contact, like the equator and a meridian on a sphere. The outermost of these circles was called that of the Same, the innermost that of the Other. The circle of the Same was made to revolve “to the right,” that of the “Other” was subdivided into seven concentric circles at unequal distances from one another, which were made to revolve with unequal velocities “to the left” (34c-36d). We learn a little later that the inclination of the two circles was made oblique (39a), so that they turn out in the end to stand for the sidereal equator and the ecliptic, their revolutions being the (apparent) diurnal revolution of the “starry heavens” and the orbits of the sun and the planets in the Zodiac respectively. It must be carefully noted that nothing is said of “spheres” and, again, that as usual in the classical period, the orbit of a heavenly body is thought of as itself revolving, like a cart-wheel, and carrying round the body which is set in it. We have heard now of the orbits of the whole and of the seven planets, but so far nothing has been said about any bodies which, as we should say, “revolve in” these orbits. We are now at last (36e) told that the creator finally constructed the body of the world “within” its soul and adapted the two; this begins the “unceasing and reasonable life” of the κόσμος (cosmos) as an organism. The circle of the Same and the Other, being circles primarily “in the soul” of the world, have an epistemological as well as an astronomical significance. Their absolutely uniform revolutions symbolize—perhaps Timaeus means that they actually embody—
The creator next proposed to make his work even more like the model on which he had designed it. He could not make it, like its model, eternal (ἀΐδιος) (since nothing sensible can be so), but he made it as nearly eternal as he could. He devised a “moving image of eternity,” which he called time. Time is to eternity as number is to unity; its absolutely uniform flow is an imperfect mirroring of the self-sameness of eternity, and time is the characteristic form of the sensible. We try to speak of the eternal as that which “was and is and is to be.” But strictly, what is eternal simply “is"; we must not say that it “was” or “will be” for such language can only be used properly of what “happens.” So again we say that the past is past, the future is to come, the nonexistent is nonexistent. But all such language, which ascribes being to what is mere “becoming” and even to “what is not” is unscientific
The true state of the case is that the model eternally is, its sensible embodiment has been going on and will be going on all through time (38c). If there is to be time, there must be perceptible bodies with uniform movements to serve as measures of it, and so God devised the sun and the other “planets” and put them into the orbits provided for them by the splitting of the circle of the Other. Their order, reckoning outwards from the earth, is Moon, Sun, Hesperus, the “star of Hermes,” then the three “outer” planets, for which no names are given here. The sun, Hesperus, and the “star of Hermes” have the same “period,” but the two latter are in an unexplained way opposed to the sun, so that they are always catching him up and being caught up by him. The details about the apparent behavior of the others would require more time than we can spare for their description. The important points to remember are that their velocities are different, that each of them has two motions, one communicated to it by the outermost circle, that of the Same (which revolves from E. to W. with a period of twenty-four hours), another, oblique to this, and with a longer period (the planet’s “yea”), from W. to E. The result is that the actual visible movements are complicated “corkscrews” (ἕλικες, helices). Men ought to understand, as they do not, that the components of the movements of all are perpetually uniform and regular, and are “time” just as much as a lunar month, or a solar year. There is a great period, the longest of all, at the completion of which all the planets are once more, relatively to the sidereal heavens and to one another, in the same positions. “To enable them to see their way” round these circuits, a great
God had now to make the various lesser animals which were to inhabit the different regions of the universe. This was done by reproducing the various forms of organism mind discovers in the form of “living being.” Of these there are four, each inhabiting its own region: gods who live in the sky, winged creatures who inhabit the air, aquatic creatures, and land-animals. The “gods” were made approximately of pure fire, given spherical form, distributed over the heaven which revolves with the circle of the Same, and given a double movement motion with the circle of the Same (i.e. a diurnal revolution), and an axial revolution of their own. (Thus the “gods” of Timaeus are simply the stars. We gather that they are self-luminous, since they are made of fire, and from comparison of the mention of their axial rotations, with the absence of any corresponding statement about the planets, we may (perhaps?) infer that the planets are not supposed to have any such rotations.) As for the earth, our mother, God made it for “a guardian and artificer of night and day, swinging (ἰλλομένην) on the path about the axis of the universe” (τὴν περὶ τὸν διὰ παντὸς πόλον τεταμένον, 40b). To describe the system further would be impossible without an actual visible model, and is irrelevant (39e-40d).
Full discussion of this astronomical passage is impossible here, but the following points should be noted, (a) There is no reference to the famous theory devised by Eudoxus within the Academy itself, which analyses the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies into combinations of axial rotations of imaginary “spheres,” with a common center at the center of the earth. Timaeus never speaks of “spheres,” but, in the language originated by Anaximander, of “circles,” conceived to turn round like a wheel spun about its center. And though one of the motions of each true “star” is said to be “controlled by” the circle of the Same (40b), this motion is expressly ascribed to the star itself, not to an outermost “sphere.” Presumably the mere fact that Timaeus is a fifth-century astronomer, speaking many years before the origination of Eudoxus’ hypothesis, sufficiently explains this. (b) The stars are not thought of, after Aristotle’s fashion, as made of a superior and “celestial” stuff. They are made of “fire,” the finest quality of fire, but still the same fire to be found in ourselves and bodies round us. We cannot too carefully remember that the fateful distinction between “celestial matter” and “elementary matter” was unknown to Greek science until Aristotle introduced it as a direct consequence of his hypostatization of the purely mathematical spheres of Eudoxus into physical globes, (c) It is worthwhile also to observe the complete freedom of the whole theory from any traces of the planetary astrology which was, later on. to infest the minds of the Hellenistic age. The position of
(e) A much more important question is suggested by the remarks about the earth. Does Timaeus mean to ascribe a motion to the earth, or does he not? In the middle of the last century there was a sharp controversy on the point between Grote, who found the motion of the earth in the dialogue, and Boeckh, who denied it. On one point Boeckh was clearly right. Timaeus cannot mean, as Grote thought, to give the earth an axial rotation with a period of twenty-four hours, since this would conflict with his own express attribution of this period to the “circle of the Same” at 39c. If the stars were revolving round us once in twenty-four hours and the earth rotating in the opposite sense with the same period, manifestly the interval between two successive transits of the same star over the meridian would not be twenty-four hours but twelve, and we cannot suppose, as Grote suggested, that Plato may have forgotten so obvious a point. On the other hand, though nearly all later editors have followed Boeckh, it is equally plain that he must be wrong in making the earth of Timaeus motionless. His interpretation
The interpretation just given follows Professor Burnet, who is at least certainly right in insisting that the word used by Timaeus of the earth (ἰλλομένην) must stand, as Aristotle said, for a notion of some sort. Mr. Cornford has since developed a very different, and attractive explanation, according to which the meaning is that the earth, situated at the center of the universe, has a diurnal rotation in the opposite sense to that of the “circle of the same” and thus exactly compensating it (op. cit., pp. 120-124). Attractive as this view is, I still doubt whether it could have been expected to be divined by a reader with nothing before him but the bare statement that the earth ἰλλεται, “winds” or “curls,” and have therefore hesitated to adapt my text to it, though I am not confident that it may not be right after all. But it is conceivable that Timaeus may be supposed to hold that some sort of “slide” of the earth would explain one or both of two “appearances,” (a) the inequality of the “seasons” into which the year is divided by the equinoxes and solstices, (b) the notorious fact that though the sun and moon are “in conjunction” every lunar month, a solar eclipse is not regularly observed at each conjunction. But I give this avowedly as a guess.
In the chapter of the de Caelo already referred to, Aristotle, after mentioning that some of the Pythagoreans held that the earth is a planet revolving round a central luminary, adds that “many others too might accept the view that the center should not be assigned to the earth, for they think (οἴονται) that the most honorable region should belong to the most honorable body, and that fire is more honorable than earth, and the boundary than the intermediate. Now circumference and center are boundaries; so on the strength of these considerations they think that not the earth, but rather fire, is situated at the center of the sphere” (op. cit. 293a, 27-35). Aristotle does not say who these persons are, except that they are not the Pythagoreans of whom he had begun by speaking. Yet he must be speaking of actual persons, since he twice uses the phrase “they think.” From what Plutarch has told us on the authority of Theophrastus, it seems to me certain that the unnamed “some” mean here, as so often in Aristotle, Plato and his followers. In that case, we have the evidence not only of Theophrastus, though that would be sufficient, but of Aristotle, that Plato “in his old age” regarded the earth as a planet revolving along with the rest round a central luminary, a view quite unlike that expounded by Timaeus. This is borne out by the evidence of an important passage in the Laws (821e-822c) where the Athenian speaker speaks of it as a truth which he has only recently learned that every planet has one and only one path (οὐ πολλὰς ἀλλὰ μίαν ἀεί). This can have only one meaning, that the speaker intends to deny the doctrine of the double or composite motion on which Timaeus insists. He must mean that the diurnal revolution is not communicated to the planets, and so is not a component of their motions; each planet has only its “proper” movement through the Zodiac. Since the appearances which prompted the double motion theory still have to be accounted for, we are driven to suppose that the “diurnal revolution” must be intended to be regarded as only apparent, being really due to a motion of the earth. The implication is that the earth is a planet revolving round an invisible central luminary in a period of twenty-four hours, as the moon is supposed to revolve round the same body in a lunar month, or the sun in a year. A little more light is thrown on the matter by a sentence of the Epinomis, a dialogue which is generally “athetized” on extremely inadequate grounds, but admitted to have been at any
Plato’s own doctrine would seem, thus, to be neither that of the motionless earth, nor that of Timaeus, nor the full-blown Copernicanism which some modern admirers have read into him. He appears to attribute one motion only to the earth, a motion of revolution round an invisible center (not round the sun), with a period of twenty-four hours. The important point is not that he has a well-worked-out hypothesis, but that his scientific instinct has seized the fundamental point that a true mechanic of the heavens must start with a revolving earth; this, no doubt, is his reason for dissatisfaction with the scheme of Eudoxus, beautiful as it is. Another inference of first-rate importance is this. We clearly have no right to assume that the view ascribed to Plato by Theophrastus and apparently presupposed in the Laws was arrived at after the completion of the Timaeus. We have seen that the Timaeus and the Laws must have been in progress simultaneously. And it is hardly credible that if Plato had suddenly made so
Timaeus next adds that the Creator further made a number of created gods who, unlike the stars, only show themselves when they choose, Oceanus, Tethys, Phorcys, Cronus, Rhea, and their offspring. We have no evidence for the existence of these beings except that of persons who claim to be their descendants, but we may fairly suppose these persons to know their own pedigrees (40d-e). This is, of course, satire, not, as has been sometimes supposed, a concession for safety’s sake to the religion of the State. Most of the figures named belong to the cosmogonies of poets like Orpheus and Hesiod, not to the Attic cultus, and the ironical remark that a man must always be believed about his own family-tree is aimed at poets like Orpheus and Musaeus. Timaeus, as a scientific Pythagorean, has his own reasons for not wishing to be confounded with the Orphics. The Creator now addresses the created gods, explaining that whatever is his own immediate work is imperishable. Hence for the making of creatures which are to be perishable, he will employ these created gods as his intermediaries (41a-d). He then himself makes immortal souls, in the same number as the stars, of the “seconds” and “thirds” of the mixture from which he has made the souls of the world and the stars. Each soul is conducted to its star and made to take a perspective view of the universe and its structure. It is then explained to the souls that in due process of time they are all to be born as men in the various “instruments of time” (i.e. the planets).
The souls are then sown, like seeds, in the various planets, while the created gods fashion bodies
We are next told something of the way in which this work was done, but the story is only given in outline, with the necessary warning that, since it has to do with the mutable, it can only be tentative (42e-47e). In making the human body, the gods first constructed the head as a suitable dwelling-place for the immortal soul, which, of course, like the soul of the κόσμος, contains the two circles of the Same and the Other. (This means that Timaeus rightly accepts the discovery of Alcmaeon of Crotona that the brain is the central organ in the sensory-motor system.) The skull was therefore made spherical, as the body of the κόσμος is spherical. The trunk and the limbs were added for the safety and convenience of the head (44c-45b). The organ of sight was then constructed. It is literally a ray of sunlight dwelling within the body and issuing out through the pupil. We thus see by an actual long-distance contact of this ray, which is a real, though temporary, member of the body, with the visible object—the theory explained by Empedocles in verses cited by Aristotle. To this account of vision Timaeus appends an explanation of sleep as produced by an equable diffusion of this internal “fire” when darkness prevents its issuing out to join its kindred fire outside us, and a brief account of mirror-vision (45b-46c). His main points at present are, however, of a different kind. He dwells on the thought that the effect of the conjunction of the soul with a body which is always “flowing,” giving off waste material and taking in fresh, is to throw the movements of the “circles” in the soul into complete disorder. The movement of the circle of the Same is temporarily arrested, and that of the circle of the Other rendered irregular. Hence the thoughtlessness and confused perception and fancy of our infancy and childhood. It is only when the “flow” of the body becomes less turbid, as waste and repair come to balance one another in adult life, that the movements of the “circles” recover from the initial disturbance of birth, and men come to discretion and intelligence, and then only with the aid of “right education” (43a-44c). Also, we must be careful to remember the distinction between true causes and mere subsidiary causes (συναίτια). Any account we give of the mechanism of vision, or any other function, is a mere statement about the subsidiary or instrumental cause. The true cause, in every case, is to be sought in the good or end a function subserves. Thus the real end for which we have been given eyes, is that the spectacle of the heavenly motions may lead us to note the uniformity and regularity of days, nights, months, and years, and that reflection on this uniformity may lead us to science and philosophy, and so make the revolutions of the “circles in the head” themselves regular and uniform. And the same thing is true of hearing; its real purpose is not that we may learn to tune the strings of a lyre, but that we may learn to make our own thinking and living a spiritual melody (46c-47e).
The sections which are now to follow are marked by Timaeus as the most original and important part of his whole cosmology. We shall see that they serve to connect the two main currents of scientific thought, the biological and the mathematical, by providing a geometrical construction for the “corpuscles” of the four “elements” which the biologist Empedocles had treated as the “simples” of his system. The four types of body thus constructed are then, in the Empedoclean fashion, treated as the immediate units from which the various tissues and secretions of the living body are formed by chemical composition. The result is thus that Timaeus, in the spirit of Descartes, offers us an anatomy and physiology in which the organism appears as an elaborate kinematical system; natural science is thus reduced in principle, as Descartes and Spinoza held it ought to be, to geometry. Plato is not, of course, very strictly committed by the details of speculations which he repeatedly says are provisional, but it is clear that he is in sympathy with the general attitude known today in biology as mechanistic. The human organism, as he conceives it, is a machine directed and controlled by mind or intelligence, but the machine itself is made of the same ultimate constituents as other machines and the workings of it follow the same laws as those of the rest.
It is important, if we are to approach the exposition in the right spirit, to understand what is meant by the initial distinction between the part of Intelligence and that of Necessity in the cosmic system. We must be careful not to confuse the “necessity” of which Plato is speaking with the principle of order and law. Law and order are precisely the features of the world which he assigns to intelligence as their source; we are carefully told that necessity
The reason for introducing it into the story seems to be simply that it is impossible in science to resolve physical reality into a complex of rational laws without remainder. In the real world there is always, over and above “law” a factor of the “simply given” or “brute fact,” not accounted for and to be accepted simply as given. It is the business of science never to acquiesce in the merely given, to seek to “explain” it as the consequence, in virtue of rational law, of some simpler initial “given.” But, however far science may carry this procedure, it is always forced to retain some element of brute fact, the merely given, in its account of things. It is the presence in nature of this element of the given, this surd or irrational as it has sometimes been called, which Timaeus appears to be personifying in his language about Necessity. That “mind persuades necessity” is just an imaginative way of saying that by the analysis of the given datum we always can rationalise it further; we never come to a point at which the possibility of “explanation” actually ceases. But the “irrational” is always there, in the sense that explanation always leaves behind it a remainder which is the “not yet explained.” When we have followed the exposition a little further, we shall discover that in the last resort this element of the irreducible and given turns out to be exactly what Professor Alexander has called the “restlessness of space-time” But, unlike Professor Alexander, Plato does not believe that the restlessness of space-time is enough to account for its elaboration into more and more rationally articulated systems; left to itself, it would be
We find, then, that we need to revise our first account of the sensible world. We had already spoken of two things which need to be carefully discriminated, the intelligible archetype and its visible copy. We have now to take into account a third concept which we shall find obscure enough, that of the “receptacle” (ὑποδοχή) or “matrix” (ἐκμαγειον) in which “becoming” goes on. This receptacle or matrix of process cannot be fire or water or any of the things which the earliest philosophers had selected as the primary “boundless.” Experience shows that these are constantly passing into one another; there is now fire where there was water, or water where there was fire. The various bodies are mutable and impermanent; what remains permanent under all the variations is the region or room or place where they arise and vanish. This is there and self-same under all the processes of change, and has no form or structure of its own, precisely because it is its indifference to all which makes the appearance of all within it possible. We find it hard to apprehend, because it cannot be discerned by sense; it must be thought of, but can only be thought of by a sort of “bastard reflection” (λογισμῳ τινι νόθῳ, 52b), i.e. by systematic negation, the denying of one definite determination after another. It is, in fact, “place” (χώρα). We may, incidentally, remind ourselves that each of our three principles is apprehended in a special way. We can satisfy ourselves of the reality of the forms by considering that if there were only sensible objects, science and true belief would be the same; whereas it is clear they are not. Science can only be acquired by learning (διδάχή) a true belief may be produced by “persuasion” appeal to our emotions; what we know can always be justified to the intellect (τὸ μὲν ἀεὶ μετ̉ ἀληθους λόγον), a true belief not always; we cannot be argued out of the one, we can be persuaded out of the other. Since science and true belief thus differ, their objects must be different.
If we try to picture the condition of things “before” the introduction of ordered structure, we have to think of the “receptacle”
The first step God takes towards introducing determination and order into this indeterminate “happening” is the construction of bodies of definite geometrical structure. This brings us to the doctrine of the geometrical structure of the “corpuscles” of the “four roots” which Empedoclean biology wrongly treats as simple ultimates. The construction is effected by making a correspondence between the “four roots” and the originally Pythagorean doctrine of the regular solids which can be inscribed in the sphere (53c-56c). There are five and only five distinct types of regular solid, and four of them can be built up geometrically by starting with two ultimate simple types of triangle, which are the most beautiful, and therefore the most appropriate, of all. These two triangles are the ultimate “elements” of the Timaeus. One of them is the isosceles right-angled triangle, called by the Pythagoreans the “half-square"; the other is the triangle which can be obtained by dividing the equilateral triangle into six smaller triangles by drawing the perpendiculars from the angular points on the opposite sides, or less symmetrically, by dividing the equilateral triangle into two by a single such perpendicular. (Hence the Pythagorean name for it, the “half-triangle”) Timaeus does not explain what the peculiar beauty of these triangles is, but we know independently that it lies in the fact that the ratios of the angles of the two triangles are the simplest possible. Those of the “half-square” have the ratios 1: 1: 2, those of the “half-triangle” the ratios 1: 2: 3. From the former, by a symmetrical arrangement of four such triangles about a center of position we get the square, and from a proper arrangement of six square faces, the cube. A similar symmetrical arrangement of six triangles of the second type gives us the equilateral triangle, and there are three regular solids which can be made with equilateral triangles as their faces—the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the icosahedron. For physical reasons, we take the cube as the form appropriate to a corpuscle of earth, the tetrahedron as that of a particle of fire, the other two as the forms of the particles of air and water respectively. There is still a fifth regular solid, the dodecahedron, which has twelve pentagons as its faces; but this can be constructed from neither of the elementary triangles, and has a different part to play. God employed it (55b) “for the whole, adorning it with constellations.” (This
We next have an attempt to specify the most important “varieties” of each of the four types of body and the “chemical compounds” they form with one another, and to account for the sensible qualities of all these bodies by reference to their geometrical structure, which must be passed over here (58c-68d). Its most interesting feature is a long psycho-physical account of the conditions of pleasure-pain (64a-65b), in terms of the depletion-repletion formula. The “unmixed” pleasures of sense are brought under the formula by the hypothesis that they are sudden and appreciable “repletions” of a “depletion” which has been too gentle and gradual to be propagated to the “seat of consciousness."
With the next section of the dialogue we pass definitely from physics to anatomy, physiology, and medicine (69a-87b). Again, it must be sufficient in this volume to pass over the details lightly. The main point is that the organism has been constructed throughout to minister to the soul. To fit the soul for its embodied life it had to receive two temporary and inferior additions, the “spirited” and “concupiscent” “parts” or “forms” already familiar to us from the Republic. Each of these has a central “organ” or “seat,” just as the “rational” part has its seat in the brain; “spirit” is lodged in the thorax, “appetite” in the lower region of the trunk, beneath the diaphragm (69a-70e). In connexion with this least orderly and disciplined element in the soul, the liver has a specially important part to play. It is the source of visions and bad dreams
The physiology is followed up by a section on pathology which makes a curious attempt at a classification of the various known diseases (82a-86a). The theory could only be properly discussed in connexion with what we know of other fifth- and fourth-century speculations on the same subject from the Hippocratean corpus and other sources. Its most outstanding feature is that it departs wholly from the lines of the Hippocratean “humoral pathology” by treating “phlegm” and “bile” not as ingredients of the organism in its normal state but as unwholesome morbid secretions. I have tried elsewhere to show reasons for supposing that Plato is deriving the doctrine from Philistion of Locri, with whom, as we see from the Epistles, he had made acquaintance at Syracuse, and that in its main outlines it is in general accord with what we know to have been the medical theory of Philolaus, though there are points of difference. If this is so, we can understand why this particular medical theory should be expounded by the Locrian Timaeus. In any case, we must not suppose that Plato has invented an amateur pathology of his own and is teaching it dogmatically. He will simply be following what he regards as respectable specialist authority.
The pathology of the body leads up to the pathology of the soul (86b-87b), and this to some regulations of physical and mental hygiene (87e-90d). Undesirable moral propensities are due very largely to physical constitutional defects; e.g. undue propensity to sexual irregularities is largely of physiological origin. The other chief cause of “badness” is education in bad social traditions. Hence Timaeus infers—not quite consistently with his own earlier insistence on personal responsibility—that those who begot and educated the transgressor are really more to blame than the transgressor himself. We must remember that he is, among other things, a medical man, and that “the profession” are prone to views of this kind. Plato may well be treating his speaker with a certain touch of irony when he makes the moral theory of Timaeus a little inconsistent with his mental pathology.
In laying down rules of hygiene, the supreme object we should
A still more important topic is the hygiene of the mind which is to rule and direct the movements of the body. Timaeus cannot relevantly enter on a systematic discussion of the principles of education, but he lays down the general principle that our intelligence is the divine thing in us, and the real “guardian spirit” (δαίμων) of each of us. It has been truly said that man, whose divine part resides in the head, is like a tree with its root not in the earth, but in the sky (90a). The rule of healthy living for the soul is that this divine thing in us should “think thoughts immortal and divine,” and that the merely human “parts” of the soul should “worship” and “tend” it. The true “tendance” of any creature consists in providing it with its appropriate food and “exercise (κινήσεις, 90c), and the “exercise” appropriate to the rational soul is thus “the thoughts and revolutions of the whole.” The end of life is to correct the “revolutions in the head” and bring them once more into correspondence with the “tunes and revolutions” of the world-soul, in whose image they were made at first (90a-d).
The story closes with a development which should not be taken as seriously as has been done by some interpreters. Timaeus, we remember, had incorporated in his narrative the old fancy that the first men were directly sprung from the soil. Hence his physiology has taken no account of the reproductive system. This, we are now told, was only wanted in the second generation, when the second-best of the original “men” came to be reborn as women. He gives an unmistakably playful account of the modifications which had to be introduced into the physiological scheme to suit the new situation (90e-91d), and then adds more briefly that the lower animals in general were also derived by degeneration from the original human pattern, the deformation being greater or less as the souls which were to tenant the various bodies had fallen more or less short of virtue and wisdom in their first life (91d-92b). Nothing is said here of the hell and purgatory of the eschatological
Here our story comes at last to an end. We have now told the whole tale of the birth of this sensible world, “a visible living creature, modeled on that which is intelligible, a god displayed to sense” (92c).
The Critias calls for no special consideration. Its declared purpose is to relate in detail the story of the defeat of the Atlantid kings, of which Critias had given the bare outline in the Timaeus. It remains, however, a bare fragment. Critias describes the topography of Attica and Athens as they were before the process of denudation which has reduced the country to a mere rocky skeleton (109b-111d), and the happy condition of the inhabitants (111e-112e). He then gives a much longer account of the island of Atlantis and its kings, the descendants of the god Posidon, their institutions, and their wonderful engineering works (118a-120d), and is about to relate how their hearts were lifted up with pride in their wealth and power, and how Zeus resolved to bring them into judgment, when the fragment breaks off, just as Zeus is about to declare his purpose to the assembled gods. The chief things which call for notice are the clear-headed way in which Plato has grasped the effects of gradual geological denudation on Attica,
but the
The conception of the “purpose of Zeus” seems to be an echo from epic poetry. It is hardly a mere accident that the last complete sentence of the fragment recalls the version of the Trojan story given in the Cypria, where the origin of the great war is traced to the plan of Zeus for the prevention of over-population. There may be some significance in the fact that Zeus is said to summon the divine council to his “most honorable abode” in the center of the universe.
See further:
Burnet. Greek Philosophy, Part I., 335-349; Platonism. 1928, c. 7.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii., 258-287 al.; Platons Dialoge, 98-158; Neue Untersuchungen über Platon, 174-182.
Levi, A. Il Concetto del Tempo nella Filosofia di Platone. Turin, N.D.
Stewart, J. A. Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 101-105; Myths of Plato, 259-297 (The Timaeus), 457-469.
Dies, A. Autour de Platon, ii., 522-603.
Taylor, A. E. A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. Oxford, 1928; Plato, Timaeus and Critias, translated, 1929.
Rivaud, A. Platon, Timaeus, Critias. Paris, 1925.
Friedlander, P. Platon; Eidos, Paideia, Dialogos (1928). Excursus II. on the city of Atlantis.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entivichelung, 374-394.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 338-358.
Baeumker, C. Das Problem der Materie in der Griechischen Philosophie, 115-188.
Martin, T. H. Études suv le Time’e de Platon.(Paris, 1841.
Robin, L. Études sur la signification et la place de la physique dans la philosophie de Platon. Paris, 1919.
Robin, L. Platon, c. v.
Cornford, F. M. Plato’s Cosmology (Timaeus translated with commentary, Cambridge, 1937.
Chapter XVIII. The Laws and Epinomis
The Laws is not only the longest of all Plato’s writings; it also contains his latest and ripest thought on the subjects which he had all through his life most at heart—ethics, education, and jurisprudence. Plato’s services to the theory of education, in particular, have usually been grossly underrated, from an inexcusable neglect of the very thorough treatment given to it in what he probably himself regarded as his most important work. His theology, again, has often been misconceived in modern times, because the tenth book of the Laws is the only place in his works where it is systematically expounded. This neglect of so noble a work is perhaps to be explained by two considerations. In one respect the Laws makes a greater demand on the reader than any other Platonic writing. The dramatic element is reduced to a minimum; if one does not care for the subject-matter of the book, there is little in its manner to attract. To all intents and purposes, the work is a monologue, interrupted only by formulae of assent or requests for further explanation. Further, the purpose of the whole is severely practical, and will not appeal to a reader who cares more for metaphysics and science than for morals and politics. More than any other work of Plato, the Laws stands in direct relation to the political life of the age in which it was composed and is meant to satisfy a pressing felt need.
In the last twenty years of Plato’s life it was becoming more and more obvious that the old city-states which had been the centers of Hellenic spiritual life had had their day. Athens herself had become a second-rate power ever since the collapse of the great Syracusan expedition, as Plato knew only too well. Sparta, to whom the hegemony had passed at the end of the Decelean war, had proved wholly unfitted for such a post, and had been crushed, in a way from which she never recovered, by the brilliant successes of Epaminondas, which made Thebes for a few years a power of the first order. Meanwhile the very existence of Hellenic civilization was endangered by the encroachments of Persia in the East and Carthage in the West. It was clear that if civilization of the Hellenic type was to hold its own, none of the older city-states was in a condition to become its center. We know now that the historical solution of the problem was to be provided by the rise of the Macedonian monarchy and the achievements of Philip and Alexander.
The date of composition of the work cannot be very precisely fixed. But we may readily fix a terminus a quo [point of origin]. One of the chief principles on which Plato insists is that the legislator has not really done his work when he has merely enunciated an enactment and provided it with a “sanction” in the form of a penalty for nonobservance. This is like the method of an empiric “slave” doctor, treating other slaves; he merely orders a prescription to be followed under the threat of consequences if it is neglected. A great physician treating an intelligent freeman tries to enlist his patient in the work of the cure by explaining to him the principles on which the treatment rests. In the same way, a legislator should try to enlist
The personnel of the dialogue, if we can call it one, is exceedingly simple. There are three characters—an Athenian, left anonymous, who is the main speaker, and two minor characters, Megillus, a Spartan, and Clinias, a Cretan. All of them are old men; of the Athenian we learn that he has astronomical and mathematical knowledge, is regarded by the others as a highly suitable person to give advice on matters of jurisprudence and political science, and that he has had personal experience of association with a “tyrant” (711a). Thus his intellectual qualifications are those of a member of the Academy, and his personal experiences are modeled on Plato’s own, and to that extent we may fairly take him as standing for Plato, though we have no reason to suppose that he is drawn with any deliberate intention of self-portraiture. All we learn of the others is that the Spartan belongs to a family in which the office of proxenus (ambassador) of Athens is hereditary, and that the Cretan is connected by blood with the famous medicine-man Epimenides (642b, d). This is meant to account for the unusual readiness of both to learn from an Athenian. When the work opens we find the three old men engaged in a general conversation about the merits and purpose of the institutions of the traditional legislators of Sparta and Cnossus, Lycurgus and Minos. They propose to continue their conversation as they walk to the cave of Dicte, the legendary birthplace of Zeus. The full situation is only disclosed at the end of the third book (702b-d). It then appears that the Cretans have resolved to resettle the site of a decayed city; the making of the necessary arrangements has been left to the citizens of Cnossus, who have devolved it upon a commission of ten. Clinias, the head
The argument of the first three books may be regarded as introductory. Plato winds his way very gradually into his subject, advancing almost imperceptibly from a problem of ethics, through educational theory, to the consideration of strictly political and juristic matter, and does not reveal his full purpose until the preparatory positions have been thoroughly secured. This method is very characteristic, and it is unfortunate that some modern readers should have appreciated it so little as to speculate about the possibility that the whole arrangement is due to the piecing together of disconnected papers by an editor. I trust that the brief analysis which follows will reveal the real march of the argument as far too carefully studied to be the result of a well-meant blunder.
Book I: What is the central purpose of the institutions of Lycurgus and Minos? The Spartan and Cretan agree that their law-givers have discovered the fundamental truth that, under all disguises, the brute hard fact about the life of a city is that it is a “war to the knife” with all rivals; almost in Hobbes’s phrase, independent cities are in a state of nature towards one another, and the state of nature is a state of real but undeclared war (πόλεμος ἀκήρυκτος). Hence the supreme good for a city is victory in this unremitting warfare, and the business of a citizen is to be, before everything, a combatant. All the institutions of Sparta and Crete are therefore rightly directed towards producing the one great virtue, efficiency in warfare, ἀνδρεία, valour. The Athenian dissents entirely from this ethic of warfare. The supreme victory for any community or any man is not victory over the foe without, but victory over self, that is, the conquest of the worser elements in the community or the individual soul by the better. And this victory is not complete when the better elements coerce or expel the worse; it is only complete when subjugation is followed by reconciliation and harmony. Peace, not war, between the components of community or individual soul is the best state; it is with a view to peace that a good legislator must make his enactments. From this point of view, wisdom, sophrosyne, justice, are the supreme virtues; mere martial valour will rank only fourth (631c). Now when we consider the Spartan system of training we see that all its peculiarities—the common meals of coarse fare, the bodily exercises and hunting, and the rough discipline in general—aim only at fostering the one virtue we have just ranked lowest among the four of the familiar quadrilateral. And, what is more, they aim at teaching only the easier and less valuable half of the one virtue.
True “manliness” or valour does not consist simply in the power
A chance remark of Megillus in reply to these criticisms provides the material for the rest of the discussion of Book I. He regards it as highly creditable to Sparta that its pleasures are so few; a wine-party, for example, is an unheard-of thing (637a). This leads the Athenian into a long discussion of the practice of μέθη, the convivial use of wine. (As a mere drink with meals wine was used sparingly at Sparta, as everywhere else in Greece, for the simple reason that the water is bad.) Some communities wholly prohibit the practice, others allow anyone who pleases to indulge in it as much as he pleases and whenever he likes. Both, the Athenian thinks, are mistaken. A Spartan may urge that the Spartans beat the “wet” forces in the field whenever they meet them, but we cannot generalize by enumeration from a few instances. The issue of numberless engagements goes unrecorded, and we can point to examples on the other side, such as the victory of the toping Syracusans over the abstemious Locrians. If we are to judge of wine-drinking or any other practice we must see what can be made of it under proper regulation. Now under two important conditions—(a) that the party is presided over by a sober man who is not himself giving way to the merriment, and (b) that this president is a man of more years and experience than the rest of the party—such a gathering might have valuable social uses. In vino veritas is true in the sense that when a man is warmed with wine, he shows himself for what he is without disguise. He blurts out thoughts which he would normally keep to himself, and exhibits tempers he would normally hide. If there were a drug which would gradually produce groundless fear and apprehension, as there is not, it would enable us to make a very safe and easy test of a man’s courage. We could make him take deeper and deeper draughts of it, and watch his success in mastering his pathological alarms. We should thus be able to do without risk what, in fact, we can only do by exposing a man to actual risk, distinguish the more from the less valiant. Wine does give us such a test of a man’s sophrosyne. We can see who forgets himself least and keeps his modesty best under the artificial removal of restraints produced by the wine-cup, and, if the party is rightly conducted, there is no danger that the application of the test will have serious consequences; the subject will be a little noisy and
Book II: The sentence just quoted does not occur until the end of the second book, but before we reach it, Plato has ingeniously made the problem of the right use of wine lead up to that of the use of music and poetry as a vehicle of early moral education. There is still a further valuable social service which may be derived from a proper use of wine, but before we can say what this service is, we must ask the question what right education is. To answer this, we reflect that a child’s first experience in life is acquaintance with pleasure and pain (653a), and that an education in character begins with learning to feel pleasure and pain about the right things (ibid. b). To understand how this education is to be got, we consider that a young creature cannot keep still; it is always jumping and shouting (ibid. d). In man, by the gift of God, these boundings and shoutings can be transformed into tuneful and rhythmical singing and dancing, and it is with this transformation that education begins (654a). Thus, by a liberal interpretation, the whole of the early moral training of the young, which is to begin as soon as they are sensible to melody and rhythm, can be brought under the rubric of education in the “choric” art, the art of song accompanied by the lyre and by the movements of an appropriate ballet d’action. The connexion of the discussion with the previous problem of the right use of wine is effected by a playful artifice very characteristic of Plato. It is at first assumed that, since the community as a whole must take its part in the worship of the Muses, there will be three choirs at our musical festivals—one of the boys and girls, a second of the younger, and a third of the older, men. But old men who ale “stiff in the joints” and past the feelings of frolic will naturally not find it easy to recapture the youthful spirit of gaiety which will make it natural for them to sing and dance before a
The details of the book cannot be discussed here, but it should be noted that while the treatment proceeds on the same main principles as those laid down for the employment of music in the schoolroom in Republic iii., the whole discussion is much richer in psychological insight; no account of Plato’s views about the moral influence of music on character can possibly afford to neglect Laws ii., though many professed accounts commit the fault. For the general theory of moral education, the most significant utterances are the declaration, emphatically commended by Aristotle, that the whole problem is to teach the young to “feel pleasure and pain” rightly (653b) and that “rightly” means “in accord with the rightly uttered discourse of the law” (659d, πρὸς τὸν ὑπὸ του νόμου λόγον ὀρθὸν εἰρημένον),
With Book III, we enter on the main problem of political science, what a “city” is, and how it arises. To illustrate the way in
In course of time, men would pass from this “nomad life” to agriculture, and the inhabiting of some sort of “city.” These settlements would naturally be made first of all in the uplands, and agriculture would bring along with it the first rude attempts at “enclosures” (681a). For defense against dangers, families would coalesce in large “houses” (like the “long houses” of the North American Indians). This would, in time, lead to an Ausgleich (balance, leveling out) of rules of life. The “large house” would develop a rule of life out of the various rules each family group brought with it into the settlement, and we might call this the first rude beginning of legislation (ibid. b-c). So we should find the first beginnings of sovereignty at the same stage in the appearance of a sort of “aristocracy” of headmen, who see that the rule of life is duly observed (681d). When the memory of the cataclysm had sufficiently died out, a further step would be taken. Men would venture to come down into the plains and build cities on a larger scale, like Homer’s Ilios (682a). With this development we find ourselves in an age of rich and powerful monarchs who can engage in serious hostilities. (It will be noted with how sure an eye Plato discerns the general character of the Greek “Middle Ages,” as they are depicted for us in the Iliad, which he rightly regards as historical in its representation of the old days of “chivalry.”)
The traditional story of the disasters of the return from Troy and of the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnese also has a lesson for us. The narrative of the conflicts between the returning warriors and the new generation, and of the Dorian invasion, throw light on the way in which a “world-war” changes the face of history (682d ff.). The main point, made at considerable length, is that the Dorian invaders, if they had only been wise in their generation, had the opportunity of establishing a State which could have held its own against all the Oriental monarchies, since they found
We learn the same lesson from the history of Persia and that of Athens. The principle is that, in the last resort, there are two “matrices” of constitutions—personal rule (monarchy), and democracy (popular rule, 693d). In a sound constitution both need to be blended. This was the case with the Persians under Cyrus, as well as with the Athenians of the same time. But in Persia, the element of popular control has disappeared, and government has become capricious autocracy, with the result that Persia is now only formidable on “paper,” since there is no real loyalty in the subject. At Athens, respect for personal character and authority has been lost in a complete reign of the mob. The cause, in both cases, has been the same, ignorance of the true principles of education. Since the great Darius, every Persian prince has been “born in the purple” and brought up by women and eunuchs, who ruin him by gratifying all his caprices. At Athens, the mischief began when the uneducated learned to think their own opinion about music and drama as good as that of the educated, and the same delusion soon spread to political matters; the Athens of today is not really a “democracy” but a “theatrocracy” of ignorant sensation-lovers (694a-701d). In Persia, no one is taught how to command, and in Athens no one learns how to obey. The lesson of history for the intending legislator is thus that every wholesome
It is a good corrective to some popular misconceptions of Plato, to note the judicious way in which he employs poetry and tradition as the basis for his tentative reconstruction of prehistory, and the moderation and sobriety of the lessons he draws from history. In the main, his conception of the stages by which men pass through the nomad to the agricultural state, and from the life of the family group to that of the “city” agrees with Aristotle’s, and I might suggest that the well-known account of the “household” and “village” as the precursors of the “city” in the Politics is consciously inspired by the more detailed picture of Laws iii. In one respect, Plato is more “modern” than Aristotle or any other ancient; he, like ourselves, has a vivid sense of the enormous lapses of time and the numerous changes which must have gone to the making of society before our records begin.
The third book of the Laws ends with the statement that Clinias and his friend are actually engaged in a visit to the site of the proposed new city, and an invitation to the Athenian to assist them by continuing his discourse on legislation as they walk. In Book IV Plato proceeds at once to give us a lesson in practical constitution-making. The very first requisite is to be well informed about the topography, climate, economic resources of the State for which we are to legislate, and the character of its inhabitants. The constitution and legislation must, of course, be adapted to all these conditions; Plato is no builder of Utopias, but an extremely practical thinker. In the present case, he assumes that the territory of the imagined city is varied: it contains arable, pasture, woodland, and the like, in reasonable quantity, but it is not extremely fertile. In situation, the city is some miles from the sea, though there is a spot in its territory which would make a good harbor. It has no very near neighbors. These conditions are assumed, because without them some of the features Plato regards as most desirable in national life could not be secured. He wants his territory to be varied in order that it may be as nearly as possible self-supporting and independent of imports; he wants it not to be over-fertile, mainly in order to exclude the rise of production for the foreign market, and for much the same reasons he is glad that it should not have easy access to
Now what would be the most favourable opportunity for the creation of a thoroughly sound system of laws and institutions? Though the remark seems paradoxical, the best chance would be offered by the cooperation of a thoroughly wise statesman with a “tyrant” but the tyrant would have to be young, intelligent, and endowed with unusual moral nobility (709e). The thought is that in this case the statesman would have the freest hand. He would need only to convert the autocrat to his plans, and the rest of society would follow suit, partly from loyalty, partly because the autocrat has the requisite force to constrain the malcontent. He must be young as well as intelligent, of course, if he is to be won to such an undertaking: an older man would be less easily impressed. He must have moral nobility, because he will be called on to sacrifice his own position as autocrat, if the combination of authority with “freedom” is to be effected. It is improbable that there should ever be such a conjuncture as the association in one age and place of a supreme statesman with a young autocrat of such unusual qualifications, but we cannot say that the thing is impossible (711d). So we may imagine that the condition has been realised and proceed
If a man with a genius for statesmanship ever got this favourable opportunity of carrying his conceptions out in practice, he would, in accord with the principles already laid down, take care not to establish an “unmixed” constitution of any of the three types familiar in the Greek world. That would be to create a sovereignty of a favoured person or class over a subject class or classes. In a true “constitution” the sovereign is not class-interest, but God, and the voice by which God makes His commands known is the law. Hence the fundamental principle of good government is that the sovereign shall be not a person or a class, but impersonal law (713e). In such a society the posts of authority will be awarded for superiority not in birth, or wealth, or strength, but in wholehearted service to law. Its point of honor will be loyalty to the laws. The Athenian accordingly imagines himself to be in the position of a legislator speaking in the presence of the whole body of intending citizens, and proceeds to begin an address to them on the majesty of law (715e-718a); the opening words of this speech are, perhaps, the one “text” quoted more frequently than any other by the Platonists of later antiquity. God eternally pursues the “even tenor of his way,” and Justice attends Him; he who would be happy must follow in their train with a “humbled and disciplined” spirit (ταπεινὸς καὶ κεκοσμημένος). To follow God means to be like God, who is the true “measure of all things” (716c). We are like God so far as we follow the life of right measure.
In the life of measure reverence (τιμή) must be meted out to its various recipients in the right order, first to the gods of the upper world and our city, next to those of the underworld, then to “spirits and heroes,” then to ancestors and dead parents, and last to our living parents; in honoring these last, we must remember that to support them with our substance is the least office, to minister to them with our bodies something more, to give them the affection and devotion of the soul the great thing. We cannot do too much for them while we have them with us; when they die, the most modest funeral is the most decent and honorable. At this point the discourse on the duties of life breaks off, to be resumed again in the following book. The reason for the interruption is that the speaker recollects that there are two possible types of law, a brief one and a longer. The brief type of law is that in common vogue. It consists of a command or prohibition accompanied by a “sanction” in the form of a penalty threatened for non-compliance.
Book V in its opening pages contains the continuation of the great preamble (726-734d). From reverence to parents, we proceed to the reverence or respect due to ourselves and our fellows. The rule of self-reverence is that the soul is more than the body and the body than possessions. A man must prize his soul more than his body and his body more than his “goods.” We dishonor our own soul when we put bodily vigour and health or power or riches before wisdom and virtue, or when we gratify unworthy caprice or passion. We dishonor the body when we prefer wealth to health. Plato’s view is that extraordinary beauty or robustness or wealth are bad for the soul, generally speaking, no less than extraordinary ugliness, deformity, ill-health, penury. The first breeds vanity, the second gross lusts, the third idleness and luxury. In respect of advantages both of body and of fortune,
Next follows an exhortation as to the spirit in which a man should conduct himself in matters where the law can lay down no specific commands or prohibitions. The supreme demand on a man is for ἀλήθεια ("genuineness”) in all the relations of life—in fact, for “loyalty.” A man who is not “true and loyal” is wholly untrustworthy; want of loyalty makes friendship and all the happiness of life impossible. We must lay it down that in this, and in all points of virtue, it is good to practice them yourself, better to go further and to bring the misdeeds of others to the knowledge of the authorities, best of all, actually to assist them in chastising the misdoer. We must add that rivalry in goodness of all kinds is the one form of emulation we should encourage in all our citizens, as it is the one kind of rivalry which aims not at engrossing a good to one’s self, but at communicating it as widely as possible. To the faults of others a good man should be merciful, whenever they are remediable, since he knows that “no one is bad on purpose"; he will only let his anger have its course with the incorrigible. A man must beware, too, of the deadly fault of improper partiality to one’s self. And he must repress all tendency to unrestrained emotionalism (726b-732d).
We must not forget that it is men, not gods, whom we are trying to enlist on the side of virtue. We must therefore make allowance for the universal human desire for a pleasant existence. We cannot expect men regularly to choose the noble life unless they are persuaded that it is also the pleasant. Its nobility has already been argued; Plato now proceeds to contend that, even by the rules of a Hedonic calculus, if you only state the rules correctly and work the sum right, the morally best life will be found to be also the pleasantest. The rules are that we wish to have pleasure, and not to have pain; we do not wish for a neutral condition, but we prefer it to pain. We choose a pain attended by an overbalance of pleasure, and refuse a pleasure attended by an overbalance of pain; to an exact balance of pleasure and pain we are indifferent. We have to take into account as “dimensions” of pleasure and pain “number” and “size"—i.e. frequency and duration and intensity. We wish to have a life in which, when attention has been given to all these “dimensions” the balance works out on the side of pleasure; not to have one in which the balance is on the side of pain. The life in which the balance is zero is preferable to that in which there is a balance of pain. If we consider four pairs of lives, corresponding to the four currently recognized virtues and their contrary
There is still one more matter to be dealt with before proceeding to the legislation in detail—the creation of the necessary magistracies. The magistrates are, so to say, the warp, the rest of the citizens the woof, of the fabric we have to weave. The warp must have the stronger and tougher constitution, must be made of those elements of the population who have most strength of character and are least pliable. We begin by laying it down (737c) that the size of the community, the number of households, must be kept permanent. (We want to exclude the social revolutions which would be produced by either marked decline or marked increase in population.) We require to have just such a population as our territory will support in industry and sobriety, neither more nor fewer. If the population grows beyond this limit, it will begin to expand at the cost of wrong to its neighbors; if it falls below it, it will not be adequate to its own defense. The actual number of households will depend on the size of the territory, but, for purposes of illustration (737e), we may imagine it fixed at 5040, a number which recommends itself by the fact that it is divisible by all the integers up to 10. This is convenient, since there may be practical reasons for wishing to divide the inhabitants into administrative groups for various purposes.
We may say at once that the very best and happiest of all societies would be one where there was no “private” interest, where even wives and children were “common” and the word “my own” never heard (739c). What we are describing now is a
It will, unfortunately, be impossible to prevent economic inequalities altogether, but they may be kept within bounds, and both penury and irresponsible wealth excluded by the following regulations. The patrimonies should be, as nearly as possible, of equal value (737c); to secure that they remain inalienable in the same family, a careful survey of the whole territory will be made and preserved in the public archives (741c). To keep out the taint of commercialism, the State will have its own currency, valueless outside its own territory, and it will be a crime in a citizen to own the coined money of a foreign city (742a).
There shall be no lending of money on interest, and no credit (742c). The reason for this is simply that we do not wish to encourage a man to live on the automatic return of investments; we want him to be a farmer living by the labour of his own hands. Accumulation will be checked by the establishment of four economic classes, the poorest possessing nothing beyond their patrimony, the richest being allowed to possess no more than four times the yield of the patrimony. Any further increase of wealth will be escheated to the State (744d-745a). Thus wealth will have some weight, as well as character and birth, in the distribution of offices. This is regrettable, but it is a condition we cannot wholly exclude (744b).
Book VI brings us at last to the appointment of the various magistrates and administrative boards. We must be content here to describe the most important of these and the method by which they are constituted, as illustrative of Plato’s insight into the practical business of “representation.” The most important ordinary magistracy is that of the νομοφύλακες or guardians of the constitution, a body of thirty-seven men of approved character and intelligence, who must be at least 50 years old at appointment, and must retire at the age of 70. Their functions are to watch over the interests of the laws in general and, in particular, to take charge of the register of properties, and penalize and “blacklist” any citizen guilty of fraudulent concealment of income. They figure also as the presiding magistrates in connexion with the trial of grave offences of various kinds. They are to be elected by votes given in writing and signed with the voter’s name (as a precaution against an irresponsible vote), and the election has several stages, by which the three hundred names first selected are finally reduced to thirty-seven (three for each “tribe” with an odd man to prevent an equal division of opinions).
The ordinary great council, the “representative chamber” of the society, is elected on a plan ingeniously contrived to eliminate extreme “class-consciousness” and to make wire-pulling and cabal impossible. It is ultimately to consist of 360 members, ninety from each of the four property-classes, but the selection has several stages and is spread over a week. In the first instance 360 representatives of each class are chosen, the voting covering four days.
The chief criticism a modern thinker would be likely to pass on the scheme would probably be that it runs the risk of making the extremist all the more dangerous by leaving him no chance of airing his grievances in the “council of the nation.” But it might be said that we are learning by experience how hard it is for the same body to combine the functions of a “safety-valve” and a really effective national council.
The most important office in a Platonic community is, as we should expect, that of the Minister of Education. The well-being of the community depends directly on the character of the education given to successive generations, and the overseer of education should therefore be the best and most illustrious man in the community, as holding its most responsible post. He must be a man of over fifty, with children of his own, and should be elected for a period of five years out of the body of the νομοφύλακες by the votes of the other magistrates (765d-766b). The “President of the Board of Education” is thus the “premier” in Plato’s commonwealth.
If the life of the society is to be thoroughly sound from a moral point of view, we must first ensure that the tone of family life itself is sound. Marriage must be regarded as a solemn duty to society; selfish neglect to discharge that duty, as we have already
"Music” requires a fuller treatment. We must remind
We proceed with the details of the education to be reared on this basis of a sound taste which is at once aesthetic and moral. We have, so to say, laid the keel of the vessel and have now to design the ribs. We may feel, perhaps, that the voyage of life is not so serious an affair as it seems. Perhaps we are only playthings for God, but even if that is so, we must “play the game” well, not in the inverted fashion of mankind at large, who fancy that war is the business of life, peace only the play. The truth is that it is peace which is “real” and “earnest,” for it is only in peace that we can pursue education, the most serious affair of life (803a-804c).
To return to our subject. We shall need schools for the teaching of the things we have spoken of, with proper buildings and grounds. And the teachers in these schools will have to receive salaries, and therefore must be foreigners. All the children must attend school (φοιταν) daily; this must not be left to parental caprice. This applies to girls as well as to boys; they must even
It is important to note the magnitude of the proposal made here. As Professor Burnet points out, what is being conceived for the first time is the “secondary school” a permanent establishment for the higher education of boys and girls by specially competent teachers duly organized and paid. (The impossibility of maintaining such an institution without salaries is the reason why, in accord with Hellenic sentiment, it is assumed that they must all be non-citizens.) The “grammar school” meets us as an actual institution in the Macedonian age; it is presumable that it owes its existence to the influence exerted in that age by members of the Academy as the recognized experts in education and jurisprudence. The old practice of the Periclean age had been that “higher education” of all kinds was got from attending the lectures of sophists, each with his speciality. Plato’s new idea is the systematization of secondary education by coordinating the specialists in single institutions.
We need not be afraid of the criticism that our views on the education of women are paradoxical. We see that women can share the labours of men by the example of Thrace and other districts where they do agricultural work, though at Athens they are expected to do nothing but sit indoors, mind the store-closet, and spin and weave. At Sparta a middle course is followed; the girls learn to wrestle, and they do no house-work, but they are not expected to be capable of doing anything for the national defense. With all courtesy to a Spartan hearer, we must confess that we cannot be satisfied with such a compromise; the women should at least be able, in case of need, to scare away raiders from the city (806b).
The scheme we have adopted for our community makes it certain that our citizens will not have to labour long hours for the means of existence; they will have abundant leisure, and they must not waste it in fattening themselves like cattle, but use it in setting themselves to live the most strenuous of all lives, that which aims at goodness of mind and body. They will have to be up betimes, before all the servants, and to prevent waste of the precious hours in sleep, it will be enjoined that public as well as household business shall be transacted in the early morning. Sleeping long and late is as bad for the body as for the mind (806d-808c). It follows that the boys must be taken to school at daybreak, and both the servants who conduct them there and the schoolmasters must pay the closest attention to their moral, for a boy, just because he has a “spring of intelligence” in him, which does not as yet run clear, is the most unruly of all animals. As to the subjects of
There are still three “branches of knowledge” (μαθήματα) which any free man should possess—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy (817e). Only a few young people are capable of high proficiency in them, but all must study them “so far as is truly necessary” (818b). But how far is that? At least as far as the Egyptians succeed in carrying large classes of young people. They have a method of teaching them to deal with fractions and to find the divisors of numbers by means of games in which garlands and other objects have to be divided among a given number of persons,
It might seem in place here to add something about the value oi hunting as a pursuit for the young. But we must lay it down once for all that we cannot be expected to deal with the whole of such problems in a law. The details must be left to the really competent Minister of Education to regulate by his personal judgment (822d-823d). For us it is enough to say that we mean only to encourage the sort of hunting which contributes to make good men. We do not wish our citizens to take to the sea, so we shall discourage sea-fishing; for stronger reasons, we object to raiding and capturing men, and to any kind of chase which depends on mere cunning. Hence we should discourage the mere netting and snaring of any kind of creature, retaining only “the hunting of quadrupeds with horses and dogs and one’s own body” as a training in endurance and courage (824a).
Book VIII and Book IX The contents of Books VIII and IX must be dealt with very summarily. Provision is made, as would be the case in any actual Greek “legislation,” first of all for the cultus of the State, every month of the year and every day of the month being provided with its appropriate worship; the object is simply to place the whole daily life of the whole community under the “religious sanction” (828). Since there will be “gymnastic” and musical “contests” as part of this regular worship, Plato then goes on to lay down regulations for the regular monthly exercises of the citizen militia, as well as for the “contests” which will mark special festivals. The latter are meant to correspond to the pan-Hellenic games of actual life, but the programme of “events” is revised. Competition is to be in exercises of strength and endurance which have a real military value, particularly in rapid evolutions in complete accoutrement, and the mimic warfare is to reproduce its model as closely as possible; there must be a spice of real danger about it. The girls and women must share in all this, so far as their physique permits, but we cannot make detailed regulations on this point in advance (829-835d).
This raises an important ethical question. Is there not a real danger that the very free association of young people of both sexes in pursuits of this kind, and their abundant leisure from “work,” may lead to a relaxed sexual morality? Plato thinks not, if we can only establish the right social tradition in such matters, which is that “homosexual” relations of all kinds must be reprobated as unnatural and that the normal sexual appetite is to find no gratification outside the bounds of lawful matrimony. This demand may strike most persons as Utopian, and as an attempt to suppress “love.” But we must not be misled by equivocal terms. “Love of good-will” is one thing, love of carnal appetite quite another; the suppression of the second in no way militates against
The speaker now turns to a consideration of regulations necessary for the pursuit of agriculture, the economic foundation of his contemplated society. Under this caption we have proposals for dealing with such matters as encroachments on boundaries, diversion of watercourses, ownership of stray animals, regulation of the market,
In matters like these, there are many already existing good rules which we shall do well to follow (843e), a significant hint that many of the regulations proposed are simply based on the actual code of Attica. The student of Plato’s political philosophy need not delay over such details, though they have a double interest for the historian of law and custom. They throw a great deal of light on questions of Attic law, and they provide the starting-point for the casuistry by which Roman lawyers and, in modern times, publicists like Grotius and Pufendorf have laboured to arrive at the principles of a satisfactory law of property. It is not surprising that Plato’s actual examples recur, for example, in the Institutes of Justinian and the de Jure Belli et Pacis. The discussion of the regulation of the market leads naturally to consideration of the conditions on which aliens may be allowed to enter the society and practice industry (850b-d). They are to be subjected to no poll-tax, but they must have an industry by which to support themselves, must conform to the rules of the
We come now to criminal jurisprudence, with an apology for the necessity of admitting that there will be any crime to be legislated against in a rightly constituted society. The crimes first considered are, in the order of their gravity, sacrilege, treason, parricide. These are “capital” crimes, and it is best for a citizen who commits them that he should be allowed to live no longer, but we must lay it down once for all that the capital sentence must not include the penalizing of his innocent family by the confiscation of property, and that they are not to be regarded as tainted in their honor by his offence. Similar crimes in an alien or a slave will be more mildly visited by whipping and expulsion from the country. In general, Plato allows himself a freer use of corporeal chastisements than modern legislators, since he does not accept the “humanitarian” estimate of physical pain nor the view that its infliction is peculiarly degrading. These capital crimes are to be tried before a court composed of the νομοφύλακες and a number of the magistrates of the preceding year, and the proceedings must be spread over three days.
We must insist, however, that in our State criminal jurisprudence takes a scientific account of the psychology of the offender (857c-d). Current opinion on this matter, as shown by the practice of existing societies, is in a state of confusion. Justice is held to be a “fine” thing (καλόν), but the just chastisement inflicted on a criminal is regarded as a disgrace to him (859d-860b). Yet to be consistent, we ought to hold that if it is “fine” to do what is just, it is also “fine” to get what is just done to you.
The secret of the current confusion is that actual jurisprudence assumes that men are bad and do wrong “voluntarily,” hence the one great distinction recognized by actual law is the distinction between voluntary and involuntary transgression. But we must adhere to the philosophical principle so familiar to us from earlier dialogues that “all wrongdoing is involuntary” (860d), and therefore we cannot make the distinction between voluntary and involuntary the basis of our penal code (861d). The distinction we really need is a different one, that of βλάβη, the causing of hurt or loss, from ἀδικία, the violation of a right. In inflicting penalties, the proper question is not whether the act committed was voluntary or not, but whether the person on whom it was inflicted received mere loss or hurt, or was further injured in his rights. The proper thing to say about a man who has caused an unintended loss or hurt to another is not,
Plato now applies these principles to the construction of a penal code. We have to distinguish violation of rights from the mere causation of damage, and in the case of the former, we must distinguish between violence and craft. Regulations are then laid down for the cases of homicide, suicide, maiming, wounding with intent to kill, minor assaults, the object being to give a specimen of a logically constructed criminal code. The penalties will depend not only on the main distinction already laid down, but on the status of the parties, whether citizens, aliens, or slaves. The details must be passed over here. What inevitably impresses a modern reader most unfavourably is the special severity with which injuries committed by a slave on free persons are treated. This is, however, a direct consequence of the recognition of the servile status, which gives these crimes something of the character of mutiny.
Book X introduces us to one of the most important developments of Platonism, its theology. Plato appears as at once the creator of natural theology and the first thinker to propose that false theological belief—as distinguished from insults to an established worship—should be treated as a crime against the State and repressed by the civil magistrate. He is convinced that there are certain truths about God which can be strictly demonstrated, and that the denial of these leads directly to practical bad living. Hence the denial of these truths is a grave offence against the social order and must be punished as such, the principle upon which the Roman Church still maintains that it is the duty of the magistrate to suppress heretical pravity. Historically we have here the foundation of natural or philosophical theology, The name we owe to the famous Roman antiquarian, M. Terentius Varro, who distinguished three kinds of theology, or “discourses about gods”—the poetical, consisting simply of the myths related by the poets; the civil, which means knowledge of the Calendar of the State’s cultus and is the creation of the “legislator”; and the natural or philosophic, the doctrine about things divine taught by philosophers
The three heresies Plato regards as morally pernicious are, in the order of their moral turpitude: (a) atheism, the belief that there are no gods at all, the least offensive of the three; (b) Epicureanism, as we may call it by a convenient anachronism, the doctrine that God, or the gods, are indifferent to human conduct; (c) worst of all, the doctrine that an impenitent offender can escape God’s judgment by gifts and offerings. It is morally less harmful to believe that there is no God than to believe in a careless God, and it is better to believe in a careless God than in a venal one. Against these three heresies Plato holds that he can prove the existence of a God or gods, the reality of providential and moral government of the world and man, and the impossibility of bribing the divine justice.
(a) Atheism is treated by Plato as identical with the doctrine that the world and its contents, souls included, are the product of unintelligent motions of corporeal elements. Against this theory, he undertakes to demonstrate that all corporeal movements are, in, the last resort, causally dependent on “motions” of soul, wishes, plans, purposes, and that the world is therefore the work of a soul or souls, and further that these souls are good, and that there is one ἀρίστη ψυχή, “perfectly good soul” at their head. Thus the demonstration of the being of God serves also, in principle, as a proof of the indestructibility of the soul, a doctrine which has to be introduced in refuting the two graver heresies. He indicates that atheism as an opinion has two chief sources—the corporealism of the early Ionian men of science, who account for the order of nature on purely “mechanical” principles without ascribing anything to conscious plan or design (889a-d), and the sophistic theory of the purely conventional and relative character of moral distinctions (889e-890a). If these two doctrines are combined, atheism is the result. It has to be shown, as against this atheism, that the motions of body are actually all caused by prior “movements” of soul, so that τέχνη, conscious design, purpose, is the parent of τύχη, not τύχη of τέχνη, as the proverb says (892b). Or, more briefly, mind, not bodies, is “what is there to begin with” (892c).
Next, there must be more than one soul which is the cause of cosmic movements (i.e. Plato’s theology is theistic, not pantheistic). There must be at least two such souls and there may be more. For there is disorder and irregularity in nature as well as order and regularity, hence the “best soul” clearly cannot be the only source of motion in the universe; since order has the upper hand, God, the “best soul,” is clearly the supreme cause, but there must be other souls which are not wholly good (896e-898d. (It must be carefully noted that there is no trace in the language of the doctrine of a “bad world-soul” read into the Laws in ancient times by Plutarch and Atticus, and in modern times by Zeller and others. The point is not that there are two souls responsible for the universe, but that there are at least two; the “best soul” is not the only soul there is, but we are at liberty to suppose as many inferior souls as the appearances seem to require.)
If we are not to misunderstand Plato’s whole conception we must note the following points carefully, (1) Evil, no less than
The refutation of the two other heresies now becomes a simple matter.
(b) Epicureanism (899d-905d) The belief that though there are gods they are indifferent to our conduct is suggested by the spectacle of successful lifelong iniquity, but it is really no more than a nightmare or bad dream (900b). If the gods pay no attention to our conduct, the reason must be either that they are unable to regulate everything or that they regard man and man’s doings as trifles, and neglect the control of these small matters either because they think them insignificant or because they are “too fine” to attend to them. We may dismiss the suggestion of lack of power at once; it is easier in action to handle small affairs than to handle great, though it is the minute things which it is hardest to perceive accurately. As to the other suggestions, all competent practitioners of medicine, engineering, and the other arts, especially that of the statesman, know that no one ever succeeds in the main of any enterprise if he neglects what appear to be “small details,” and we cannot suppose that the “best” soul is more ignorant than a human practitioner, even if it were certain, as it is not, that human conduct is a “trifle” from God’s point of view. To suppose that God neglects us because He is too indolent or fastidious to attend to us, would amount to saying that the “best soul” is cowardly or “work-shy,” and this is no better than blasphemy. Nor is it true that the regulation of human destiny in accord with moral law would involve endless “interference” with the machinery of things. The result is secured from the first by a law of singular simplicity, the law that “like finds its like,” souls, like liquids, “find their level.” A man “gravitates” towards the society of his mental and moral likes, and thus, through the endless succession of lives, he always “does and has done to him” what it is fitting that such a man should do or have done to him (904e). That is the “justice of God” from which no man can escape in life or death.
We may dispose of (c) the doctrine that God can be bribed to wink at sin even more summarily (905e-907d). For our argument has justified the old belief that we are the “chattels” or “flock” (κτήματα) of the gods. If they wink at the conduct of human “beasts of prey,” they are behaving like shepherds or watch-dogs who allow the wolf to rend the flock on condition of sharing in the plunder. A blasphemy like this is more fittingly met by honest indignation than by argument or gentle remonstrance.
We now come to the penalties for the publication of these various heresies. The overt maintenance of any of them ought to be brought at once to the notice of the magistrates, who are to bring the case before the proper court. If a magistrate neglects to act, he must
Plato is so much in earnest with this horror of immoral superstition that he ends by proposing to suppress all shrines and sacrifices except those belonging to the public worship of the city. No one may be permitted to have a private “chapel” or “oratory” or to sacrifice except at the public altars and with the established ritual. His motive is not so much the economic one of preventing the locking-up of wealth in the “dead hand,” as the moral one of protecting society against the insidious lowering of the ethical and religious standard.
Book XI: The discourse now proceeds to deal with legislation for the security of private property and trade, particularly with the regulations necessary to prevent dishonesty in buying and selling, and in executing or paying for “piece-work.” Then follow regulations about wills, the guardianship of orphans, the conditions on which a son may be disinherited, and the enforcement of the claims of parents on their children. Penalties are enjoined for vendors of philtres and sorcerers, with the remark that the last-named offence
These matters of private law must not detain us here, though Plato’s treatment of them has the double interest of being founded largely on Attic practice, which he is trying to amend where it seems defective, and of having exercised a considerable indirect influence on the development of Roman law.
With Book XII we return to the sphere of public law and the law of the constitution. Peculation or embezzlement of the public funds, an offence regularly charged on every Attic politician by his enemies, is unpardonable and in a citizen must always be visited with death, irrespective of the magnitude of his defalcation (942a). In military matters everything depends on discipline and strict fidelity to orders; this must therefore be enforced in all the exercises which have been enjoined as the standing military training. Cowardice in the face of the enemy is to be punished by loss of all citizen-rights as well as by a heavy fine (944e-945a).
To ensure that the magistrates do their duty, Plato adopts the Attic practice of requiring every magistrate at the end of his term of office to submit to a εὔθυνα or audit, and gives special care to the appointment of the board of corregidors (εὔθυνοι) charged with the holding of the audit. The members of the board must be over 50 years old, and are to be chosen by the following method. There is a vote by universal suffrage, each citizen voting for only one candidate. This process is to be repeated until the number of names not eliminated is reduced to three. Twelve such officials are to be appointed in the first instance. As soon as the three oldest members of the board reach the age of 75 they retire, and in future there will be an annual election of three new
It would be inconsistent with the whole spirit of the legislation to permit citizens to withdraw themselves from the life of the State at their choice. Travel abroad must therefore always receive the sanction of the authorities, and this sanction will only be given in the case of persons over 40 (950d). It is desirable that older men of sound character should visit other States with a view to learning how the customs of our own society may be improved by judicious imitation of those of others. The traveller should, on his return, make a report on his observations to the “nocturnal council,” a sort of extraordinary Committee of Public Safety, which is to be in perpetual session and is charged with a general supervision over the public welfare. We have heard of this body before in connexion with the proceedings against heresy, and are now told how it is constituted. Its members are the εὔθυνοι,
It gets its name from the regulation that its daily sessions are to be held before daybreak. One of its chief functions is to foster sound scientific research (952a). There will be a similar careful control of the temporary admission of foreign visitors to our own community. Special encouragement will be given to responsible persons from abroad whose object is to impart or acquire lessons in true statesmanship. They will be honored “guests of the nation” (953d).
It is not enough to have made a good constitution and code for our society; there is need for constant vigilance to preserve our institutions from degeneration (960d). This vigilance will be exercised by the “nocturnal council,” which may fairly be called the “brain” of our whole system (961d). To discharge its functions it will need to have a thorough understanding of the end to which social life is directed, the development of “goodness” in all its four great forms. This means that its members will require very much more in the way of education than anything we have yet provided (965b). If they are really to understand what goodness is, they must be able to “see the one in the many” (965c), to appreciate and realise the great truth of the unity of all virtues (ibid. d-e). In fact, they must have a genuine knowledge of God and the ways of
It is sometimes said that in the Laws astronomy has taken the place formerly given to dialectic as the supreme science, and that this indicates a growing uncertainty in Plato’s own mind about the possibility of metaphysics. This is a complete misinterpretation of the concluding section of the Laws. The intellectual quality demanded in the members of the supreme council, that they should be able to see the “one in the many” is precisely the character always ascribed in the dialogues to the dialectician. And we note that astronomical science is only one-half of the qualification laid down. It must be accompanied by a right understanding of the doctrine of the place of ψυχή in the universe, the doctrine which, more than any other, lies at the root of Platonic metaphysics. Though the name “dialectic” is not used, the demand for the thing remains unabated.
The Epinomis
There is no real division between the Epinomis and the Laws, and the former is sometimes actually quoted by later writers as the “thirteenth” book of the Laws, though the Epinomis was already reckoned as a distinct work by Aristophanes of Byzantium.
There is no real ancient evidence against the authenticity of the dialogue. Diogenes Laertius (iii. I, 37) says that “some” ascribed it to the Academic Philippus of Opus, but, as he has just told the story that Philippus “transcribed” the Laws “from the wax,” he presumably only means that he was said to have done the same for the Epinomis. Proclus, who disliked the work, wished to reject it, but, as he merely offers two very bad arguments for his view, he presumably knew of no Academic tradition
The immediate purpose of the dialogue is to discuss the question left unanswered in Laws xii., of the complete scientific curriculum necessary for the members of the “nocturnal council": What studies will lead to σοφία (973b)? We must recognize that σοφία, in any case, is only attainable by a select few, and with difficulty (973b ff.), and that most of the so-called ἐπιστημαι do not help us to it (974d). Thus we may exclude all the arts and sciences which simply contribute to material civilization or to amusement (974e-975d), as well as those of war, medicine, navigation, and rhetoric, and still more unhesitatingly the mere art of acquiring and retaining multifarious information, which many confuse with σοφία (975e-976c). We ought to give the name σοφία only to studies which make a man a wise and good citizen, capable of exercising or obeying righteous rule. Now there is a branch of science which, more than any others, has this tendency and may be said to be a gift of a god to man, being in fact the gift of Heaven (οὐρανός) itself. This gift is the knowledge of number, which brings all other good things
Without knowledge of number we should be unintelligent and unmoral (977c-e). How divine a thing it is we see from the consideration that where there is number there is order; where there is no number, there is nothing but confusion, formlessness, disorder (977e-978b). To be able to count is the prerogative which marks men off from the animals. We learn to count up to fifteen by simply studying the daily changes in the face of the moon as she rounds to the full; a much bigger problem is set us when we go on to compare the period of the moon with that of the sun, as the agriculturist must. In our own recent discussion it was easy enough to see that a man ought to have goodness of soul, as well as of body, and that to have this he must be “wise.” The difficult question was what kind of knowledge this all-important “wisdom” is. What we have just said suggests the answer (978b-979d).
Perhaps we may not discover a single “wisdom” which covers the whole ground. In that case, we must try to enumerate the various branches of wisdom and say what they are (980a). We may go back to our thought that the best way a man can spend his life is to spend it in praising and honoring God. Let us then, to the praise of God, construct an improved “theogony,” holding fast to the natural theology we have laid down, and particularly to the principle of the causal priority of soul over body (980b-981b). An “animal” we know, is a soul conjoined with a body. There are five regular solids, and we may recognize five corresponding forms of body—earth, water, air, fire, and aether
The body of each kind of animal is a compound in which the “element” that forms its habitat is predominant. Hence the two most conspicuously visible classes of living beings are those which live on the earth, of whom man specially interests us, and those which have bodies made chiefly of fire and are gods, the stars and planets. Their bodies are more beautiful than ours, and more lasting, being either deathless or of age-long vitality. A comparison of the restless and disorderly movements of man with the majestically orderly movements of the heavenly bodies is enough to show that their souls equally surpass man’s in intelligence. If they, unlike us, never deviate from one path, it is because their motion exhibits the necessity imposed by rational pursuit of the best (982b). Their real bulk, as science can demonstrate, is enormous, and there is
This means that we must master the science of the revolutions of the stars and planets. At present we have not so much as names for the planets, though they are called the stars of several gods, a nomenclature which has come to us from Syria (986e-987d).
The study we need to lead us to true piety, the greatest of the virtues, is thus astronomy, knowledge of the true orbits and periods of the heavenly bodies, pursued in the spirit of pure science, not in that of Hesiod’s farmer’s calendar (990a). But since such a study is concerned with the difficult task of the computation of the relative periods of sun, moon, and planets (and thus has to reckon with
Without this scientific knowledge, a city will never be governed with true statesmanship, and human life will never be truly happy. The wisest man is the man who has attained all this knowledge; we may feel confident that when death translates him from the sensible region, he will finally achieve the complete unification of the self, and his lot, wherever it may be cast, will be truly blessed. As we said before, the attainment is only possible for the few, but we must insist that our supreme governors at least shall devote themselves to it (992a-d). Thus the Epinomis ends by the unqualified reassertion of the old demand that statesmanship and science shall be combined in the same persons.
See further:
Burnet. Greek Philosophy, Part I., 301-312 al.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii. 657-796 al.; Platons Gesetze, Kommentar zum griechischen Text. Leipzig, 1896; Platos Gesetze, Darstellung des Inhalts. Leipzig, 1896.
A. E. Taylor. The Laws of Plato translated into English. London, 1934.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 395-419.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 358-365.
Barker, E. Greek Political Theory: Plato and his Predecessors, 292-380.
Jaeger, W. Aristoteles, 125-170.
Muller, F. Statistische Untersuchung der Epinomis des Philippos von Opus. 1927.
>Harward, J. The Epinomis of Plato. Translated with Introduction and Notes. Oxford, 1928.
And for the problems presented by the Epistles:
Friedlander, P. Platon: Eidos, Paideia, Dialogos. 1928.
Egermann, FR. Die platonischen Briefe VII und VIII. Vienna, 1928.
Souilhe, J. Platon, Lettres. Paris, 1926.
Novotny, F. Platonis Epistulae. Brno, 1930.
Harward, J. The Platonic Epistles. Cambridge, 1932.
Chapter XIX. Plato in the Academy: Forms and Numbers
To us Plato is first and foremost a great writer, but from his own point of view, books and the study of them are a secondary interest with the “philosopher”; what counts as supreme is a life spent in the organized prosecution of discovery (τὸ συζην). There can be no doubt that Plato thought his work as the organizer of the Academy much more important than the writing of dialogues. Since Aristotle commonly refers to the teaching given in the Academy as Plato’s “unwritten doctrine” (ἄγραφα δόγματα), we may be reasonably sure that Plato did not even prepare a MS. of his discourses. This explains why there were several different versions in the next generation of the famous lecture on “the Good,” which seems to have contained Plato’s most explicit account of his own philosophy. We are told that several of the hearers, including Aristotle, Xenocrates, and Heraclides of Pontus, all published their notes of it, and the obvious implication is that there was no “author’s MS.” to publish. Consequently we have to discover Plato’s ultimate metaphysical positions indirectly from references to them in Aristotle, supplemented by occasional brief excerpts, preserved by later Aristotelian commentators, from the statements of Academic contemporaries of Aristotle, like Xenocrates and Hermodorus. This creates a serious difficulty. When it is a mere question of what Plato said, the testimony of Aristotle is surely unimpeachable; but when we go on to ask what Plato meant, the case is different. Aristotle’s references are all polemical, and Aristotle is a controversialist who is not unduly anxious to be “sympathetic.” Unfortunately, too, mathematics, the science specially important for its influence on Plato’s thought, is the one science where Aristotle shows himself least at home. Thus there is always the possibility that his criticisms may rest on misunderstanding. And the misunderstandings may not even originate with him. The criticism of Plato all through the Metaphysics seems to be subsidiary to Aristotle’s standing polemic against Xenocrates, the contemporary head of the Academy. Hence it is possible that much of the criticism of Metaphysics M-N, the most sustained anti-Academic polemic in Aristotle, may be directed rather against Academic misinterpretation of Plato than against Plato himself.
In a necessarily brief statement our safest course is to deal
When we turn to these Aristotelian statements we find that, for the most part, they amount to a version of the theory of forms with a very individual character, and of a much more developed type than anything the dialogues have ascribed to Socrates. There are also one or two other notices of specific peculiarities of Plato’s doctrines, all concerned with points of mathematics, and it is with some of these I propose to begin, as they may help us to understand the point of view from which the doctrine of forms as known to Aristotle was formulated.
We must remember that though mathematics was by no means the only science cultivated in the Academy, it was that which appealed most to Plato himself, and that in which the Academy exercised the most thoroughgoing influence on later developments. All the chief writers of geometrical textbooks known to us between the foundation of the Academy and the rise of the scientific schools of Alexandria belong to the Academy. In Plato’s own lifetime, Theaetetus had completed the edifice of elementary solid geometry, by discovering the inscription of the octahedron and icosahedron in the sphere. He and Eudoxus and others had laid the foundations of the doctrine of quadratic surds as worked out in the tenth book of Euclid’s Elements; Eudoxus had invented the method of approximating to the lengths and areas of curves by exhaustion (the ancient equivalent of the Integral Calculus), and had recast the whole doctrine of ratio and proportion in the form in which we now have it in Euclid’s fifth book, for the purpose of making it applicable to “incommensurables.” We naturally expect to find traces in Plato’s doctrine of this special preoccupation with the philosophy of mathematics which is characteristic of the work of the school.
To understand the motives which were prompting the Academy to a reconstruction of the philosophy of mathematics, we must go
With these considerations in mind, we can readily understand certain statements which Aristotle makes about mathematical views of Plato. There are three such statements which we may at once elucidate, (a) Plato stated that the “point” was a
(c) Plato said that “there is a first 2 and a first 3, and the numbers are not addible to one another” (Metaphysics M 1083a 32, the one statement about numbers which is definitely attributed to Plato by name in the last two books of the Metaphysics). A similar point is made about the Academy generally in the Ethics (Nicomachean Ethics 1096a, 17 ff.), where we are told that they held that there is no form (idea) of number, because “in numbers
This explains why there is no form of number. The reason is that each “number” is itself a form, as was really implied in the Phaedo itself when Socrates spoke of “the number 2” and “the number 3” as instances of what he meant by a form. Hence the ordered series of integers is not a form, it is a series of forms. The point may be grasped if we remember that in our own philosophy of mathematics we do not find it possible to define “number” or even “integer"; all that we can do is to define the series of integers or the series, e.g., of “real” numbers, and to define individual numbers. I can define “the integer series” as a series of a certain type with a certain first term, and I can define “the integer” n+1 by saying that it is the number of that series which is next after n, but I cannot really define “integer.” Aristotle is never tired of arguing against Plato that there is no number except what Aristotle calls “mathematical” number, or alternatively “number made of 1’s” (μοναδικός ἀριθμός); but the simple truth is that no “number” is “made of 1’s,” and that it is precisely what Aristotle calls “mathematical” number which has no existence except in his imagination. Plato may well have been led to this denial that numbers are “addible” by his recognition that “surds” like √2, 3√2, must be admitted into arithmetic as numbers, since it is evident that no process of “adding 1 to 1” could ever yield such numbers as these.
Thus this doctrine, also, may well be connected with the fact that the “real” numbers form a continuum. But it is important to be clear on the point that the principle that number is not really generated by addition of 1’s
This brings us to the consideration of Aristotle’s account of Plato’s theory of forms. According to the Metaphysics,
It is plain from the explanations attempted by the later commentators on Aristotle that the chief source from which the doctrine alluded to in the Metaphysics was known in antiquity was the reports of the auditors of Plato’s famous lecture on “the Good.” As we do not possess these reports and cannot be sure how far the statements of Peripatetic commentators on Aristotle about them can be trusted, we need to be cautious in our interpretation. But there are certain points on which we can be reasonably certain. It is quite clear from the whole character of Aristotle’s polemic against “ideal numbers,” that the numbers which Plato declared
To some extent, at least, it seems possible to recover this key. We have to begin by understanding what is meant by speaking of one constituent of a number as the “great-and-small” and by calling this an “indeterminate duality.” Even without the help of the commentators on Aristotle, the Philebus would enable us to give a reasonable answer to this question. We saw there that “that which admits of more and less indefinitely” was Plato’s description of what we call a “continuum,” though the number-series itself does not figure among the examples of continua given in the dialogue. This enables us to see at once why Plato spoke of what the Pythagoreans had called the “unlimited” (ἄπειρον) as a “great-and-small” or a “duality.” It is a duality because it can be varied indefinitely in either of two directions. Probably the commentators arc right in connecting this with the more specific view that you can equally reach plurality, starting from unity, by multiplication or by division, e.g. when you divide a given class regarded as a whole into sub-classes, you have two or more more determinate forms within the original γένος. This indicates a direct connexion between the theory of number ascribed to Plato by Aristotle and the preoccupation with the problem of the subdivision of forms in the later dialogues on which Stenzel has done well to insist, though he has allowed himself to neglect too much the specifically mathematical problem. We can also see, I think, why the other constituent of a number should be said to be “the one,” and why the “unit” is no longer regarded, in Pythagorean fashion, as a “blend” of “limit” with the “unlimited,” but as itself the “limit.” Here, again, we have a point of contact with the theory of logical “division.” As the Philebus had taught us, we may arrive at a “form” in either of two ways; we may start with several different idê as many and seek to reduce them to unity by showing that they are all special determinations of a more general “form,” or again we may start with the more general “form” and discover
In the case of numbers it is easy to see how the conception, already implied in the Epinomis, of a “continuum” of “real” numbers leads to the Platonic formulas. If we wish to discover a number whose product by itself is 2, it is easy to show that we can make steady approximation to such a number by constructing the endless “continued fraction":
1 + 1
2 + 1
2 + 1
2 + 1
2+ ...
By stopping off the fraction at successive stages, we get a number of values with the following peculiarities.
1, 1+1, 1+1,
2 2 + 1
2
The values are alternatively less and greater than √2, and each value differs from √2 less than the preceding value; by carrying the fraction far enough, we can get a fraction a/b such that a2 /b2 differs from 2 by less than any magnitude we please to assign. This is what we mean by saying that √2 is the limiting value to which the fraction “converges” when it is continued “to infinity.” Now in forming the successive approximate values, or “convergents,” we are making closer and closer approximation to the precise determination of an “infinite great-and-small.” It is “infinite” because however many steps you have taken, you never reach a fraction which, when multiplied by itself, gives exactly 2 as the product, though you are getting nearer to such a result at each step. It is “great-and-small,” because the successive approximations are alternatively too small and too large. √2 is, so to say, gradually pegged down between a “too much” and a “too little,” which are coming closer together all the time. I choose this particular example because this method of finding the value of what we call √2 was pretty certainly known to Plato.
It is clear, however, that we have not yet exhausted the meaning of Plato’s doctrine. From Aristotle’s polemic we see that the Platonic analysis was not meant to apply simply to the case of the “irrationals” which Plato was the first to recognize as numbers. The theory also involves a doctrine of the structure of the integer-series itself, since it is clear that the numbers with which the forms are identified are, as Aristotle always assumes, the integers. The integers themselves, then, have the “great-and-small” and the “one” as their constituents. How is this to be understood?
How, then, does Plato suppose the series of integers to be constructed? I doubt if the notices preserved to us enable us to answer the question finally. What is clear is that Plato rightly rejects the view retained by Aristotle, that an integer is a collection of “1’s,” and that the series is thus constructed by additions of 1 to itself. 2 is not “1 and 1” but “the number next after 1.” (This ought to be plain from the simple consideration of the way in which we learn to count. We do not count, “one, one, one, one…” but “one, two, three…”) But when we ask in what way the “duality” comes in in constructing the series of integers, we are puzzled by the confusion which seems to run through Aristotle and his commentators between the “indeterminate duality” or “great-and-small” and the number 2. If it were only in the polemic of Aristotle that this confusion were found, we might conceivably dismiss it as a mere misunderstanding, but it appears to have occurred also in the Academic reports of Plato’s doctrine. The complete study of the problem would require a long discussion of the mass of material collected and examined by M. Robin in his volume La Theorie platonicienne. Here it must be enough to remark that the following points seem to be quite certain, (1) The “dyad” was called δυοποιός, because it “doubles” everything it “lays hold of.” There is no doubt that the “dyad” meant is the “great-and-small,” but “it also seems clear that there is a confusion, perhaps from the very first, with the αὐτὸ ὃ ἔστι δυάς, the number 2, and that the function of the “dyad” within the integer-series is thought of as being to produce the series of “powers of 2 by repeated multiplication, 1 x 2, 1 x 2 x 2, 1 x 2 x 2 x 2, and so forth (cf. Epinomis 991a 1-4).
Cp. Aristotle’s
If, as seems probable, Plato’s conception has these defects, we must not be surprised. He probably started with the right conviction that what we should call the notion of a “section” is necessary for the definition of the “irrationals,” and went on to extend the conception to cover the case of the integers. What could not be expected of the first thinker who had formed the notion of a “real” number is the recognition that integers, rational fractions, real numbers, do not form a single series, in other words that the “integer,” 2, the “rational number” 2/1, and the “real number 2” are all distinct. In the logical construction of the types of number, we need three distinct steps: the rules for defining the successive integers, the derivation of the rational numbers from the integers, and the derivation of the “continuum” of the real numbers from the series of rational numbers. These, however, are matters on which mathematical philosophers have only reached clear comprehension in very recent times. The important point is that Plato should have grasped the necessity of enlarging the traditional conception of number and of strictly defining numbers of all kinds.
What are the “mathematical” which Plato distinguished from his numbers or forms? Aristotle tells us that they differ from forms in the fact that they are many, whereas the form is one, and from sensible things by being eternal (Metaphysics A 987b 15). It is to be noted that he does not call them “mathematical numbers,”
So we, too, are familiar with analytical geometry in which we study the properties of curves and surfaces by means of numerical equations. All the properties of the curves and surfaces can be discovered from these equations, but the application of equations is not confined to geometry or geometrical physics; the same methods, for example, play a prominent part in the study of economics, as when we plot out curves to show the effects of modifications of duties on the “volume” of foreign trade. In a word, I take it, the “mathematicals” are what the geometer studies.
We may now perhaps be in a position to see what is meant by the statement that the constituents of the forms are the constituents of everything. The things of the sensible world, as we have learned from the Philebus, are one and all in “becoming"; they are events or processes tending to the realisation of a definite law, and this law, Plato thinks, can be expressed in numerical form. Because these things are always “in the making” they do not exhibit permanent and absolute conformity to law of structure; if once they were “made” and finished, they would be the perfect embodiment of law of structure. And because the stuff of things is extension itself, the law thus realised would be geometrical and therefore, as we should say, be expressible in the form of an equation
Aristotle seems, as I said, to connect his complaint about the Academic “separation” (χωρισμός) between forms and sensible things specially with the doctrine we have just been discussing. He is commonly taken to mean no more than that the Platonic form is a sort of “double” of the sensible thing, supposed to be in some “intelligible world,” wholly sundered from the real world of actual life. It is hard to suppose that he could put such an interpretation on a theory which according to himself makes the στοιχεια of number the στοιχεια of everything. Hence I think Stenzel
As he points out, one of Aristotle’s chief difficulties about the “numbers” is that he holds that if “animal” is one number and “man” is another, we have to face the question whether the “units” in “animal” are part of the “units which constitute “man” or not; (e.g. if you said “animal” is 2, “man” is 4, since 2 X 2 = 4, “man” would seem to be the same thing as “animal” taken twice over). The complaint, as Stenzel says, is not that an εῖδος is treated as something distinct from a sensible individual, but that the more universal εἴδη, the γένη as Aristotle calls them, are thought of as though they had a being distinct from that of the ἄτομον εἰδος or infima species. Aristotle’s point is that “animal,” for example, has no being except as “horse,” “man,” “dog,” or one of the other species which can no longer be divided into sub-species. This would be, in effect, a criticism on the method of division as practiced in the Sophistes, where it is made a rule that in summing up the result of the division into a definition, all the intermediate differentiae which have been employed must be recapitulated. This is a procedure condemned by Aristotle’s own doctrine that a definition need only state genus and specific difference; the specific difference includes in itself all the intermediate differences. Hence, according to Stenzel, the χωρισμός of which Aristotle complains is that the Platonic account of “division” as
See further:
Burnet. Greek Philosophy, Part I., 312-324; Platonism, c. 5, 2, 7.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 366-436.
Baeumker, C. Das Problem der Materie in der griechischen Philosophie, 196-209.
Stenzel, J. Zahl and Gestalt bei Platan und Aristoteles. 1924.
Robin, L. La Theorie platonicienne des idees et des nombres apres Aristote. Paris, 1908.
Milhaud, G. Les Philosophes-geometres de la Grece, Platon et ses predecesseurs. Paris, 1900.
Taylor, A. E. Philosophical Studies, pp. 91-150.
Thompson, D’Arcy W. “Excess and Defect” in Mind, N.S., 149.
Appendices
Chronological Table
| Dates BC | Events |
|---|---|
| 428-7 | Plato born (Ol. 88, 1). Fourth year of Archidamian War; year following death of Pericles. Revolt and subjugation of Mytilene. Capture of Plataea by Peloponnesians. Hippolytus of Euripides. |
| 427 | Gorgias at Athens as envoy from Leontini. Aristophanes’ first comedy (Δαιταλῆς = Daetalês) produced. |
| 425 | Tribute of Athenian allies raised. Capture of Sphacteria. Pan-Sicilian congress at Gela. Acharnians of Aristophanes performed. (?) Hecuba of Euripides. | 424 | Athenian defeat at Delium (Pyrilampes wounded.) Brasidas in the north. Loss of Amphipolis and banishment of Thucydides. Battle outside Megara. Knights of Aristophanes. |
| 423 | Year’s truce with Sparta. Revolt of Scione. Clouds of Aristophanes. Connus of Amipsias. | 422 | Death of Brasidas and Cleon before Amphipolis. (?) Socrates serves in this campaign. Wasps of Aristophanes. |
| 421 | Peace of Nicias; Scione captured and inhabitants massacred. Peace of Aristophanes. | 418 | Battle of Mantinea; Laches killed, διοικισμός of Arcadians by Sparta. |
| 416 | Melos captured by the Athenians and inhabitants massacred. Tragic victory of Agathon. | 415 | Mutilation of Hermae and “profanation of mysteries.” Despatch of Syracusan expedition under Alcibiades, Nicias and Lamachus; recall and disgrace of Alcibiades. Troades of Euripides. |
| 414 | Clouds of Aristophanes. | 413 | Final ruin of Syracusan expedition; deaths of Nicias and Demosthenes. Decelea occupied by the Spartans. (?) Electra of Euripides. (?) Iphigenia in Tauris. |
| 411 | Revolution of the “four hundred.” Return of Polemarchus and Lysias from Thurii. Thesmophoriazusae and Lysistrata of Aristophanes. | 410 | Battle of Cyzicus. Philoctetes of Sophocles (410-9). |
| 409 | Carthaginian invasion of Sicily; Selinus and Himera destroyed. | 408 | Hermocrates in Sicily. Orestes of Euripides. |
| 407 | Battle of Notium. Return of Alcibiades to Athens. Hermocrates killed in street-fighting at Syracuse. | 406 | Battle of Arginusae. Trial and condemnation of the generals; protest of Socrates. Deaths of Euripides and Sophocles. |
| 405 | Battle of Aegospotami. Dionysius I becomes “tyrant” at Syracuse. | 404 | End of the Peloponnesian War; Athens surrenders to Lysander. Appointment of the “Thirty"; the murder of Polemarchus. Affair of Leon of Salamis (404-3). |
| 403 | Fall of the “Thirty"; deaths of Critias and Charmides. Restoration of democracy at Athens. | 401 | Expedition of Cyrus and the battle of Cunaxa. |
| 399 | Trials of Andocides and Socrates for impiety and the death of Socrates in the archonship of Laches. | 395-87 | Corinthian War. Rebuilding of the Athenian Long Walls (395-393). Pamphlet of Polycrates against Socrates (c. 392-390). Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes. Destruction of Spartan mora by Iphicrates (?392 or 390). |
| 388 | First visit of Plato to Sicily and Italy at the age of 40. Traditional date of the capture of Rome by the Gauls. | 387 | Corinthian War ended by “King’s Peace.” Approximate date of foundation of Academy. |
| 385 | Birth of Aristotle at Stagirus. | 382 | Spartan seizure of the citadel of Thebes and the political murder of Ismenias. |
| 380 | Panegyricus of Isocrates. | 379-8 | Spartan garrison expelled at Thebes by Pelopidas and his associates. Raid of Spartan Sphodrias on Piraeus. |
| 378 | Alliance of Athens and Thebes. Second Athenian League founded. | 373 | Great earthquake and tidal wave on the Achaean coast. |
| 371 | "Peace of Callias” between Sparta and Athens. Spartan power broken by Epaminondas at Leuctra. Liberation of Messene and the foundation of Megalopolis follow in the next year or two. | 369 | Spartan lines on Mt. Oneion broken by Epaminondas. (Theaetetus was probably wounded in this campaign.) |
| 367 | Death of Dionysius I. Plato summoned to Syracuse by Dion. Aristotle enters the Academy. Traditional date of “Licmian rogations” and the defeat of the Gauls by Camillas at Alba. | 362 | Battle of Mantinea; Epaminondas killed. |
| 361-60 | Third visit of Plato to Sicily. Traditional date of penetration of Gauls into Campania. | 357 | Capture of Syracuse by Dion. |
| 356 | Birth of Alexander the Great at Pella. | 354 | Murder of Dion by Callippus. Plato’s VII Epistle. Earliest extant speech of Demosthenes (on the Symmories.) |
| 353 | Overthrow of Callippus. Plato’s VIII Epistle. | 351 | First Philippic of Demosthenes. |
| 349-8 | Olynthiacs of Demosthenes. Capture of Olynthus by Philip (348). | 347 | Death of Plato. |
| 346 | Peace of Philocrates. Philip acts as general in the “Sacred War” against the Phocians, becomes a member of the Amphictionic Council and presides at the Pythian games. Temporary restoration of Dionysius II at Syracuse. | 344-3 | Dionysius is finally overthrown by Timoleon. |
| 343-2 | Aristotle at Pella as tutor to Alexander. |
Appendix: The Platonic Apocrypha
In using the name Apocrypha as a convenient collective designation for those items contained in our Plato MSS. of which it is reasonably certain that they have no real claim to Platonic authorship, I make no gratuitous assumption of fraudulence in their writers or worthlessness in their contents. Apart from the collection of Definitions, which has its own special character, the Apocrypha seem to be undisguised imitations of Platonic “discourses of Socrates” and most of them to be the work of the early Academy; the attribution to Plato has arisen naturally and by accident. The works in question fall into three classes: (A) items actually included in the canon of Thrasylus; (B) the collection of ὅροι or definitions, which falls outside the division into “tetralogies"; (C) νοθευόμενοι, dialogues recognized in antiquity as spurious.
A. Dialogues included in the “tetralogies,” but certainly, or all but certainly, spurious.
Of these there are seven: Alcibiades I, Alcibiades II, Hipparchus, Amatores (the whole “of the fourth “tetralogy”), Theages ("tetralogy” V), Clitophon ("tetralogy” VIII), Minos, ("tetralogy” IX). All were clearly regarded as genuine by Dercylides and Thrasylus. The only fact known about their earlier history is that Aristophanes of Byzantium had included the Minos in one of his “trilogies” along with the Laws and Epinomis (Diogenes Laertius iii. 62). Since we never hear of Dercylides or Thrasylus as introducing any items into the Platonic canon, it seems reasonable to infer that the whole group were already accepted by the Alexandrian scholars of the third century BC and that the composition of all must therefore be dated earlier still. None of the group is certainly quoted by Aristotle, or even Cicero
It follows that we should assign their composition,
Alcibiades I. This is in compass and worth the most important member of the group, as it contains an excellent general summary of the Socratic-Platonic doctrines of the scale of goods and the “tendance” of the soul. The Platonic authorship has been defended by Grote, Stallbaum, C. F. Hermann, J. Adam and recently M. Croiset and P. Friedlander; Jowett included a version in his English translation of Plato. For my own part I feel reluctantly forced to decide for rejection on the following grounds. (1) Close verbal study seems to show that in language the manner is that of the later Plato,
(2) It seems incredible that Plato, who has given us such vivid portraits of Alcibiades in the Protagoras and Symposium, should ever have treated his personality in the colourless fashion of this dialogue. (3) It should be still more incredible that Plato, with his known views on the worth of “text-books” should have composed what is, to all intents, a kind of handbook to ethics. The work has the qualities of an excellent manual, and this is the strongest reason for denying its authenticity. I agree, then, with those who hold that Alcibiades I is a careful exposition of ethics by an early Academic, written well before 300 BC, and possibly, though perhaps not very probably, even before the death of Plato. I should say with Stallbaum that it contains nothing actually unworthy of Plato, but I am equally satisfied that it contains echoes of Plato which are not in the manner
The writer’s purpose is to expound the thoughts that the one thing needful for true success in life is self-knowledge, that this means knowledge of what is good and bad for our souls, and that such knowledge is different in kind from all specialism. Alcibiades is drawn as a young man of boundless ambition just about to enter on public life. (The date assumed is the end of his “ephebate,” before the outbreak of the Archidamian War. Pericles is at the head of affairs, 104b.) Socrates, who has long admired the wonderful boy from a distance, is now allowed by his “sign” to express his admiration for the first time.
To succeed as a statesman, A. must be a good adviser and so must have knowledge which his neighbors have not, and this knowledge must come to him either as a personal discovery or by learning from others. But none of the things A. has “learned” are matters considered by sovereign assemblies, and in the matters which such an assembly does consider there are experts who would be much better counsellors than A. His boasted “advantages” of person, rank, wealth, are irrelevant. On what topics, then, would he be a competent adviser of the public? He says, “On the conduct of their own affairs, e.g. the making of war and peace.” Yet it is the expert we need to advise us whether it is better to make war, on whom, and for how long. Our standard of the “better” is supplied by the expert’s τέχνη. Now, what τέχνη is the relevant one in these questions of state? When we declare war, we always do so on the plea that our rights have been infringed. Has A., then, ever learned “justice,” the knowledge of rights and wrongs? He has never received instruction in it, nor can he have discovered it for himself. To do that he would need first to look for it, and to look for it he must be first awake to his ignorance of it. But from his childhood he has always been wrangling with his companions
But, says A., the politician need not know what is right; he need only know what is expedient. Well, if A. thinks he knows what the expedient is, let him answer one question: Is the expedient always the same as the right or is it not? A. thinks not, but Socrates is confident that he can prove the contradictory (114d). The proof turns on establishing the equations καλόν = ἀγαθόν, αἰσχρόν = κακόν (114d-116b).
How, then, must we set to work on the “care” (ἐπιμέλεια) of ourselves? We wish to be as good as possible at the goodness of a καλὸς κἀγαθός, that is, of a φρόνιμος, a man of sound judgement in all things. About what things do the καλοί καγαθοί, the “virtuous,” show this sound judgment? A. says, in capacity to command “men who associate with one another to transact the business of civic life” (125c), or more briefly, “men sharing in the constitutional rights and functions of citizenship” (125d). The statesman’s τέχνη is εὐβουλία, “excellence in counsel respecting the conduct and safety of the State.” This safety depends on the existence of φιλία, or more precisely, ὁμόνοια, “oneness of mind” between the citizens; not the “oneness of mind” secured by the arts of number, weight and measure, but the kind of “oneness of mind” which makes men agree “in a house” and is the basis of family affection. Such agreement implies that both parties to it have a “mind of their own,” and so differs from any arrangement by which one party leaves a matter of which he is himself wholly ignorant to the sole discretion of the other. That is not what is meant when justice is said to be “minding your own business and leaving others to mind theirs (127d). (The exposition at this point shows traces of a confusion one would not expect in Plato.)
Again (the transition is oddly abrupt), what is “care for a man’s self"? With some needless elaboration, we reach the result that to care for a thing means to make it better, and that we cannot tell what will make a thing better unless we know what the thing is. So our question becomes “What is the self?” (128a). It is argued at length that an agent is never identical with the tools he uses. All of us are constantly using our hands, eyes, members generally, as tools. The body is thus an instrument used, and therefore cannot be the agent who uses the instrument. The real self, the agent which “uses” and “commands” the body, must be the ψυχή, and the true definition of man is that he is a “soul using a body”
The great business of life is “self-knowledge,” the “care” of ourselves (132c).
So the soul can “see itself” only by either gazing at another man’s soul, particularly at “that region of it where the
Alcibiades II.
A poor production, stamped as not Plato’s by its style, by manifest imitations of Alcibiades I, and, as has generally been admitted since Boeckh, by a definite allusion to one of the Stoic “paradoxes.”
The subject is Prayer. The writer seems to take his cue either from the passage of the Memorabilia where Xenophon, who may himself be thinking of the closing words of the Phaedrus, says that Socrates “used to ask the gods simply to give him good things, since they know best what things are good” and thought it perverse to pray “for gold or silver, or a tyranny, and things of that kind,”
A. says, Oedipus was notoriously “a mere lunatic.” This raises a problem. “Lunatic” is the contrary of “sane.” But mankind may be divided into two classes which allow of no tertium quid, the φρόνιμοι, men of sound judgement, and the ἄφρονες, men of unsound judgement. On the
The φρόνιμοι are those who know “what is proper to do and say.” The ἄφρονες do not know this, and so unintentionally do and say what they should not. Oedipus does not stand alone in this. If a god appeared to Alcibiades himself and offered to make him autocrat of Athens, or Hellas, or Europe, A. would probably think he was offered a great boon. Yet the power and splendor of the position would be no true boon to one who had not the knowledge how to use it. A tyranny may prove fatal to the recipient, as was the case with the murderer of Archelaus; he was himself murdered after a reign of three days.
A. would do well, then, to postpone his prayer until he has learned to pray aright. But who will teach him? “Your sincere well-wisher” says Socrates, “but there is a mist which must first be removed from your soul” A. rewards these words of encouragement by “crowning” Socrates with the garland he had meant to wear while praying, and Socrates fatuously accepts the compliment. (A tasteless reminiscence of the Platonic playful “crowning” of Socrates by the drunken Alcibiades, Symposium, 213d-e.)
The very poor dialogue is dependent on, and therefore later than, Alcibiades I. Besides the echoes already mentioned, we note that the μαινόενον ἄνθρωπον of 138a 6, said of Oedipus, is a verbal imitation of the use of the same phrase, “a mere lunatic,” with reference to Alcibiades’ own brother at Alcibiades I, 118e 4. The ill-managed fiction of the god who offers A. the “tyranny” of Athens, Hellas, or Europe, is founded on what is said more naturally of A’s own day-dreams at Alcibiades I, 105b-c.
It is still more significant that the discussion of the Stoic “paradox” is forcibly dragged into the argument at its very opening. Oedipus is mentioned merely to give an opening for the remark that he was “crazy,” and the nominal main argument is kept standing still while Socrates goes off at a tangent to discuss the irrelevant question whether all unwise persons are “crazy” too. The writer thus betrays the fact that his real concern is to attack the Stoics. This shows that he is not writing before some date when Stoicism was already in existence, i.e. not before the early decades of the third century. In the time of Arcesilaus, president of the Academy from 276 to 241 BC, anti-Stoic polemic became the main business of the school. It does not necessarily follow that the polemic may not have begun rather earlier.
Linguistic considerations do not take us far. Stallbaum produces a respectable “haul” of alleged non-Platonic words and phrases, but forgets that many of these may only go to show that the writer was a poor stylist, without throwing any light on his
Amatores (or Rivales. The title is ’Ερασταί in the famous MSS. BT, Άντερασταί in the margin of B).
The scena is the school of the reading-master Dionysius, said by Diogenes and others (Diogenes Laertius iii. 5) to have been Plato’s own first teacher. Two boys are disputing, apparently on a point of geometry. Socrates is told by the “lover” of one of them that they are “chattering philosophy” about “things on high” (τὰ μετέωρα). The tone of the remark leads him to ask whether philosophy is a thing to be ashamed of. The “lover’s” rival is surprised that Socrates should act so much out of character as to put this question to a man who leads the life of a voracious and sleepy athlete. This new speaker is a votary of “music” as the other is of “gymnastic.” His opinion is that philosophy is so divine a thing that a man must be less than human if he disprizes it. But what is this “philosophy?” “What Solon meant when he spoke of ’learning something fresh every day of one’s life’.”
The cultivated “lover” feels bound,
Again, what studies would a true lover of wisdom regard as most important? The “musician” says, “Those which will win you the highest reputation.” A philosopher should be at home in the “theorick” of all the professions, or at least, of those which are in high consideration, though he should not stoop to meddle with their manual part. He should know them as the “master-builder”
Let us make a fresh start. In the case of our domestic animals, there are two sides to the professions which “tend” them. The expert knows a good horse or dog from a bad one better than other men; he also “disciplines,” or “corrects” (κολάζει), the animals under his care. What “art” similarly “corrects” human beings? Justice, the “art” of the dicast (judge and juror); hence we should presume that the practitioners of this art also know a good man from a bad one. The layman in the art is ignorant even of himself, does not know the true state of his own soul. This is why we say that he has not sophrosyne (self-restraint, moderation, balance); by consequence, to have sophrosyne will mean to be a practitioner of the art we have just called justice, the art of true self-knowledge. We call this art sophrosyne because it teaches us to know ourselves, and also justice, because it teaches us to “correct” what we discover to be amiss (138b).
Since the life of society
The purpose of the little work is clearly to set the Platonic conception of philosophy as the knowledge of the good, with its corollary, the identification of the true philosopher and the true king, in sharp contrast with the shallower conception of philosophy as “general culture.” The great representative of this view of philosophy in Attic literature is Isocrates,
The facts would,
Theages. The main object of the work seems to be to relate a number of anecdotes about Socrates’ “sign.” Theages, son of Demodocus (perhaps the general of the year 425-4 mentioned at Thucydides iv. 75), is twice named in Plato (Apology, 33d, Republic 496b). From these references we learn that he suffered from delicate health and was dead in 399. According to the Republic, he might have been lost to philosophy but for the invalidism which kept him out of public life. In the Theages he is a mere lad whose future destination is giving his father some anxiety. There is no indication of dramatic date except that in 127e, apparently verbally echoed from Apology, 19e. Prodicus, Polus and Gorgias are all assumed to be present in Athens. The piece can hardly be said to have an argument. Demodocus thinks that nothing would prepare his son for a great career so well as association with Socrates. But, says S., my young friends do not always benefit by my society; everything depends on the “divinity.” My “sign” sometimes interferes, and it is always lost labour to disregard it. Charmides neglected my advice not to train for the foot-race at Nemea and had reason to be sorry for it. Timarchus insisted on leaving a dinner-party to keep an engagement in defiance of the “sign.” The “engagement” was, in fact, to assist in an assassination, and Timarchus afterward confessed, on the way to execution, that he had done wrong to disregard my warnings. The sign” also predicted the great public disaster at Syracuse. Aristides, grandson of the great Aristides, made famous progress while he was with me, but, in a short absence, forgot all he had learned, though Thucydides (the grandson of Pericles’ opponent) was associating with me to his great advantage. Aristides explained that he had never directly learned anything from me, but found his own intelligence mysteriously aided by being in the same room with me.
All through this conversation there are recognizable borrowings from the Platonic dialogues. The “sign” is described (128d) in the actual words of Apology, 31d; the statement that it warned S. that some lads would not benefit by his company is taken from Theaetetus 151a, and the anecdote about the boys Aristides and Thucydides has been constructed by combining that passage with the Laches, where these two lads are introduced to S. by their fathers. There is an allusion to the usurpation of Archelaus (124d) which verbally reproduces Gorgias 470d. Theages, like the young
Stallbaum
I see no force in this reasoning, which starts with a bad blunder. Stallbaum has forgotten the statement of the Theaetetus (151a) about the warnings of the “sign” which is our author’s real starting-point. There is no misunderstanding of the Theaetetus in the Theages. Also it is antecedently just as likely that the Theages is one of the sources from which Antipater “collected” his tales as that it is drawing on him. In fact, a Stoic would not be likely to be satisfied with Plato’s account of the merely inhibitory character of the “sign.” Xenophon’s version of the matter, which makes the “sign” give positive guidance, is much more in keeping with Stoic theories about “the divinity.” Hence I hold that the fidelity of the Theages to Plato on this point is definite evidence against the presence of Stoic influence. The linguistic arguments are also nugatory. Some of the expressions to which Stallbaum took objection are actually Platonic, others are mere examples of a slightly turgid diction.
On the evidence I think it
Hipparchus. By general admission the language and diction of the dialogue are excellent fourth-century Attic, not to be really discriminated from the authentic work of Plato. This should put Stallbaum’s view that it is a clever late imitation out of court. That might have been possible after the rise of “Atticism,” but not earlier. I shall discuss Boeckh’s unlucky speculation on the authorship later on.
Socrates and an unnamed friend
The first and obvious answer is “A greedy man is one who is not above making a profit from an unworthy source” (ἀπὸ τῶν μηδὲνος ἀξίων). But a man who expects to make a profit from what he knows to be worthless must surely be silly, whereas we think of the greedy not as silly, but as “cunning knaves” “slaves of gain” who know the baseness of the source and yet are not ashamed to make the profit. Here there is a difficulty. He who knows when and where it is “worthwhile” to plant a tree, or perform any other operation, is always some kind of expert. And an expert would not expect to make a profit out
Here the friend complains that Socrates is “gulling” him. But that, says S., would be a shocking act and would violate the precept of that good and wise man Hipparchus, the eldest of the Pisistratids. He introduced Homer’s poetry to Athens, regulated its recitation, patronized Anacreon and Simonides, all out of zeal for improving his fellow-citizens. For the country-folk he set up Hermae by the roads engraved with maxims intended to surpass the wisdom of the famous Delphian inscriptions. One of these maxims was ΜΗ ΦΙΛΟΝ ΕΞΑΠΑΤΑ, “never gull a friend.” After the murder of this great and good man, his brother Hippias ruled like a tyrant, but so long as he lived, Athens enjoyed a golden age. The true story of his death is that Harmodius murdered him from jealousy because Aristogiton preferred the wisdom of Hipparchus to his own.
To return: we cannot give up any of our theses, but perhaps we might qualify one of them, the thesis that gain is always good. Perhaps some gain may be bad. But at least, gain is always gain, as a man, good or bad, is always a man. In a definition we should
The thoughts of the trifle are, all through, as Platonic as its language, and, apart from the one awkward “circle” in the reasoning, the main argument seems to me worthy of Plato in his more youthful vein. The interest shown in economic facts is thoroughly intelligent. The real evidence of non-Platonic authorship is, to my mind, the anonymity of the interlocutor and the inferiority and irrelevant length of what is meant to be the humorous interlude about Hipparchus. The dialogue should be assigned to an Academic of the earliest period with an excellent style and an intelligent interest in economics.
Clitophon. The work is no more than a brief fragment, but raises interesting questions. Clitophon, a minor character in the Republic,
He is convincing,
It looks, then, as though one of two things must be true. Either Socrates has the same limitations as a man who can speak eloquently in praise of a science in which he is himself only a layman, or, more probably, Socrates did not choose to explain himself fully. Clitophon is sure he needs a physician of the soul, but, unless S. can do more for him than he has so far done, he will be left to fall into the hands of Thrasymachus or another for practical treatment (410a-e).
It is not quite clear to what conclusion the writer is leading up, but it should be plain that the apparent commendation of Thrasymachus at the expense of Socrates is ironical. Clitophon’s point is that unless Socrates can do more for him than simply preach on the
Minos. Like the Hipparchus, this dialogue gets its name from the introduction of an historical narrative; the respondent is anonymous. The question discussed is the nature of law, and the point is to be made that it is not of the essentia of law to be a command. A law is the discovery (ἐζεύρεσις) of a truth,—the view common to all champions of “eternal and immutable” morality. The piece opens, in an un-Platonic way, by a direct question from Socrates, “What is law?” (The abruptness seems to be copied from the opening of the Meno, but there the abrupt question is put into the mouth of Meno and is dramatically appropriate.) The answer given is that “the law” is a collective name for τὰ νομιζὁμενα, the aggregate of “usages.” But this is like saying that sight (ὄψις) is the aggregate of visibles (ὁρώμενα). The statement, that is, tells us nothing about the formal character of the “legal” as such. A new definition is
What are we to say about the notorious divergences between the laws of different communities or different generations? One thing is clear; no society ever fancies that right can really be wrong. A law not based on reality (τὸ ὄν) is an error about τὸ νόμιμον. (It may be accepted as law, but it ought not to be so accepted.) And we see from the examples of medicine, agriculture and other arts that the laws of an art are the regulations of the ἐπιστήμων, the man who has expert knowledge about some region of τὸ ὄν. So the true “laws” of civic life are the directions given by “kings” and good men (the experts in moral knowledge), and therefore will not vary; a mistaken direction has no right to be called “law.”
Now, who knows how to “distribute” (διανεῖμαι) seeds to different soils properly? The farmer who knows his business. The physician’s “distributions” of food and exercise are the right distributions for the body, the shepherd’s distributions the right ones for the flock. Whose distributions are the right ones for men’s souls? Those of the king who knows his business.
In ancient days, there were such “divinely” wise experts in kingship, of whom Minos of Crete was one. The current story is that he
The thought of the Minos is Platonic; not so Platonic is the eulogy of Minos, of whose institution the Laws speaks with some severity.
Stallbaum’s theory that the work is an Alexandrian forgery is excluded by the known fact that Aristophanes of Byzantium placed it in one of his “trilogies.” The right inference is not Stallbaum’s, that Aristophanes brought the work into the Platonic canon, but that he found it there. The language points to a date after the death of Plato, but still in the fourth century. Aristophanes and Thrasylus both evidently regarded the Minos as a kind of “introduction” to the Laws. The discrepancy between its estimate of Minos and Cretan institutions and that of Laws, I. shows that the piece can hardly have been intended so.
I subjoin here some brief notes on the contents of those among
I. By an unknown and turgid writer to an unknown recipient, who seems to be, virtually at least, an autocrat. The writer has long held the highest ἀρχαί in “your city,” and has had to shoulder the odium of false steps taken against his advice. He has now been dismissed with contumely, and so washes his hands of the “city” and returns an insultingly small sum of money sent him for his present expenses. The situation answers to none in the life of Plato, nor, so far as one can see, in that of Dion, to whom Ficinus wished to transfer the authorship. Yet the style seems fourth-century, and its total unlikeness to that of all the other Epistles shows that we can hardly be dealing with a deliberate forgery meant to pass as Plato’s. If the “city” is Syracuse, the writer might be a Syracusan who has been sent into actual or virtual banishment and therefore poses as no longer a citizen. But why does he write in Attic? Or is our text a transcription into Attic? (I have sometimes thought of the historian Philistus—who had been sent into virtual exile at Adria by Dionysius I but returned at his death and was the chief opponent of Dion—as a possible author.
V. Plato to Perdiccas of Macedonia: A letter recommending Euphraeus of Oreus as a political adviser.
Constitutions, like animals, have their distinctive “notes"; Euphraeus is skilled in the knowledge of these, and would not be likely to recommend measures “out of tune” with monarchy. An unfriendly critic might discount the recommendation by urging that its author has not even caught the “note” of the democracy in which he lives. But the truth is that “Plato was born too late in the day” for his country to listen to advice which he would have rejoiced to give. Objections to the letter will be found in the works of C. Ritter and R. Hackforth,
VI. Plato to Hermias, Erastus and Coriscus: The two young Academics (Coriscus is Aristotle’s friend whose name figures so often in his “logical examples ) are introduced to Hermias, who had made himself “tyrant” of Atarneus and was soon to be the patron of Aristotle, as well as the first martyr in the Hellenic “forward movement” against Persia. He needs confidants of high character; the two young men have character and intelligence, but need an ἀμυντικὴ δύναμις, a “protector” whom they can find in him. The writer hopes that his letter will lay the foundation for an intimate friendship. We are not likely to hear any more of the “spuriousness” of vi. since the vigorous defense of it by Wilamowitz in his Platon and the throwing of a flood of light on the philosophical and political importance of the “Asiatic branch” of the Academy at Assos by Jaeger.
IX. Plato to Archytas: Archytas has complained of the heavy burdens and anxieties of public life. He should remember that our country and our family have both as much claim on our thought and our time as our personal concerns.
A promise is made to care for a young man named Echecrates, from regard to Archytas no less than on his own and his father’s account. No one has alleged anything suspicious in the language of ix. The difficulty which has been made about the youth of Echecrates arises from the assumption that he is the man of that name who appears in the Phaedo. Archer-Hind rightly called attention in his edition of the dialogue to the mention of an Echecrates of Tarentum, the city of Archytas, in Iamblichus’s list of Pythagoreans. The date of the letter cannot be fixed. Plato and Archytas were already friends in 367 BC (Epinomis vii. 338a) and we do not know how much earlier.
X. Plato to Aristodorus: A mere note commending the loyalty of the recipient to Dion and expressing the conviction that “loyalty, fidelity, honesty” (τὸ βέβαιον καὶ τὸ πιστὸν καὶ ὑγιές) are the true “philosophy.” There are no materials for judgement either way, but, as Ritter says, the tone “seems genuine.” And why should one forge such a note?
XI. Plato to Leodamas: A meeting would be desirable, but
XII. Plato to Archytas: A note acknowledging the receipt of certain “papers” (ὑπομνήματα) and expressing admiration of their author as fully worthy of his legendary ancestors. The writer sends certain unrevised “papers” of his own in return. Our chief MSS. append a note that the authenticity of this letter was disputed,—when or why is not known. C. Ritter inclines to attribute it to the author of ii., vi. and xiii. (that is, as I hold, to Plato). The strongest argument on the other side is its apparent connexion with the pretended letter from Archytas to Plato prefixed to Ocellus (or Occelus) the Lucanian on the Eternity of the Cosmos.
B. The Οροι (Terms)
This is a collection of definitions of terms of natural and moral science. The total number of terms defined is 184, but a good number of them receive two or more alternative definitions. In the “canon” the collection was definitely marked off from the genuine work of Plato by exclusion from the “tetralogies.” Since our collection was thus known to Dercylides and Thrasylus, it must be older than the Christian era. I do not know that there is any further evidence to show when or where it was made. The genuineness of the contents as old Academic work is fairly guaranteed by two considerations. Many of the definitions are simply extracted from the dialogues; others are quoted and criticised by Aristotle, whose Topics, in particular, are rich in allusions of this kind. I think it will be found that there are no signs of Stoic influence, and this suggests that the collection, or a larger one of which it is what remains, goes back to a time before the rapprochement between Academicism and Stoicism under Antiochus of Ascalon in the second quarter of the first century BC There seems also to be no serious trace of Aristotelian influence. No use is made of the great Aristotelian passe-partout ἐνέργεια; the genus of εὐδαιμονία is actually given (412d) as δὑναμις; the Aristotelian distinction
C. νοθευόμενοι (Adulterated)
de Justo. A conversation between Socrates and an unnamed friend on the nature of τὸ δίκαιον. Justice, the art of the judge (δίκαστής), like counting, measuring, weighing, is an art of distinguishing. It distinguishes the rightful from the wrongful. A given act, e.g. the utterance of a false statement, may be sometimes right, sometimes wrong: right when it is done “in the appropriate situation” (ἐν δέοντι), wrong in all other cases. It is knowledge which enables a man to recognize the appropriate occasion. Wrongdoing, then, is due to ignorance, and so is involuntary.
de Virtute. This conversation also is held by Socrates with a friend who is anonymous in most of the MSS. In the Vatican MS. called by Burnet O, he has a name, Hippotrophus. The piece is thus presumably that mentioned by Diogenes Laertius under the alternative names Midon and Hippotrophus. It has the same type as the last. The question is whether “goodness” can be taught. In both pieces Socrates is made, as in the Minos, to originate the problem. The example of the various “arts” is used to show that if you would acquire special knowledge, you must put yourself under a specialist’s tuition. But “goodness” apparently cannot be acquired thus, since Themistocles, Aristides, Thucydides, Pericles were all unable to impart it to their sons. Again “goodness” does not seem to come “by nature.” If it did, we might have specialists in human nature, as we have fanciers of dogs and horses, and they would be able to tell us which young persons have the qualities that will repay careful training. “goodness” then, like prophecy, seems to depend on an incalculable “divine” inspiration.
Boeckh, as we have said, regarded these trifles as the genuine
They cannot be that for several reasons. For (1) they are slavishly close imitations, often reproducing whole sentences of Plato’s text. Thus the argument about the parallel between “justice” and the arts of number and measure in the de Iusto has been directly copied, as Stallbaum said, from Euthyphro 76 ff. The de Virtute is largely made up of similar “liftings” from the Meno and Protagoras. (2) The discourses ascribed to the cobbler Simon must have been shorter even than our two νοθευόμενοι, for there were thirty-three of them in a single roll (Diogenes Laertius ii. 122). (3) The work ascribed to Simon was almost certainly a forgery. (The learned Stoic Panaetius said that the only certainly genuine dialogues by “Socratic men” were those of Plato, Xenophon, Antisthenes, Aeschines; those ascribed to Euclides and Phaedo were doubtful, all others spurious. Diogenes Laertius ii. 64.) In fact, it is hard to doubt that we are dealing with late exercises in imitation of Plato’s style, “atticizing” copies of a classic. The purity of the language is partly explained by this, partly by the presence of verbatim extracts.
Demodocus. This hardly even pretends to be a dialogue. It is a direct harangue of Socrates to an audience which includes Demodocus (? the father of Theages). The style is halting to the verge of inarticulateness. The drift, obscured by verbiage, is that Socrates has been asked to advise the audience on some decision they are about to take. The request implies that there is a “science of giving advice.” Either the present audience possess this science or they do not. If they all possess it, there is nothing to discuss; if none of them possess it, discussion is waste of time. If one or two possess it, why do not they advise the others? Where is the use of listening to rival counsellors, or of taking a vote when their counsel has been heard? How can persons who do not know for themselves which is the advisable course vote to any purpose on the advices of rival counsellors? Socrates will certainly not advise such a set of fools.
At this point the shambling speech ends. What follows seems to be a detached set of anecdotes, having nothing in common with what has gone before, except that Socrates is apparently the narrator, and that each anecdote embodies a rather puerile dilemma.
(a) I once heard a man blame his friend for accepting the story of the plaintiff in a suit without troubling to hear the other side. This, he said, was unfair and a violation of the dicast’s oath. The friend retorted that if you cannot tell whether one man is speaking the truth, you will be still more at a loss if there are two speakers with different stories. If they should both tell the same story, why need you listen to it twice?
(b) A man is reproached by a friend to whom he has refused
(c) A man is blamed for giving ready credence to the random utterances of irresponsible persons. Why? Because he believes the tale of “anyone and everyone” without investigation. But would it not be an equal fault to believe the tales of your most particular intimates without examination? If a speaker is an intimate of A and a stranger to B, will A be right in believing his tale and B equally right in disbelieving the same story? If the same tale is told you by an intimate and a stranger, must it not be equally credible on the lips of both?
The shambling and helpless style of these anecdotes shows that they come from the same hand as the foolish harangue to Demodocus. The writer must have been a person of low intelligence, with no power of expression and a taste for futile “eristic.” I doubt whether his scraps were meant to form a connected whole.
Sisyphus. Socrates is in conversation with a Pharsalian of the singular name of Sisyphus,
But what is consultation (τὸ βουλεύεσθαι)? A process of inquiry (τὸ ζητεῖν). Inquiring is trying to get fuller knowledge of something of which we have some preliminary notion, but not full knowledge. It is the presence in us of ignorance which makes this process difficult. But men do not “consult” about what lies beyond the range of their knowledge; hence the business of yesterday should have been called an inquiry into the interests of Pharsalus. Why did not the inquirers take the course of “learning” the truth from
The writer is perhaps the same man as the author of the Demodocus; he has the same foible for childish eristic, the same interest in the alleged puzzle about “deliberation” and the same helplessness of style, though the Sisyphus is not quite so helpless as the Demodocus. He has read the Meno
Eryxias. This is a much more serious production than any of the four just examined. The writer has provided a definite audience, scene and date. Socrates is talking in the portico of Zeus Eleutherius
The date is supposed to be between the Peace of Nicias and the determination taken in 416 by Athens to attack Syracuse, as we see from the opening remarks made by Erasistratus on the necessity of taking a firm line with that “wasp’s nest.” The subject of the discussion, which is made to arise quite naturally, is the nature and worth of πλοῦτος, “capital,” as we should say. Erasistratus holds that “the richest man is he who owns what is worth most.” If so, may not a poor man in lusty health be said to be richer than an opulent invalid with whom he would never dream of changing places? And there may be things of higher worth than health. It is evident, also, that the thing of highest worth is happiness (εὐδαιμονία). It should follow that the richest of men are the “wise and good,” because they do not impair their happiness by making false steps in life: “the man who knows what is good is the only real capitalist,”—a clear allusion to the Stoic paradox, solus sapiens dives. Eryxias objects that a man might be as wise as Nestor and yet in want of the bare necessaries of life. Still, says S. If such a man’s wisdom might have a high value in exchange in any district where it was esteemed. A man
Here S. directs attention to the original and still more fundamental question what wealth is. You may say, “abundance of χρήματα, means.” But what are means? It is argued, with a little needless display of general information, that means are “possessions which are of use to us.” Hence a cartload of Carthaginian currency would not be “means” at Athens, where it will not exchange for anything. Coin is popularly confused with wealth simply because it exchanges freely for clothes and all other commodities. Now a professional man can exchange his professional services for commodities, and thus ἐπιστῆμαι, knowledge of professions, seems to be one form of capital. Again an article is only capital to one who knows how to use it, and the καλοὶ κἀγαθοί are the persons who know how to make the right use of everything. Thus there is a sense in which to make a man wiser is to make him richer. Critias still protests that possessions are not wealth, but the argument is continued. In any trade, a man’s capital clearly includes not only his materials but his implements, and sometimes also appliances for making those implements. If a man were once fully equipped with all that his body requires, money and such things would be useless to him. Again, since to learn you must be able to hear, the money a man pays his doctor for taking care of his hearing is actually useful as a means to “goodness.” This money may have been made in a “base” calling, and thus a “base” thing may be useful for good. We are
I think it clear that the purpose of the dialogue, which is very interesting for its economic theses, is to canvass the Stoic doctrine that wisdom, virtue, wealth are identical, and that the sage is the only “capitalist.” This is the thesis which Eryxias treats as idle playing with words and Socrates “side-tracks,” in order to discuss the more than verbal question whether riches are good or bad. It is part of the anti-Stoic polemic that S. supports Eryxias against Critias who denies that “property” is wealth. The author means to protest against “pulpit declamation” which amounts to nothing but words and to replace it by the dispassionate Academic view that wealth and wisdom are different things, the one at the bottom, the other at the top of the scale of good. The Greek of the dialogue is not the Attic of Plato, yet it is hardly the vulgar κοιή. I should conjecture that the work belongs to the beginnings of the Academic polemic against Stoicism, in the early decades of the third century. The writer seems to have drawn some of his material from the Callias of Aeschines,
Axiochus. In style this dialogue is far inferior to the Eryxias. The language is a vulgar κοινή, full of non-Attic words and phrases. The mise-en-scene shows complete ignorance of the personages of Plato’s dialogues. The principal figure, apart from Socrates, is Axiochus of Scambonidae, the uncle of Alcibiades. The supposed date is fixed by a reference to the trial of the generals after Arginusae (368d) as not earlier than 405, and Axiochus represents himself as having supported the protest of Socrates against the unconstitutionality of the proceedings. The writer has forgotten that Axiochus was, next to Alcibiades, the chief victim of the scandals of 415 and shared the capital sentence.
In the opening
I feel personally convinced that Immisch is right in the view taken of the purpose of the dialogue in his edition of it.
This is the argument of which Axiochus speaks with marked contempt as superficial “twaddle” momentarily
It is hardly necessary to say anything of the little trifle, not contained in our Plato MSS., called the Alcyon and attributed, in MSS., variously to Plato or to Lucian. (It is commonly included in printed texts of Lucian; the only recent editor of Plato to print it is C. F. Hermann.) This piece of silly prettiness is certainly neither Plato’s nor Lucian’s; since it was already known to Favourinus of Arles,
Diogenes Laertius (iii. 62) gives the following list of νοθευόμενοι: Midon or Hippotrophus, Eryxias or Erasistratus, Alcyon, [a corrupt
There still survives in Syriac a translation of a “Socratic” dialogue, Herostrophos
A more interesting personal document is Plato’s Will (Diogenes Laertius iii. 41-43). The probability is that this and the Wills of Aristotle and Theophrastus are genuine. The Academy would have legal reasons for safeguarding the document, just as a society today preserves its charter of incorporation or its title-deeds. The Will runs thus: “Plato leaves possessions and devises them as hereunder. The property at Iphistiadae bounded on the N. by the road from the shrine at Cephisia, on the S. by the shrine of Heracles at Iphistiadae, on the E. by the land of Archestratus of Phrearria, on the W. by the land of Philippus of Chollidae, shall be neither sold nor alienated, but secured in every way to the boy Adimantus.
…Item, three minae of silver. Item, a silver goblet, weight 165 dr. Item, a cup, weight 45 dr. Item, a gold finger-ring and earring,
By comparison with the similar wills of Aristotle and Theophrastus we can see that Plato was by no means in affluent circumstances.
See further on the works dealt work above:
Shorey, P. What Plato Said. pp. 415-444, “Doubtful and Spurious Dialogues.”
Souilhe, J. Platon, Dialogues Suspects (Paris, 1930. The author tends to accept the Clitophon, and Alcibiades I): Platon, Dialogues Apocryphes. Paris, 1930.
Friedlander, P. Die Platonischen Schriften. Berlin and Leipzig, 1930; pp. 117-127 on Hipparchus; 147-155 on Theages; 233-245 on Alcibiades I.
All these are accepted.
Finis
.
Alfred Edward Taylor
1869–1945
Eminent British Idealist philosopher
Fellow, Merton College, Oxford, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, McGill University, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of St. Andrews and University of Edinburgh.
Editor’s Note: The Addenda, which formerly accompanied the Appendices, have been added to their pertinent pages, noted as Add.
References
The Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, “Aeschines’ speech against Timarchus,” Topos Text, November 25, 2017.
The Speeches of Aeschines. Scaife Viewer, “Against Timarchus,” Adams, Charles Darwin, translator. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.; New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1919 (1958 printing).
Taylor, Alfred E. Plato: The Man and His Work. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1955.