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Plato: The Man and His Work, I.
By A. E. Taylor
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
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.
Presumably Plato’s acquaintance with Socrates, then, went back as far as he could remember. The Alexandrian tales will only mean that Plato became a “disciple” of Socrates as soon as he was an ἔφηβος or “adolescent,” a period of life currently reckoned as beginning at eighteen and ending at twenty. Even with this explanation the story is probably not accurate. Both Plato and Isocrates, his older contemporary, emphatically deny that Socrates ever had any actual “disciples” whom he “instructed,” and Plato himself, in a letter written nearly at the end of his life, puts the matter in a truer light. He tells us there that at the time of the “oligarchical” usurpation of 404-3, being still a very young man, he was looking forward to a political career and was urged by relatives who were among the revolutionaries (no doubt, Critias and Charmides) to enter public life
Hermodorus,
This temporary concentration at Megara presumably would only last until the feelings aroused in connexion with the cause célèbre had had time to blow over. The biographers narrate that it was followed by some years of travel to Cyrene, Italy, and Egypt, and that the Academy was then founded on Plato’s return to Athens. How much of this story—none of it rests, like the mention of the sojourn in Megara, on the evidence of Hermodorus—may be true, is very doubtful Plato himself, in the letter already alluded to, merely says that he visited Italy and Sicily at the age of forty and was repelled by the sensual luxury of the life led there by the well-to-do. His language on the whole implies that most of the time between this journey and the death of Socrates had been spent at Athens, watching the public conduct of the city and drawing the conclusion that good government can only be expected when “either true and genuine philosophers find their way to political authority or powerful politicians by the favour of Providence take to true philosophy.” He says nothing of travels in Africa or Egypt, though some of the observations made in the Laws about the art and music, the arithmetic and the games of the Egyptian children have the appearance of being first-hand. The one fateful result of Plato’s “travels,” in any case, is that he won the whole-hearted devotion of a young man of ability and
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 B.C.—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 B.C.); 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.
Very little in the way of actual “new theorems” is ascribed to Plato by the later writers on the history of mathematical science, but the men trained in his school or closely associated with it made all the great advances achieved in the interval between the downfall of the original Pythagorean order about the middle of the fifth century and the rise of the specialist schools of Alexandria in the
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
Also, Plato’s belief in the value of a hard scientific education for a ruler of men, wise or not, was absolutely genuine. Accordingly, he at once set about the task
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)
Unfortunately Dion was too good and too bad at once for the situation. Like Plato himself, he believed in strong though law-abiding personal rule and disgusted the Syracusan mob by not restoring “democratic” license; he had not the tact to manage disappointed associates, quarrelled with his admiral Heraclides and at last made away with him, or connived at his being made away with. Dion was in turn murdered with great treachery by another of his subordinates, Callippus, who is said by later writers to have been a member of the Academy, though this seems hard to reconcile with Plato’s own statement that the link of association between the two was not “philosophy” but the mere accident of having been initiated together into certain “mysteries.” Plato still believed strongly in the fundamental honesty and sanity of
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.
§ 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
In modern times doubt has been carried much farther. In the middle of the nineteenth century, especially in Germany, the “athetizing” of Platonic dialogues became a fashionable amusement for scholars; the Laws was pronounced spurious by Ast and, at one time, by Zeller, the Parmenides, Sophistes, and Politicus by Ueberweg and others; extremists wished to limit the number of genuine dialogues to nine. Fortunately the tide has turned, since the elaborate proof of the genuineness of the Sophistes and Politicus by Lewis Campbell. There is now a general agreement that every dialogue of any length and interest in the list of the thirty-six
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.
But, even in this case, there is no ground to suppose that the unknown writer intended his work to pass current as Plato’s. A little more must be said of the dialogues which are still rejected by some scholars, but defended by others. The Alcibiades I has nothing in its language which requires a date later than the death of Plato, and nothing in its
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.
On the other hand, the contents of the work are singular. It is mainly given up to the recital by Socrates of a “funeral discourse” on the Athenians who fell in the Corinthian war. Socrates pretends to have heard the discourse from Aspasia and to admire it greatly. Apparently the intention is to produce a gravely ironical satire on the curious jumble of real and spurious patriotism characteristic of the λόγοι ἐπιτάφιοι (funeral orations), which are being quietly burlesqued. The standing mystery for commentators is, of course, the audacious anachronism by which Socrates (and, what is even worse, Aspasia) is made to give a narrative of events belonging to the years after Socrates’ own death. To me it seems clear that this violation of chronological possibility, since it must have been committed at a time when the facts could not be unknown, must be intentional, however hard it is to divine its precise point, and that Plato is more likely than any disciple in the Academy to have ventured on it. (As the second part of the Parmenides proves, Plato had a certain “freakish” humor in him which could find strange outlets.) And I find it very hard to suppose that Aristotle was deceived on a question of Platonic authorship. Hence, it seems best to accept the traditional ascription of the Menexenus, however hard we may think it to account for its character.
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 B.C. (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 A.D.) 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
§ II. To understand a great thinker is, of course, impossible unless we know something of the relative order of his works, and of the actual period of his life to which they belong. What, for example, could we make of Kant if we did not know whether the Critique of Pure Reason was the work of ambitious youth or of ripe middle age, whether it was written before or after the discourse on the Only Possible Demonstration of the Being of a God or the Dreams of a Ghost-seer? We cannot, then, even make a beginning with the study of Plato until we have found some trustworthy indication of the order in which his works, or at least the most significant of them, were written. Even when we have fixed this order, if it can be fixed, we need, for a completer understanding, to be able also to say at what precise period of life the most important dialogues were written,
The external evidence supplied by trustworthy testimony only assures us on one point. Aristotle tells us (Politicus 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 Epinomis 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 Republic 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.
It must have been contemporary with the writing of the whole
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;
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.]
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,
The dialogues will tell us something of Plato’s fundamental life-long
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 Politics 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”).
Hence, the first duty of every man who means to enjoy good or happiness is to “tend his soul,” “to
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 everybody 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 (
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. 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,
Now no man wishes to have what he knows or believes to be bad for him. Many men wish for what, in fact, would be bad for them, but they can only do so because they falsely think the thing in question good. To wish to have a thing because you know it would be bad for you would be impossible. As Aristotle puts it, “every one wishes for what he thinks good.” Many men choose evil in spite of the fact that it is evil, no one chooses it because it is evil and he knows it to be so. (Of course he may know or believe that he will be sent to prison or to hell for choosing as he does, but at heart he thinks that it will be “worth his while” to take these consequences, he will be “better off” even after paying this price
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,
Now the systematic production of works falsely ascribed to eminent authors seems not to occur in the history of Greek literature until long after the time of Aristotle. And again it is not likely that Aristotle, of all men, should have been misinformed about the real authorship of an Academic dialogue. Thus it is hard to believe either that the dialogue is a deliberate forgery or that it is a production of some lesser member of the Academy which has been ascribed by a simple mistake to Plato, as seems to be the case with a few of the minor items of the “canon of Thrasylus.” Nor have modern stylometrical investigations given any reason to suspect the little work. Aristotle’s allusion thus seems to compel us to accept it as genuine. On the other hand, there are two notorious difficulties which we have to face when we admit Plato’s authorship. One is that it is at least hard to see what Plato’s object in such a composition can be. The other is that the dialogue commits an anachronism to which there is no parallel anywhere in Plato, and which cannot be unconscious. The body of it is made up of a recital by Socrates of a “funeral oration” on the Athenians who fell in the Corinthian war, and Socrates professes to have heard the speech from the lips of the famous Aspasia, the wife of Pericles. It is certain that Socrates was put to death in the summer of the year 399 B.C., long before the opening of the Corinthian war (395 B.C.). Yet he is made to carry his review of Athenian history down to the pacification dictated by the Persian king, which ended the war in the year 387. Aspasia, the nominal speaker, must have died before Socrates. This is implied in the structure of the Aspasia of Aeschines, on which see H. Dittmar, Aeschines von Sphettus, 45-56. Plato must have violated chronology quite deliberately and with a view to producing a definite effect. But what can we suppose the intention to have been?
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!
If we read the Menexenus in this light, we can perhaps understand the point of the curious anachronism in its setting. The satire of the actual “Funeral Discourse” is so subtly mixed with sympathetic appreciation that it would be easy to mistake the whole speech for a serious encomium—a mistake which has actually been made by a good many interpreters of Plato. The ordinary reader needs some very visible warning sign if he is to approach the discourse with the required anticipation that
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;
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 the purpose of Plato’s dialogue
mainly in a “polemic” against Aeschines).
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
The introductory narrative provides an opportunity for a clear indication of the date
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.”
The Thracian, however, had explained that not only can you not treat a local disorder properly without treating the patient’s whole body, you cannot treat the body successfully without treating the soul, which is the real seat of health and disease. Hence Socrates is under a promise not to practice the recipe against headache on anyone who is not spiritually sound in constitution. It would be useless if employed on a subject with a deep-seated spiritual disorder. Sophrosyne is presupposed in spiritual health; before Charmides can be treated for his headaches, then, we must find out whether he has sophrosyne (Charmides 155e-158e). Now if a man has this or any other character of soul, it must, of course, make
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, 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 ἑαυτοϋ πράττειν, 161b,
It does obviously present one advantage. The formula is a strictly universal one, applicable to the whole conduct of life in all its different “ages,” not merely to the kind of conduct appropriate to the young in particular. In a boy the shyness, or backwardness, of which we have just been speaking is a laudable thing, and “forwardness” a fault, but “shyness” is far from being a laudable characteristic in a grown man. But at any age of life it is laudable to “mind your own affairs” and censurable to be a “meddler” or busybody. Unfortunately, as Socrates goes on to point out, the phrase “to attend to one’s own matters” is so ambiguous that the new suggestion is something of a “conundrum”; we have to guess, if we can, what its author may have meant (161d). Clearly he cannot have meant that a man should only read and write his own name and no one else’s, or that the builder or the physician should build his own house or cure his own body and no other, on pain of being noted for a “meddler.” Life would be intolerable to a community where the rule was that every one should “attend to his own matters” in the sense that he must “do everything for himself” (161e). The alleged saying, then, is what we called it, a pure conundrum. 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.)
“What is really needed for the direction of life is the knowledge of 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
But we should be none the happier for all this knowledge unless we had something more which we have not yet mentioned—knowledge of good. Without this we might know all about healing the sick, sailing the sea, winning battles, but we should not know when it is good that a sick man should recover, or that a vessel should come safe to port, or a battle be won. If our life is to be truly happy, it is this knowledge of our good which must take the direction of it; apart from that knowledge, we may be able to secure the successful accomplishment of various results, but we cannot make sure that anything will be “well and beneficially” done. But sophrosyne by our assumed definition is not this knowledge of good; even when we waived all other difficulties about it, we still retained the thesis that it is a “knowledge about knowledges,” a “science of sciences.” Thus sophrosyne seems to fall between two stools; it is not the knowledge of good which would really ensure happiness. It is not even a knowledge which will ensure that the practitioners of the various “arts” shall be experts and practice their callings with success; for we have just seen that it is the specialist in each department and not the man who knows the “theory of knowledge” who is the final judge in his own department. sophrosyne, if we accept the proposed definition of it, even with the most favourable interpretation, thus seems to be of no practical value whatever (171d-175a). Yet this conclusion is so extravagantly paradoxical that it clearly cannot be sound. We can only suppose that the fault is with ourselves; our notions on the subject must be hopelessly confused. This is unfortunate, as it makes it impossible to employ the Thracian’s recipe for the cure of Charmides, but there is no help for it. (Of course, the real, as distinct from the dramatic, conclusion has already been reached in the suggestion that what is really needed for the direction of life is the knowledge of good, and that this knowledge is something quite different from any of the recognized special “sciences” or “arts.” The purpose of the dialogue is to show that serious examination of the implications of the current conceptions of sophrosyne conducts us straight to the two famous Socratic “paradoxes” of the unity of virtue and its identity with knowledge of good.)
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 B.C.), 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.
If he has picked it up for himself, as expert knowledge is often picked up, he can point to its results, he can give us examples of persons who have been made better by his influence on them (186a-b). Socrates confesses himself to be no expert, but maliciously suggests that the case may be different with the two generals. They are richer than he, and may have been able to pay “sophists” for instruction in the art of “tending the soul”; they are older and more experienced, and so may have discovered the secret for themselves
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”
Since unwise persistence, mere obstinacy, is a bad and harmful thing, whereas we certainly mean by courage something we regard as eminently good, it looks as though we might remedy the defect of our formula by saying that “wise persistence” (φρόνιμος καρτερία) is courage (192d). But the question now arises what wisdom we mean. A man may wisely calculate that by persisting in expenditure he will make a commercial profit, but we should hardly regard this as an example of courage. 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
Native fearlessness is a valuable endowment, but it is only in a human being that it can serve as a basis for the development of the loyalty to principle we call courage, and it is only in “philosophers” that this transformation of mere “pluck” into true valiancy is complete. But there is a further difficulty which Nicias has left out of account. By a “formidable thing” or “thing to be feared” we mean a future or impending evil. Now there is no science of future good and evil distinct from the science of good and evil
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 (φιλον) 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 (φιλον). 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” (φιλον), 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 φιλον, 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” (φιλον) 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.
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,
We learn from Plato (Phaedo 59b) that Hermogenes was present at the death of Socrates. Xenophon mentions him several times and professes to owe some of his information to him. He was a base-born brother of the famous, or notorious, “millionaire” Callias, son of Hipponicus, the munificent patron of “sophists” (Cratylus 391c), but himself poor, and apparently on no very good terms with his brother. 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 “dramatic date” of the conversation is hardly indicated with certainty. If we may suppose, what seems to me most likely, that the “curfew regulations” in Aegina, alluded to at 433a, were connected with the Athenian military occupation of the island in 431, this would suggest a date not too long after the beginning of the Archidamian war, when Socrates would be in the early forties, and the other two perhaps twenty years younger.
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).
The issue under consideration is thus only one aspect of the famous “sophistic” antithesis between “nature” and “social usage” which we know to have been the great controversial issue of the Periclean age. The fancy that if we can only discover the original names of things, our discovery will throw a flood of light on the realities named, seems to recur periodically in the history of human thought. There are traces of it in Heraclitus and Herodotus; in the age of Pericles it was reinforced by the vogue of allegorical interpretations of Homer, which depended largely on fanciful etymologies. Much of the dialogue is taken up by a long series of such etymologies poured forth by Socrates under what he himself declares to be “possession” by some strange personality. 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 (386d).
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.
(3) And though the shape of a κερκίς is something fixed, it will be reproduced by the carpenter in different material, according as the implement is wanted for weaving different sorts of cloth (e.g., you would need the wood to be harder for work on some kinds of material than on others). We may transfer these results to the case of the “legislator” who makes names. The letters and syllables, like the wood of the carpenter, are the material into which he has to put “the real name” (ἐκεινο ὃ ἔστιν ὄνομα). Differences in the material will not matter, in this case any more than in the other, so long as the resulting instrument answers its purpose. This is why, though the sounds of a Greek word and those of the “barbarian” equivalent may be very different, each is a true name if it discharges the function of a name adequately (389b-390a). (It should be noted that all through this passage the technical language of the doctrine of forms is used without explanation. Plato assumes that Hermogenes and Cratylus may be counted on to know all about it. To my own mind, it is just the frequency with which this assumption is made, apparently without any consciousness that it calls for any justification, which is the strongest reason for refusing to believe that the whole doctrine was “developed” by Plato or anyone else after the death of Socrates.)
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.
But, like a wise man, Socrates mixes some sense with his nonsense. Thus it is a sound principle, whatever we may think of some of the applications made of it, that proper names of men and gods are likely to have been originally significant, though their meaning has been lost through linguistic changes. It is sound sense again to say (398d) that we may often be put on the true track by considering archaic forms which are obsolete in current speech, or peculiar dialectical variants (401c). So again Socrates is quite right in calling attention to the presence of “barbarian” words in the current vocabulary (409e), though the use he makes of the fact as a convenient way out of a difficulty whenever he is at a loss is manifestly jocular (421c-d). The jocularity is even more patent when he pretends (402a) to make the sudden discovery, which he then rides to death, that the ancient names of the gods and a host of other words show that the creators of the Greek language were Heracliteans, or (409b) that the name Selene conveys the discovery, connected at Athens with the name of Anaxagoras, that the moon shines by reflected light. It is no surprise to us when, after a long interval of more serious discussion, we find him (437a ff.) expressing his doubts whether after all etymology might not be made to bear equal witness to Parmenides and his doctrine of the absolute motionlessness of the real.
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 AB.C. (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 B.C.), 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.
A date not later than about 420, and possibly a little earlier, seems to fit all the
The serious business of the dialogue is opened by Socrates in a short speech, laying down the main lines it is to follow. Clinias is a lad of great promise and illustrious connexions; it is of the first moment that he should grow up to be a thoroughly good man. The sophists are therefore invited to prove the value of their latest discovery by convincing him “that one must give one’s attention to goodness and philosophy” (275a). They fall to work at once by asking a series of questions so constructed that they can only be answered by “Yes” or “No,” and that the respondent can be equally silenced whichever answer he gives. 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.
In Zeno’s hands, the deduction of apparently contradictory conclusions from the same premisses had a legitimate object. The intention was to discredit the premisses themselves. And in fact, Zeno’s antinomies do establish the important result that the postulates of Pythagorean mathematics are incompatible with one another and require revision (e.g. it is indispensable to Pythagorean geometry that every straight
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”
to any man for the sake of wisdom; that is to say, provided that wisdom can really be taught and does not “come by accident” (ἀπὸ ταὐτομάτον), a difficult question which we have not
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
v 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.
The conversation is rapidly degenerating into mere personalities (λοιδορία) when Socrates saves the situation by repeating his former suggestion that the eminent wits from Thurii are still only engaged on the “fun” which is to introduce their serious wisdom. They need to be pressed a little more, and we shall then get at last to the earnest. 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”
On scrutiny, the “art” which seems to have the best claims to supremacy is the βασιλικὴ τέχνη, the “art of the king” i.e. statesmanship. If there is any “speciality” which can secure happiness, it should certainly be that of the man who knows how to govern and administer the community (since, of course, no one except a paradox-monger would deny that “human well-being” is what all true statesmanship takes as its end). But with this result we seem to have come round in a complete circle to the same point from which our argument set out. It is clear that statesmanship (ἡ πολιτικὴ τέχνη) is the supreme master-art; generals and other functionaries are only servants of the statesman. He uses, as means to his end—the well-being of the state—victory in war and all the other results which the generals and the rest make; and we have seen already in the Cratylus that the art which uses a product is always the master-art in relation to those which made the product. But the statesman too has something to produce; he uses the products of all the other “craftsmen” as means to producing something himself, and this something must be something beneficial, and therefore good. Now we had already satisfied ourselves that knowledge is the only thing which is unconditionally good. Hence, if statesmanship is really the art of the conduct of life, such results as wealth, civic independence, freedom from party strife, must be its mere by-products; its main product must be wisdom and goodness. Yet what wisdom and goodness does true statesmanship produce in those on whom it is exercised? It does not aim at making them all “good” shoemakers or “good” carpenters, or “good” at any other special calling. Apparently we must say that the knowledge which the art of the statesman produces in us is the knowledge of itself. But what use do we make of this knowledge of statesmanship? Perhaps its use is that it enables us to make other men good. But then we come back to the old question, “Good at what?” We seem to have reached the conclusion that happiness depends on knowing how to make other men good at knowing how to make yet other men (and so on ad indefinitum) good at knowing…no one can say precisely what (291a-292e).
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.
The extreme absurdity of the performances by which the brothers follow up the second and more important part of the “protreptic” argument are merely meant to throw that section of the dialogue into the strongest relief. The one comment it may be worthwhile to make is that the standing rule of “eristic” by which the respondent is expected to reply to each question exactly as it has been put, without raising any objection to its form or qualifying his answer by the introduction of any distinguo, however simple, of itself provides exceptional opportunity for the perpetration of every kind of “fallacy in the diction.” From this point of view much of the dialogue might be said to be a criticism of the method of question and answer as a vehicle of philosophic thought. It is clear, and Plato may have meant to hint this, that the method is the most uncertain of weapons unless the questioner combines intelligence with absolutely good faith; this is why it may be a powerful weapon of criticism in the hands of Socrates, but is nothing but an instrument of sophistry in those of a Euthydemus whose only object is to make men stare.
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 “reat 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
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
that he was among the acquaintances of
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.
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
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 |110| worst use of his oratorical skill.) But if he is “a moral man,” he will not have the wish to do wrong. At this rate, a true orator would never abuse his skill, and this seems inconsistent with the former contention that when an orator does misuse his art, the blame lies with himself and not with his teacher (457c-461b).
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 |111| of the “tending” of a thing. There is a double art of tending the body, that is, of keeping it in a state of health and fitness, and a corresponding double art of tending the soul. In the case of the body, the two arts of “tending” have no common name; they are those of “gymnastic” bodily culture (which sets up the ideal of true bodily “fitness”), and medicine (whose function it is to restore the “unfit” to health). The art of “tending” the soul has a single name; it is called πολιτική, “statesmanship”: but it also has two branches, legislation (νομοθετική), which sets the standard of spiritual health, and “justice” (or righteousness, δικαιοσύνη), which corrects and repairs disease in the soul. Each of these four is a genuine art; it aims at the good or true best condition of body or soul, and thus rests on a scientific knowledge of good and evil. The regulations of “gymnastic” and medicine are based on knowledge of what is wholesome for the body, those of the legislator and the judge on knowledge of what is wholesome for the soul. But each of the four arts has its counterfeit, and the counterfeit differs from the true art in taking as its standard the pleasant and not the good. Thus the confectioner is a counterfeit of the physician. The physician aims at prescribing the diet which will be wholesome for us, the confectioner at prescribing that which will please our palates. Now it is possible to know what diet is wholesome, but you can only discover what diet will please a man’s palate by guesses based on long acquaintance with his moods and whims, and even when you guess right, the dishes you prepare will commonly not be good for your patron.
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,
And he wishes for the end because he thinks it a good. So when we put a man to death, or banish him, or confiscate his property, we always have an ulterior end. We only do these things because we think they will be “useful” in view of that end. If the autocrat, then, is mistaken in supposing that such steps will “be for his good” if they are really bad for him, he is not doing “what he wished,” and should not be called “powerful.” (The thought is thus that every one really wishes for good, no one wishes for evil. “The object of every man’s desire is some good to himself.” To be really powerful means to be able to get good; it is weakness, not power, to “do whatever you please,” if the consequence is that you reap evil and not good (466a-469e).)
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.
And, as Polus does not deny, what is just is “fine” and therefore, as we have seen, either good or pleasant. Hence the man who is justly punished has something good done to him (since no one will suggest that he finds the punishment pleasant). He is benefited by what is done to him. We may go on to specify the nature of the benefit. 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
Callicles pushes the point “in a spirit of friendship”; Socrates is a man of admirable natural parts, but his way of life has left him at the mercy of anyone who wishes to do him a harm. If he were falsely accused on a capital charge, he would be quite incapable of making an effective defense—more’s the pity (481c-486d). Socrates professes himself delighted to have such an opponent to deal with, a man who is at once “educated,” sincere (as is shown by the fact that his professed view of the proper place of philosophy in man’s life is one which Socrates knows him to hold in common with several distinguished associates), and perfectly frank in speaking his mind without any deference to the conventions. If we can convince a man with these qualities of the soundness of our view of life, there can be no reasonable doubt of its truth. But first we must be quite clear on the point that, in the doctrine of Callicles, “better” is a mere synonym of “stronger” and “worse” of “weaker.” If this is granted, as it is, then, since “the many” are stronger than one man, their conventional usages are the usages of the stronger, that is to say, of the better, and should be regarded as the “naturally fine” (κατά φύσιν καλά). But their convention is just what Callicles has been denouncing, the convention that aggression is wrong and that to commit it is “uglier” than to suffer it. Thus the antithesis between “nature” and “convention” on which Callicles had based his argument is unsound. This, says Callicles, is mere catching at a word. He never meant by the “stronger” (κρείττους) those who are merely superior in muscle and brawn (ἰσχυρότεροι). A canaille of slaves would, at that rate, be stronger and better than the “strong man.” By the “stronger” he really meant “the wiser” (φρονιμώτεροι), the “men of parts.” “Natural right” is that “the better and wiser should rule and have the advantage over (πλέον ἔχειν) the worse” (486d-490a).
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
(Callicles thus assumes the psycho-physical theory according to which pleasure is or accompanies—the theory hardly distinguishes these alternatives—the “filling-up” or making good of a process of “depletion” in the organism, pain the process of “depletion” itself. The doctrine is familiar to us from Plato’s acceptance of it, so far as the satisfaction of physical appetites are concerned, in the Republic and Philebus, and Aristotle’s vigorous polemic against it in the Nicomachean Ethics. Plato rejects it, except for these cases, and the rejection of it is the basis of the important distinction of the Philebus between “pure” or “neat” and “mixed” pleasures. It is taught more unreservedly by the Pythagorean Timaeus at Timaeus 64a-65b, and we see from Aristotle’s polemic that it was fully accepted by Speusippus and the extreme anti-Hedonists of the Academy. Its origin is pretty clearly to be found in the medical doctrine of Alcmaeon, according to which all disease is disturbance of the state of ισονομία (“constitutional balance”) between the hot, the cold, the moist, and the dry in the organism. 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)?
“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).
If you want to avoid being wronged, you must either be an “autocrat” or a friend of the sovereign body, whatever it may be (ἑταιρος της ὑπαρχούσης πολιτείας, 510a). In an autocracy this means that you must be a “creature” of the autocrat; in a democracy, like Athens, you must make yourself a favourite with your “master” the populace, and conform yourself to its moods and prejudices. In neither case have you secured yourself against the greater evil of committing wrong. On the contrary, to be a favourite with either autocrat or populace you must sink to their moral level and sympathize with their injustices. Callicles thinks this only sensible, for the “leviathan” will kill you if you do not humor it. But this plea rests on the assumption that life at any cost and on any terms is supremely desirable, even at the cost of moral corruption. It amounts to basing the high claims made for rhetoric on the view that rhetoric is an art of saving your skin. No doubt it is; the politician is constantly saving his skin by his plausible speech. But swimming
“The truth is that 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”
On the hypothesis, then, our fitness for the statesman’s calling depends on our possession of a science (ἐπιστήμη), in fact, on our knowledge of moral values. Now an expert can establish his claim to be an expert in two ways: (a) by pointing out the master from whom he has learned his knowledge, (b) by pointing to the results in which his knowledge has been embodied. If a man can satisfy neither of these tests, we cannot take his claims to be an expert seriously. 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).
To call them statesmen is like calling a confectioner or a fancy baker a specialist in hygiene and medicine; it is to compare a subordinate “art,” which makes things, with the master-art which “uses” them aright (517e-518c). If a man made that confusion, his cooks and confectioners would soon ruin his constitution, and he would lay the blame for his want of wholesome appetite on the inferiority of his present cook as compared with his old one. 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 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 B.C. (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 dialogue opens with an abruptness hardly to be paralleled elsewhere in the genuine work of Plato by the direct propounding of a theme for discussion; there are not even the ordinary formalities of salutation. May we argue that this indicates that its composition belongs to the very earliest years of Plato’s literary activity? This would be an important consideration, since, as no one denies, the whole characteristic metaphysics of the Phaedo, the theory of forms and the doctrine of “reminiscence” are explicitly taught in the Meno. In any case there ought to be no doubt that the Meno is a cruder and earlier work than either of the two great dramatic dialogues with which it is most intimately connected, the Phaedo and the Protagoras, and this of itself would be enough to prove that the Phaedo is not, as has been supposed, a first publication of an important philosophical discovery.
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
There is a single “pattern” of health (ἓν πανταχοὖ εἰδος) in all healthy beings, and similarly with strength. So, since we can speak of a good man and of a good woman, there must be some one “pattern” of goodness in man and woman, young and old. (In the language of today, “goodness” must be a determinable, of which the “goodness of a man” the “goodness of a woman” and the rest are the determinants.) 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.
Assuming this theory, we may say that colour is “an efflux from surfaces which fits into the passages of the visual apparatus and is sensible” (ἀπορροὴ σχημάτων ὄψει σύμμετρος καὶ αἰσθητός), a definition which Meno thinks
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.
The point insisted on is that the lad starts with a false proposition, is led to replace it by one less erroneous, and finally by one which, so far as it goes, is true. Yet Socrates has “told” him nothing. He has merely drawn diagrams which suggest the right answers to a series of questions. The only “information” he has imparted to the slave is that a certain line is technically called by “the sophists,” i.e. “professionals,” a “diagonal.” Everything else has been left to the boy to think out for himself in response to the suggestions provided by Socrates’ diagrams and questions. 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 that ἀρετή = virtue is a good thing. (No question arises of a “justification” of this ὑπόθεσις hypόthesis, 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.
Yet, on second thoughts, we may see reason to distrust our identification of goodness with knowledge. If it were knowledge, surely there would be professional teachers of it and they would have “pupils.” But there does not appear to be any such “profession.” It is lucky for us that Anytus has just taken a seat by our side at this point of the conversation. He is the son of a worthy citizen who made a fortune by steady intelligence and industry; the popular judgment is clearly that he has had an excellent early training and education, as is shown by his repeated election to high offices. His opinion on the question whether there are “teachers of goodness” ought therefore to be highly valuable (89b-90b).
(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
To sum up, then: goodness is neither inborn nor yet learned from teachers, but arises from a happy irrational “divine possession” (θείᾳ μοίρᾳ ἄνευ νου), unless, indeed, there could arise a statesman who could teach statesmanship to others. His “goodness” would be to that of other men what substance is to shadow. We must, however, remember that our conclusion is tentative; we cannot say with certainty how goodness arises until we have answered the still outstanding question what it is. In the meanwhile Meno would be doing Athens a service if he could make Anytus more sympathetic with our point of view (99e-100c).
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.
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 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.
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 {an 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 θειον = 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.
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.
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 B.C.) 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.)
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Alfred Edward Taylor1869–1945
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.
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
References
“Aeschines’ speech against Timarchus,” Perseus Digital Library, November 25, 2017.
Taylor, Alfred E. Plato: The Man and His Work. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1955.