4
ACCOUNT (see Logos)
AESTHETICS
Eugenio Benitez
Many of Plato’s dialogues explicitly discuss matters that today fall under the umbrella of aesthetics. Literary criticism occupies a prominent place in the Ion, Menexenus, Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus and Laws. Arguments about the standard of aesthetic judgement occupy most of the Hippias Major, as well as portions of the Smp. and the second book of the Lg. Some dialogues even venture into territory that we might describe as ‘pure aesthetics’, in that they discuss specific perceptible properties of form, colour or sound (Hp. Ma. 298 ff.; Philebus 51c), the manner by which art objects appear as they do to spectators (Sophist 236a), the characteristics of an artwork purely in terms of art (Lg. 667d) or the ontological status of art objects (R. 596a ff.). A few dialogues incidentally discuss painting, sculpture or music (narrowly construed), by way of illustrating a more general topic (R. 472d ff.; Phlb. 17d; Critias 107b), and some dialogues, such as the Gorgias and Timaeus, delineate or at least prominently display the aims, conditions and principles of art (technê, q.v.). Thus it can be said that aesthetic themes are prominent throughout the works of Plato. There are two dimensions of Plato’s aesthetics, however, that are arguably more fundamental to his philosophy than any of the specific themes just mentioned. They are the dimensions of mimêsis (q.v.), or representation, and the dimension of mousikê, or ‘music’ in the broad sense that includes all the arts (q.v. music). When these are taken into consideration it becomes plain that aesthetics is not just prominent in, but central to Plato’s thought.
According to several dialogues, all writing, and indeed all art, is a form of mimêsis (e.g. Criti. 107b; Lg. 668b). It is not always appreciated how comprehensive this claim is for Plato. It includes even philosophical writing, which is admitted to be a form of poetry (Lg. 817a), and so it applies both to the dialogues themselves (811c), and to their function (Phdr. 276d). We should therefore expect that Plato’s dialogues are composed according to their own explicit ideas about aesthetic representation. The most important of these ideas is the distinction drawn in the Sph. between two ways that an image might represent its original. One way is by really being like the original. Such images are called ‘likenesses’ (Sph. 235d6). Another way is by seeming, but not really being like the original. Such images are called ‘phantasms’ (236c3). To be genuinely philosophical, the dialogues must attain the standard of likenesses. Yet, even if the dialogues attain that standard, they remain distinct from their originals. The inability of an artwork ever to copy its original perfectly has implications for the interpretation of Plato in general, since it seems unlikely, based on the aesthetics of original and image, that Plato would ever suppose that his dialogues stated the truth simply and exactly. The best they might do is to disclose truth to one who could see them from the right perspective. On this view, doctrine would be avoided in preference of a variety of convergent likenesses.
There is an even more comprehensive implication of the view that all art is mimêtic. In the Ti., we are told that the world itself is a work of art, that it is in fact ‘a moving image of eternity’ (Ti. 37d5). Because the relationship of the world to eternity is one of likeness, the status of the world as image implies that the appearance–reality distinction is, for Plato, an aesthetic one. Reality does not underlie the appearances like some sort of primary substance; it is represented in them, as in a work of art. On this view there is not any fundamental difference between the way one discovers reality through art or through natural science – in either case one is finding the real in a reflection. As a result, musical skills (in the broad sense) become an all-inclusive conduit to reality. Music, when genuinely harmonious, provides the pattern for discovering anything true. In this sense all music is philosophical, and philosophy is ‘the greatest music’ (Phaedo 61a3).
Once we see that for Plato all disclosure occurs by means of images, we can better understand his deep concerns about music and musical education. Music is for him not merely cultural study, it is a matter of ontology. As the Athenian Stranger puts it, ‘anyone who would not err about a poem must recognise what it is (hoti pot’ esti); he must recognise its reality (ousian) – what it wants to be and what it is really a likeness of (ti pote bouletai kai hotou pot estin eikôn ontôs, Lg. 668c4–7)’. The skills basic to education in the arts are the very same skills that appear in more developed form in the philosopher. In that case images that fail to resemble how things really are, in particular images that present an attractive but skewed perspective of things, are not only deceptive but mentally distorting. They warp mental processes so that it becomes hard to see correctly. A child whose mental processes were warped by long exposure to distortions would have difficulty in acquiring the skill to see what is reflected in images (cf. Lg. 653a–c). An adult whose mental processes were so distorted would be like someone chained to the way of mistake (cf. R. 514a).
Fortunately, thinks Plato, the intellectual appeal of beauty, symmetry and truth far outweigh the hedonistic attractions of a false perspective (Phlb. 65b–e). Moreover, the natural desire for all things beautiful is capable of being trained and focused (Smp. 210a ff.). Anyone who has once caught a glimpse of what is truly fair will be eager to behold it again. That is the motivation to philosophy. Considered from the point of view of beauty and symmetry, it seems like a fundamentally aesthetic motivation. Considered from the point of view of truth, it seems like a fundamentally epistemological motivation. At the deepest level, however, it is nothing more than a motivation for the good (R. 504e).
AKRASIA (INCONTINENCE, WEAKNESS OF WILL)
Daniel C. Russell
Although Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics VII) made akrasia the standard term in ancient (and modern) discussions of acting against one’s better judgement, Plato more often writes of doing wrong willingly or knowingly (hekôn) as opposed to doing so unwillingly or unknowingly (akôn). Like Aristotle, though, Plato recognized a problem in explaining how such a thing is possible.
Plato characterizes akrasia (or rather akrateia, as he calls it at Timaeus 86d) as voluntarily acting badly against one’s better judgement due to being overcome by a desire, despite being able to do otherwise. Consider someone who voluntarily overeats despite meaning to stick to a diet. One might characterize his behaviour as akratic – a breakdown between judgement and choice – and then explain how such breakdowns occur. Alternatively, perhaps this characterization is mistaken and the behaviour should be explained in some other way. Plato appears to have taken each of these approaches in different places.
In some dialogues Plato rejects the possibility of akrasia on the grounds that there is no opposition between such motivating forces as practical reason and desire (q.v.). In the Protagoras, Socrates puts forward the thesis that no one does wrong wittingly. Whereas most people think that knowledge is often ‘dragged around’ by desire ‘as if it were a slave’, Socrates suggests that ‘knowledge is a fine thing capable of ruling a person’ and that ‘if someone were to know what is good and bad, then he would not be forced by anything to act otherwise than knowledge dictates’ (Prt. 352c). Socrates’ argument for this thesis focuses on pleasure: what we desire is pleasure, and to judge that something is better or worse is to judge that it is more pleasant or less pleasant, respectively; so since practical reason (in the form of either knowledge or belief, 358b–c) and desire have the same targets, they do not oppose each other. Apparent cases of akrasia must really be cases of ignorance that one is doing the worse thing.
Since desire has the same target as practical reason, desire must always seek what is good, that is, beneficial for one. That is, no one does wrong willingly:
Now, no one goes willingly toward the bad or what he believes to be bad; neither is it in human nature, so it seems, to desire to go toward what one believes to be bad instead of to the good. And when he is forced to choose between one of two bad things, no one will choose the greater if he is able to choose the lesser. (358d)
Earlier in Prt. Socrates declared it ‘uneducated’ to suppose ‘that any human being willingly makes a mistake or willingly does anything wrong or bad’; rather, educated persons know ‘very well that anyone who does anything wrong or bad does so involuntarily’ (345d–e). Similarly, in Meno (77a–8a) Socrates argues that if people did bad things knowing them to be bad, then they would know that such things were harmful for them and thus would make them miserable and unhappy. But since nobody desires to be miserable and unhappy, anyone who desires what is in fact bad must mistakenly believe that that thing is beneficial for him. Likewise, responding to Callicles who espouses akrasia in Gorgias, Socrates says that ‘no one does what’s unjust because he desires to’, but that ‘all who do so do it unwillingly’ (Grg. 509e). This, he says, is because we desire to do only those things that benefit us: ‘when one desires some act for the sake of some end, that end must be something beneficial for one, since when one learns that an act would be harmful for one, one stops desiring it’ (467c–8c). The denial of akrasia – often called the ‘Socratic paradox’ – rests on the idea that what desire seeks is also what practical reason seeks, so that there can be no opposition between them.
Elsewhere, however, Plato argues that desire does not seek what practical reason seeks. In Republic, Socrates famously divides the soul (q.v.) into ‘reason’, ‘spirit’ and ‘appetite’, and argues that whereas reason and spirit seek what is beneficial, appetite (not distinguished from desire) does not (R. 437b–41c). Indeed, Socrates compares spirit and reason to a lion and a tamer united against appetite, depicted as a hydra (588b–90d). On this view, one can desire to do what one judges to be bad, as when Leontius succumbed to a desire to look at corpses (439e–40b). Likewise, in Phaedrus (237d–8c) Plato depicts reason as a charioteer with one noble and obedient horse (spirit) and one ugly, disobedient horse (appetite/desire) that is deaf to reason and occasionally gets its way. And in Sophist, Plato distinguishes going wrong out of ignorance from going wrong out of vice, that is, a ‘discord’ between ‘beliefs and desires, anger and pleasures, reason and pains’ (Sph. 228b). In these dialogues, apparently one can desire what reason judges to be bad for one, making akrasia possible.
However, in yet other dialogues Plato seems to hold both that akrasia is possible and that no one does wrong willingly. In Laws, the Athenian says that there can be discord between one’s ‘feelings of pleasure and pain and [one’s] rational judgment’ (Lg. 689a), and that while some people are ‘immoderate’ due to ignorance, some are so due to ‘lack of self-control’ (734b). (Although 644d–5b also seems to suggest that the soul is divided into parts, Bobonich 1994 has challenged this; see Gerson 2003 for a reply.) Yet the Athenian also says that ‘every unjust man is unjust against his will’, since no one willingly embraces things that are harmful for him in his ‘most precious part’ (731c; see also 860d–4c; Philebus 22b). The Athenian brings these two thoughts together by saying that succumbing to akrasia is succumbing to doing what one does not really desire to do (Lg. 863d–e; see also Clitomachus 407d). But this is puzzling: if to act against practical reason is to do what one does not really desire to do, then how can desire also lead one to act against practical reason?
Some help may come from Ti., where it is said that a corrupted person has excessive desires but is not willingly in such a condition (Ti. 86b–7b). Perhaps Plato’s thought is that in its uncorrupted condition desire seeks what practical reason seeks, and that ‘willingly’ must be understood in terms of desire in its uncorrupted condition. So akrasia is the result of a corrupted condition, which is bad for one, and no one is ‘willingly’ in that corrupt condition. Moreover, since wrongdoing is bad for the one who does it, it follows that no one does wrong ‘willingly’.
Many scholars believe that Plato denied the possibility of akrasia (when he did) on the grounds that desire is a species of practical reason (e.g. Penner 1991), a view often called ‘Socratic intellectualism’; but there is no consensus on this point (e.g. Brickhouse and Smith 2007; Devereux 1995). Moreover, the apparent shifts in Plato’s thinking on akrasia and the nature of the soul have been central to modern debates about the unity (or otherwise) of Plato’s philosophy across his career (e.g. Annas 1999:ch. 6; Vlastos 1991a:48, 86–91).
ANTILOGY AND ERISTICS (ERISTIC)
Menahem Luz
Antilogy (antilogia) is an ancient concept mentioned as early as Herodotus (VIII.77, IX.88) and etymologically corresponding to the English term ‘contradiction’ (anti = contra, logia = diction), but broader in scope with a secondary meaning of ‘dispute’ or ‘gainsay’ where no formal contradiction is implied. Although the art of antilogical contradiction (antilogikê technê) was occasionally employed by Socrates in order to disprove a mistaken opinion (Theaetetus 197a), the art of ‘antilogy and disputation’ was chiefly employed in competitions for profit by the sophists as part of their art of eristic (Sophist 226a).
The word Eristics is derived from the term ‘rivalry’ (eris) since the sophists competed against one another or a prospective client in disputation (Lysis 211b) employing any verbal trick or captious ‘sophism’ even if reached through false assumptions as exemplified throughout Plato’s Euthd. (Kneale and Kneale 1964:12–15). Plato thus did not regard eristic ‘rivalry’ as serious philosophy but ‘a game’ in disputation (Sph. 237b–c) – that is, argument for argument’s sake – and employing antilogy for this purpose (216a, 232b). Although there are many cases where antilogy and eristics should be distinguished (Kerferd 1989:62–5), antilogical eristics were also employed as part of a sophist’s training in order to enhance expertise in the art of persuasion. They were also employed in public rhetorical displays (epideixeis), in which a sophist would give a public lecture contradicting or disputing conventionally accepted norms – for example, Gorgias’ Encomium to Helen defends the immorality of Helen of Troy. Since the search for the truth was often secondary to the art of persuasion in antilogical eristics, the conclusions were often based on an ambiguous, if not on a relativistic, understanding of the goals of philosophy (Guthrie 1971a:176–81). Although many scholars have followed the ancients in denigrating Eristics, some have considered it and antilogy more objectively as the first tentative steps towards logical thinking (Kneale and Kneale 1964:12).
The relativistic sophist Protagoras was said to have been the first to develop antilogy as a principle of argumentation: ‘there are two arguments (logoi) on every theme contraposed (antikeimenoi) to each other’ (D. L. 9.51.13–5). This was probably discussed in his lost work: ‘Antilogies vols.1, 2’ (54.19; cf. 9.38) and a surviving text of his school reads:
There are two logoi cited by the philosophers in Greece concerning the good and bad, for some claim that the good is one thing and the bad another while others [claim] that they are the same thing for something is good for some but bad for others – and even for the same person it is sometimes good and sometimes bad. (Dissoi Logoi 2.90.1.1)
In this quotation from the Dissoi Logoi not only are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ relative, but even the arguments for and against this claim are relative in that they comprise two logoi in the form of an antilogy. Plato later criticized the sophists who wasted their time in ‘antilogical arguments (logoi)’ in that they lacked ‘the art of logos’ to distinguish between truth and the falsehood (Phaedo 90b–c; cf. 101e). Since Protagoras maintained that the individual is the sole ‘measure’ of truth not only for the phenomena but also for the truth of a logos or its antilogos, the decision on which of them is to become the accepted norm depended on a speaker’s power of persuasion rather than the objective truth of his arguments (D. L. 9.51.14–16). While Protagoras might contradict (antilegei) accepted social norms and logoi by democratic persuasion, an extreme sophist like Thrasymachus would use antilogical eristic to justify tyranny through the use of fallacy and ambiguous argument (Republic 343b–4c). The antilogical method was also used in eristic exercise whereby rival students vied with each other to justify the case of either one of the two antilogies. However, as early as Plato (Phaedrus 261d–e), it was also used in forensic training, juridical theory (one must hear both sides prior to judgement) and later in sceptical enquiry (for every logos there is an antilogos).
Conservatives like Aristophanes (Clouds 889–1104) and philosophers in the Socratic circle viewed this relative and nonnormative approach as undermining belief in logoi that supported accepted morality since in their view only one of the two antilogies could be true by nature or reason at any one time. Nonetheless, it has been claimed that Socrates’ method of dialectic refutation (elenchus; q.v.) can be seen to be derived from the antilogical methods of the sophists in that he too sought for inconsistencies in the arguments of his conversants (Gulley 1968:31).
A method of countering the Sophists was formulated by Antisthenes (q.v. Other Socratics) that each definition and statement (logos) can denote only one thing (e.g. ‘gold is gold’) and statements in other terms (e.g. ‘gold is a yellow metal’) are contradictions referring gold to something else (Luz 2000:92). Thus, Antisthenes concluded that it is impossible to contradict (antilegein) since each logos refers to a separate entity. Plato recognized that the art of contradiction (antilogikê technê) can intrude itself into serious dialectic as well as false eristic especially when the conversants make generalizations that do not distinguish between the different species of subject (R. 454a–b). Besides Plato’s criticism of sophistic contradiction (antilogikos) as having no part in true philosophy (Tht. 164c–d), he also includes philosophical questioning that contradicts the opponents’ conclusions rather than their hypotheses (Sph. 225b–d). This has been plausibly interpreted as a reference to Euclides’ Megarian school (Cornford 1964:176–7) where antilogical paradox was employed precisely for this purpose.
Like Plato, who incorporated the principle of antilogies into his method of diairesis (q.v. Method) whereby each species could be divided into a class that is like and unlike, Aristotle’s early logical work ‘On the Opposites’ (peri enantion) established that it is not contrasting (antikeimena) subjects that are syllogies (e.g. wisdom and ignorance) but their definitions that are (Ross 1970:108, f. 3). This however was to be replaced by his doctrine in the Categories where substance has no opposite itself and while the other categories (quality, quantity, etc.) may contain opposites (black and white, heavy and light) they are not opposites in themselves. Just as he treated the examination of sophistic rhetoric in an objective, nonmoralizing way, so Aristotle turned to sophistries, eristics and antilogies in his work Sophistical Refutations, where he drew the distinction between different forms of logical reasoning (‘syllogism’), for reasoning can be either true or false, but it is the duty of the true reason not only to prove something but also to refute false reasoning (Sophistical Refutations 176b29–31). In the Topics, Aristotle carefully worked out rules by which the dialectical syllogism can avoid this and confute the antilogy (Topics 105a:18–19). His answer to the Protagorean antilogy (Metaphysics 4; 1011b23–24) is found in his principle of the Law of the Excluded Middle (metaxu antiphaseos): it is impossible to maintain (phanai) and contradict (apophanai) the same thing in the same relationship at the same time (Metaphysics 4; 1005b.19–20, 26–34n). However, he did find a use for antilogies in Metaphysics 2: in order to understand a problem we have to list all of its quandaries (aporiai) and arguments pro et contra. There he set forth 14 quandaries of metaphysics, each by thesis and antithesis, but strictly avoided any formal solution for either side. Aristotle, however, did not believe that each thesis and antithesis had equal weight in the end, but that we must attain positive knowledge of a subject by weighing both sides beforehand. In this way he clears the table for his positive apodeictic discussion of metaphysics in the following books. Without the antitheses of bk 2 we would not know which arguments to set aside.
APPEARANCE AND REALITY (REALITY)
Christopher Moore
Plato’s dialogues prompt reflection on at least four related questions about reality. Ethical: how does living well take apprehending what is real? Epistemological: in what ways does apprehending what is real differ from believing what is merely apparent? Metaphysical: what does accepting a distinction between reality and appearance mean for the nature of things? Methodological: by what means might one come to know what is real?
Plato’s characters distinguish diverse kinds of appearances from reality:
•eikos: ‘plausible’, ‘probable’, ‘reasonable’; what is persuasive in a speech, in contrast to what is true (alêtheia)
•doxa: a ‘belief’, an ‘opinion’, a ‘thought’; what seems (dokein) so to someone, in contrast to what really is the case, for example, knowledge (epistêmê) or understanding (nous)
•ta legomena: ‘things said’; what a community of speakers accepts (compare muthoi), in contrast to what really is so
•to phainomenon: ‘what appears so’; how things received by the senses (aisthêseis) are perceived or thought about, in contrast to what is or exists (to einai)
•to mê on: ‘what is not’; what some people mistake for what really exists (to on)
•to genomenos: ‘what comes to be’; what changes and has changing appearances, in contrast to whatever is unchanging (and may be invisible)
•dream-appearances, shadows, reflections, paintings and mimêtic activity
(I) ETHICS
In the dialogues, understanding a virtue may start in, but cannot stop at, specifying either those people who appear to exemplify that virtue or those sets of traits which seem typical of those people who exemplify that virtue. Many of Plato’s characters come to accept that understanding a virtue requires proposing an abstract definition and then testing it against counter-examples. That the reality of a virtue or some other object of moral reflection may be discovered through conceptual analysis seems likely to be a cultural presupposition preceding Socrates but elaborated by Plato’s Socrates.
People act on their thoughts about their moral obligations, circumstances and resources, but their thoughts may not reflect reality. Protagoras sees himself as a completely capable educator; Crito worries he will be seen as a shameful friend. Yet the dialogues suggest that they fail to know what they really can, and thus ought, to do. They lack self-knowledge (q.v.). This has bad consequences for their students, the city (Phaedrus 277e1–3), their associates (Theaetetus 201c) and themselves, either at present or hereafter (Gorgias 524d).
Rather than emphasizing the ‘depth’ of self-knowledge when writing about getting to the reality of one’s nature, Plato uses the tropes of matching inward with outward (Phdr. 279b9; Symposium 215b), comparing oneself to ideals (Phdr. 230a), working with others (Alcibiades 1 133b) and being able to say what one means (Laches 194b).
(II) EPISTEMOLOGY
The myth of the cave (q.v.) in Republic bk 7 suggests that what we now accept as real we may later reject as mere shadow, reflection or image. The myth does not tell us how to assess the match between our beliefs and the world. But bk 1 depicts refutative exchange, the revelation of beliefs and their (inconsistent) consequences to show that some of what one thought cannot be true. Bks 2–3 and 10 dwell on the effects of attending to imitations of reality (mimêsis) (cf. Sophist 267e1; Grg. 462b–5d). Bk 6’s divided line image (q.v.) gives a symbol of the distinction between reflections, material objects, hypothetical knowledge and grounded knowledge. Bk 7’s system of education identifies the way a person might become practised at acquiring knowledge of immutable things (universal forms), particularly through mathematics and deliberate conversation.
The Tht. discusses the nature of knowledge, in particular how to distinguish it from (mere) perception, (mere) true belief and (mere) true belief with an account, but does not conclude with any explicit agreement about what makes our apprehension of reality distinctive (Burnyeat 1990).
(III) METAPHYSICS
Degree of reality seems proportional to explanatory scope: whatever most explains the order of the universe is the most real; how things appear to us is less real (though not entirely unreal).
In the Tht., Socrates impersonates a Protagoras who argues that the world is just as it seems to each of its perceivers. The bulk of the dialogue goes to undermine (some version) of this relativistic thesis, thus supporting the view that something constant underlies everyone’s perceptions. Talk about appearance or seeming or opinion makes sense only against an assumption that there is something more real.
It is traditional to call Plato, in contrast to Aristotle, an idealist, someone who suspects or is committed to the belief that the really real is not the changing particulars but something imperceptible, immutable and intelligible. While Plato likely did not pioneer distinguishing between appearance and reality with ‘form’ (eidos, idea) language, his dialogues did draw implications from such talk. It may be impossible to articulate a theory of forms from these dialogues, either because Plato did not have one; or if he did, did not use the dialogues to set out and defend it, or because his views changed over time. Nevertheless, the dialogues might show the value of thinking about what could explain how the world seems to us (Moravscik 1992; Thesleff 1999).
(IV) METHODOLOGY
In the Ion, Socrates wonders how Ion could know what Homer really thought. Socrates suggests he has no rational skill but is served instead by ‘inspiration’ (q.v.). Whether Plato believes any aspect of reality could be apprehended via inspiration, prophecy or direct intuition, is hard to say, but it is doubtful he thinks such means could verify their own accuracy.
What seems clearer is that in that dialogue Socrates removes the appearance of Ion’s great wisdom and reveals that Ion really just has a knack with Homeriana. Socrates finds this out by asking Ion questions (erôtesis), examining the things he says (exetasis), and refuting him (elenchos). These three revelatory activities Socrates together calls ‘philosophizing’ (Ap. 29de). What Plato thinks this kind of talking can establish is uncertain.
The dialogues offer many more candidate methods (q.v.) for discovering reality amid appearances. One might remember what the wise have said (Men. 81a5; Phdr. 260a5–6), study with those who know (Lg. 186c–d), run deductions (Phdr. 245c6–6a2), look at a diagram (Men. 82b9), hypothesize (Men. 86e7–7b7; Phd. 100a3–8; Parmenides 136a1–2) and practise dividing and collecting (Sph. 218c; Phdr. 277b5–9). The R. appears to encourage ‘dialectic’ (q.v.) as a way to knowing how things really are (R. 454a, 511b–c), though it is not clear what this term means beyond deliberate, reasonable and sustained examination (cf. Prm. 135c2). To be a philosopher on the model of Socrates involves trying to live on the basis of good reasons, reasons based in what is real and true, on facts and valid inference. (It is debatable whether the other philosophers in Plato’s dialogues stand for this.) Many of our reasons are good, but our accepting them is insufficient reason for continuing to accept them. Yet, deciding which to keep involves a conceptual difficulty. Since beliefs are checked only against other beliefs – our resource is always what seems so to us (Tht. 171d3–5) – we may seem caught in a web of appearances. Plato’s Socrates seems to have responded by (tentatively) taking as real those theses that survived continuous testing. Plato may further have thought that mathematics or similar practises could reveal significant parts of reality, though which parts, and with what significance, remains a difficult question.
APPETITE (see Desire)
ARGUMENT (see Logos)
ART (TECHNÊ)
David Roochnik
Technê, typically translated as ‘art’, ‘expertise’, ‘craft’ or ‘skill’, is a word used widely and with great significance in Plato’s early dialogues, for example consider Laches 184e–5e. Here Socrates is faced with the question of how to educate a young man in ‘virtue’ or ‘excellence’ (aretê). He insists that only ‘an expert’, someone who is technikos (La. 185a1) – that is, has mastered a technê – in the matter under deliberation is qualified to provide an answer. To convince his interlocutors that this is the case he deploys an analogy: if one wished to know what physical exercise the boy should practise in order to develop an excellent body, he would consult an expert or technical ‘trainer’ (paidotribê:184e3). In an analogous fashion, when the question concerns the excellence of the young men, someone who is ‘expert (technikos) in the care (therapeian) of the soul (psuchê)’ (185e4) is required.
Apology 20a–c presents a second example. If, Socrates argues, Callias’ two sons were colts, he would hire an experienced, well-trained and well-regarded professional to supervise their upbringing, for only such an expert would be able to cultivate the excellence ‘appropriate’ (prosêkousan:Ap. 20b1) to horses. His sons are young men but no less, Socrates suggests, do they require someone ‘knowledgeable’ (epistêmôn:20b5) to educate them in their specific excellence; namely, in ‘human and political excellence’ (20b4–5). Again, the analogy is manifest: as the technical horse trainer is to the excellence of colts, so the technical educator is to the excellence appropriate to young men.
Since an ‘expert’, or technitês, has mastered his subject thoroughly, his knowledge can be readily identified. He can, in many cases, simply point to the results of his work to give evidence of his skill. For example, after months of training by someone knowledgeable in hippikê, the technê of horsemanship, the young colt will be visibly improved. For this reason its owner is willing to pay the expert horse trainer for his services. (Indeed, at times ‘technitês’ can even be translated as ‘professional’.) In general, it is reasonable for ‘laymen’ (idioteis) who are not knowledgeable in the field – and every technê has a specific or determinate field – to defer to the expert’s judgements. Even though the colt belongs to a wealthy aristocrat, its owner, if he truly wants an excellent horse, will rigorously follow the regimen prescribed by the horse trainer.
With this in mind, consider the consequences of a strict reading of Socrates’ use of the technê-analogy. On the simplest level, if there were a technitês in human excellence then the endeavour to live a good life would become a question that could be answered, a problem that could be solved. Second, if the analogy holds strictly, it would be reasonable for other human beings to subordinate themselves to the one who possesses such answers: to what Jenks calls the ‘moral expert’ (Jenks 2008:xv). As a result, it is arguable that there is a direct connection between Socrates’ use of the technê-analogy in the early dialogues and the political authoritarianism that he seems to defend in the Republic where ‘philosopher-kings’ are firmly in control of the lives of the citizens. In other words, a political implication of a strict reading of the analogy is that it becomes reasonable for citizens to obey an epistemically authoritative ruler.
Many scholars such as Parry (1996) read Socrates’ use of the technê-analogy in this fashion. In other words, they take technê to be a positive model for Plato’s early attempt to develop a moral theory. (See Irwin 1977a:71–5 for a clear summary of this position.) For at least three related reasons this view must be challenged. First and most generally, the notion of a ‘moral expert’ implied by a positive reading of the analogy conflicts with the aporetic or interrogative character of so many of Socrates’ dialogues. Second, if it is the case that as the horse trainer is to horses, so the expert in human virtue is to human beings, then human aretê must, like the specific excellence of horses, be a determinate epistemic object. It must constitute a bounded conceptual field that can be thoroughly mastered. Again, the aporetic character of the dialogues should call this into question. Third, if the field of expertise is, as the La. passage cited above suggests, the human soul, then the psuchê must also be determinate, for it must be capable of becoming a subject matter of an expert’s technê. It is arguable on the basis of a reading of the Symposium such as that presented in Hyland (2008:39–41), for example, that the psuchê is not such an object. As a result, a strict reading of the analogy becomes problematic.
The above does not imply that the analogy is without philosophical significance. Instead, it suggests that it should be read as quite limited. Virtue may indeed be analogous to technê but only in the minimal sense of being some kind of knowledge, even if not a technical one. In fact, it is conceivable, as Roochnik (1996) argues, that Plato has Socrates deploy the analogy precisely to develop a conception of virtue as non-technical knowledge. To clarify, consider Vlastos’s distinction between ‘knowledgec’, a rigorous form of knowledge whose hallmark is ‘infallible certainty’ (Vlastos 1985:14) and ‘knowledgee’ (Vlastos 1985:15), ‘elenctic knowledge’ that Socrates derives through his familiar argumentative strategies. Even though it does not invoke the technê model this distinction is useful. The ‘elenctic knowledge’ Socrates both encourages and may even possess is not strictly technical. Instead, it emerges only from dialogue with others.
BEAUTY (KALON)
Gabriel Richardson Lear
The notion of beauty (to kalon) is surprisingly pervasive in Plato’s dialogues (ugly = aischron). Whereas modern philosophers tend to treat beauty as the special concern of aesthetics, Plato finds a significant role for it in his metaphysics, cosmology, epistemology and ethics. For example, Socrates argues that beauty, along with proportion and truth, is the cause of the good life and, more generally, of good mixtures (Philebus 65a). The beauty of the cosmos (q.v.) marks it as formed in the image of eternal models (Timaeus 28a–9a). Love of genuinely beautiful poetry and people is a necessary, or at least useful, preliminary for the development of reason (Republic 401d–2b). Erotic experience of a beautiful body can turn one’s life towards the pursuit of wisdom (Symposium 210a–12a; Phaedrus 250d–6e). And all the interlocutors assume that virtue is kalon, including the great amoralist Callicles, who is presented as claiming against Socrates that pleonectic power is more genuinely kalon – and thus more truly virtuous – than the traditional moral virtues (Gorgias 482c–6d, 508c–e; cf. Sophist 228e, 230d–e). Plato does assume that good art will be kalon (R. 377b, 401c; Laws 668a, 669a) and establishes a criteria of poetic beauty, but he does not make the modern assumption that art provides an especially pure or philosophically illuminating case of the experience of beauty. That experience in Plato’s view is the experience of love (q.v.).
The Greek term kalon can be translated by a number of English words: beautiful, fine, admirable, noble and good. In its adverbial form, kalôs, it is typically used as the equivalent of the adverbial form of agathos (good). Some scholars doubt that Plato’s discussion of the kalon really concerns beauty at all, especially in moral contexts (Irwin 1979:154). But although the two concepts are not exactly the same (Kosman 2010), it is unlikely that Plato’s kalon is simply the praiseworthy in general, only sometimes referring to what is admirable in a specifically aesthetic way (i.e. by eliciting a special sort of pleasure in an observer). For example, Plato often has characters assert that things are kalon when their parts are well-proportioned, harmonious and measured (Phlb. 64e; R. 402d; Sph. 228a, 235e–6a; Ti. 30c, 87c–8c). This analysis coincides with one traditional account of beauty. Furthermore, he emphasizes the way we are ‘struck all of a sudden’ by kala people and ideas, suggesting that the kalon is distinguished in part by the way it affects our receptivity (Smp. 210e; Phdr. 250b–d). The kalon forces itself on our awareness, either through our eyes or on the mind. Since this experience of being struck is vital to Plato’s story of how erôs can be channelled into a process of intellectual development – the kalon object of love is, at each stage, a ‘summoner’ of philosophical thought (Ferrari 1987:144–6) – we should take care not to disown the kalon’s kinship with beauty in this respect.
In the R. Socrates claims that the form of the good (q.v.) is the cause of ‘all that is correct and beautiful in anything’ (R. 517c; cf. 452e; Ti. 30a). If this were true, it would justify his claim that all beautiful things are good (Alc. 1 115a–16c; Meno 77b; Protagoras 358b; for the converse, that all good things are beautiful: Lysis 216d; Smp. 201c, 204d–e). In the R., he is especially concerned with the beauty of things with a proper work or function. We can see why goodness in such things would cause them to be kalon. For the goodness of such a thing is whatever it is that enables it to perform its proper function well, but that is precisely what will determine what it is for that thing to be well-proportioned and internally harmonious. And proportion and harmony are the hallmarks of beauty (R. 601d, 452e; Ti. 87c). This functional account of beauty fits well with one of the definitions of the beautiful proposed in Hippias Major: that it is the appropriate (Hp. Ma. 290c–1d). It also makes sense of the intuition that the beautiful is beneficial (Grg. 474d; Hp. Ma. 296e–7a; Laches 192d; cf. R. 364a). Though genuinely kala things may not suit the desires we happen to have, if they are human artefacts, actions or souls, they will be useful from the point of view of the human function (R. 589c; Ti. 87e). It is less clear how beautiful things without functions – numerical proportions, patches of pure colour might be examples – can be explained in terms of their relation to the good. This raises the question of whether and how to distinguish beauty and goodness (Barney 2010; Hobbs 2000:222–7; Lear 2007; Price 1989:16; White 1989).
Insofar as we experience something as beautiful, we feel pleasure (q.v.). Sometimes the pleasure is pure (Phlb. 51c–d), other times it is ‘mixed’ with pain (Phdr. 251c–d). This connection between pleasure and beauty reveals another aspect of Plato’s view: beauty is a feature of the way things appear or manifest themselves to a subject. In the Phdr. Socrates claims that the beautiful alone among the forms ‘shines out’ through the sensible objects which participate in it (Phdr. 250b–e). In the first instance, this means that it is a form whose images we can literally see. But the ‘radiance’ of beauty seems also to refer to our mode of access to it. Although we may work out later why something is beautiful, that it is beautiful is something of which we are immediately aware.
Beauty is therefore the power of appearing, that is, manifesting oneself as, perfect and internally harmonious. This does not imply that whenever we experience something as beautiful, it is in fact beautiful. Our own defective perspective (perceptual or ethical) may cause a false appearance of beauty or ugliness (Sph. 235d–6a; cf. Hp. Ma. 294a–e; R. 602b). And as with other illusions of appearance, one can experience something as beautiful without believing as a matter of rational conviction that it is perfect. In this case, a conflict would occur between the part of the soul to which the object appears beautiful and the part which believes that it is not.
Genuinely beautiful things are therefore truthful in the sense of communicating to a spectator an accurate appearance of perfection. This is especially important for Plato’s discussions of kalos logos, beautiful speech, a topic that covers rhetorical persuasion (Hp. Ma.; Phdr.), poetry (Ion; R.) and, by implication, philosophical discourse (Smp. 198b–9b; Lg. 817b). Since speech conveys an image both of the world it describes and of the person describing it, beautiful speech must be truthful both in the sense of being authentic and in the sense of imprinting in the listener beliefs which are correct, or at least likely in outline. Truly beautiful speech is, therefore, either wise or philosophical.
The experience of beauty is pleasant. Pleasure, according to Plato, is a qualification of awareness attendant upon ‘being filled with what is appropriate to our nature’ (R. 585d; Phlb. 31d). In other words, pleasant objects and activities seem good for us (Lg. 657c). The implication, though Plato does not say so explicitly, is that the experience of beauty is not only the experience of a thing’s manifest perfection but also the experience of the thing’s perfection as good for the subject. It is no wonder, then, that the experience of beauty excites erôs, that passionate desire for ‘intercourse’ with the beautiful thing.
Plato’s faith in the transformative power of beauty may seem overly optimistic, but he does not think it is guaranteed. In the Phdr. Socrates depicts all aspects of the soul as responsive to the kalon boy, but their responses conflict. The life of philosophical conversation is only one way the struggle may be resolved (Phdr. 256a–c). Thus, it would be unfair to accuse Plato of sentimental blindness to the danger of beauty. Beauty has a beneficial effect only on souls innately capable of improvement and only if they have a ‘leader to lead them aright’ (Smp. 210a).
BEING AND BECOMING (ON, ONTA; GIGNESTHAI)
Sandra Peterson
Several passages in Plato contrast being, using the Greek infinitive ‘to be’ (einai) or participle ‘being’ (on) and becoming (gignesthai). The contrast, tailored in each dialogue to its particular interlocutors, resists tidy packaging into a single stance of Plato’s.
I discuss passages from Timaeus, Theaetetus and Republic. Other relevant passages are: Phaedo 78c–9a, 102b–3c; Cratylus 439b–40e; Symposium 207d–8b; Parmenides 152b–e, 163d; Sophist 248a–9d; Philebus 26d, 27b, 54a–d, 59a–d, 61d–e; and Laws 893b–4.
(I) TIMAEUS
At Ti. 27d–8a Timaeus strongly contrasts (a) what always is and never becomes, and (b) what always becomes and never is. What always is ‘is grasped by understanding, which involves a reasoned account. It is unchanging’. What becomes is ‘grasped by opinion, which involves unreasoning sense perception. It comes to be and passes away but never really is’. The latter apparently includes all perceptible items in our world. Accounts of being are more reliable than accounts of becoming, which are merely likely (Ti. 29b–c). ‘What being is to becoming truth is to belief (pistis)’ (Ti. 29c).
According to Timaeus (Ti. 28a–9a), a craftsman who made the universe could use only an eternal (aidion) model because a beautiful work requires an eternal model.
As an example of what is grasped by understanding alone and not perceived by the senses Timaeus (Ti. 51b–e) gives ‘intelligible forms’ such as fire itself, of which the fiery stuff in space that we perceive is an image.
Timaeus further explains at Ti. 37e–8b that we should not apply future or past tensed forms of the verb ‘to be’ to what is everlasting. We cannot say that it was and will be, but we can say that it is. We can use ‘was’ and ‘will be’ of what becomes, but cannot accurately say even that what becomes is what becomes. Timaeus does not dwell on this linguistic point.
To illustrate Plato’s contrast between what becomes round and what is round, consider: when a lump of dough gets round after continued rolling, a doughy sphere gets generated or comes-to-be (gignetai). Sphere-shape, however, always is (esti) round: the shape, sphere, did not ever become round. What a sphere is, the sphere itself, is, permanently, round.
(II) THEAETETUS
Socrates at Tht. 152d finds Theaetetus receptive to a view that elides the contrast between being and becoming. This view, which Socrates calls ‘not a paltry account’ of Protagoras, Heracleitus and Empedocles, declares that nothing ever is:
. . . nothing is one thing itself by itself, and you would not correctly call something some sort of thing, but if you label it great it shows itself small . . . – and everything that way, nothing being one thing or of something nor any sort of thing. But from movement, change, and mixture with one another, everything that we say is – not labeling it correctly – gets generated. For nothing ever is but always gets generated. (152d2–e1)
Socrates subsequently gives the example (154a) that colour gets generated or comes to be between an eye and an object when they (each a complex of motions and changes) collide. He says:
nothing is hard, hot, or anything, just by itself; . . . but in their intercourse with one another things get . . . qualified in all ways, as a result of their change. (156e)
[T]hings are always getting generated for someone. We should exclude ‘be’; from everywhere . . . Nor ought we to admit ‘something’, ‘someone’s’, ‘my’, ‘this’, ‘that’, or any other word that brings things to a standstill. (157b)
Socrates introduced the view that things never are, but always get generated or come to be, to bolster Theaetetus’ proposal that knowledge is perception. On this view when we incorrectly say that something is, we should most properly say that it is getting generated for someone. (Or we could less properly say that it is for someone.) Socrates explains the connection to Theaetetus’ proposal:
160c: Since what acts on me is for me and not someone else, it’s also the case that I and not someone else, perceive it? . . . So my perception is true for me – because it’s always of the being that’s mine and as Protagoras said, it’s for me to decide . . . Well then . . . how could I fail to have knowledge of the things I’m a perceiver of? . . . So you were quite right to say that knowledge is nothing but perception.
At Tht. 183b, however, Socrates and Theaetetus agree that in our current language one cannot state the theory that everything constantly changes, unless perhaps one simply utters ‘not so’ endlessly – which, presumably, reduces the theory to absurdity. Socrates drops it from the ensuing conversation.
(III) REPUBLIC
What purely is contrasts with what rolls about or wanders between what purely is and what is not (R. 475c–80b). What purely is, including such items as the beautiful itself, is always the same in all respects and is an appropriate object of knowledge (477). It is the special interest of philosophers (480). Certain items roll about in that if they may be called, for example, just or beautiful, they may also be called unjust or ugly (in some respect). Only later at 485b does the word ‘becoming’ occur: philosophers love the learning that makes clear to them ‘the being that always is and does not wander around between becoming and decaying’. At 521–32 we read that study of mathematics draws us from becoming to study being (521d). The study of being leads us to the final item of study, good itself (532b).
The secondary literature disputes whether such passages suggest (a) every perceptible change in every respect at all times (Cherniss 1957:356 responding to Owen 1953a), or suggest at most that there is (b) at each time every perceptible change in some respect or other (Irwin 1977b:3 note 5). There is also dispute whether Plato believed (a) at some time: Irwin (1977b:6) says no. Cherniss (1957:349–60) says yes.
CAUSE (AITIA)
Fred D. Miller, Jr.
Plato’s terms aitia (n.) and aitios or aition (adj.) are traditionally translated as ‘cause’, although ‘reason’ and ‘explanation’ are also used. The correct translation is controversial, as will become clear.
The concept of cause helps to distinguish reliable from unreliable beliefs: although true opinions are valuable as long as they remain, they tend to escape from our souls, so that they are not worth much unless tied down by an ‘account (or working out, logismos) of the cause (aitia)’ (Meno 97e–8a). This is also suggested by Timaeus 27e–8a, which makes two points: first, that belief is concerned with that which comes to be, in distinction from knowledge which is concerned with that which is, and, second, that everything that comes to be comes to be through the agency of some cause (cf. Philebus 26e).
In the Phaedo Plato makes Socrates interrupt his attempt to prove that the soul is immortal by turning to an inquiry into ‘the cause of generation and destruction’ (Phd. 96a). Although earlier scientists speculated about the causes of a wide range of natural phenomena, Plato was the first to consider critically what it meant to speak of a cause of something. According to Plato earlier scientists took causes (e.g. of thinking) to be bodily processes involving stuffs like air or fire or blood.
Socrates says that he was intrigued by Anaxagoras’ claim that intelligence (nous) is the cause of everything, but disappointed when he found that Anaxagoras actually tried to explain things in terms of material processes like other earlier scientists. It is as if one were to say that Socrates’ actions are due to his mind but then to explain why he was sitting in his prison cell in Athens rather than escaping to another city as due to the position of his bones, sinews, flesh and skin. This indicates a failure ‘to distinguish the real cause from that without which the cause would not be able to act as a cause’ (99b). What Anaxagoras calls the cause is merely a necessary condition of what he purports to explain. The cause of X should explain why X in fact exists and not some contrary state of affairs. Ideally it would explain ‘what was the best way for it to be, or to be acted upon, or to act’ (97c–d).
The best causal explanation would explain how the universe is held together by the good and what ought to be. After confessing that he has not found such a cause, he offers a second best method of explanation based on the theory of forms, which involves the following claims: There exist forms such as the beautiful itself, and particular things are beautiful only because they partake of the beautiful itself. The forms typically have opposites which they cannot admit, for example, tallness cannot be short, and shortness cannot be tall (102d). Moreover, there are two types of forms – for example, tallness ‘in nature’ versus tallness ‘in us’ – which some commentators call transcendent and immanent forms (102d–3b). For example, the immanent form of shortness is itself short and cannot be tall, and it also compels whatever it enters to share in shortness. Socrates is short because he shares in the immanent form of shortness, while Phaedo is tall because he is occupied by the immanent form of tallness. This useful distinction also explains the paradoxical fact that a particular can in a way partake of opposite forms: Simmias can have the immanent form of tallness in relation to Socrates and the immanent form of shortness in relation to Phaedo. Finally, in order to support more sophisticated explanations, the theory recognizes a special bearer of a form, which is distinct from the form but brings the form with it whenever it occupies a particular and will not admit the opposite of the form that it brings. For example, an object becomes hot when it is occupied by fire, the special bearer of heat; and if the object is occupied by snow, the special bearer of cold, the fire retreats or ceases to exist. Likewise three brings oddness with it and excludes evenness. (It is noteworthy that Plato includes a mathematical example.) The Phd.’s final proof of the immortality of the soul presupposes this theory of causality, for the soul is the special bearer of life which cannot admit of death.
In the later dialogues perhaps Plato adumbrates the causal explanation of the cosmos envisioned in the Phd. The Phlb. distinguishes four factors – the unlimited, limit, the mixture that comes to be from the foregoing and the cause or productive agent that brings this mixture about (Phlb. 27b–c). Further, it recognizes intelligence (nous) or soul as the fundamental cause of the universe (Phlb. 30d; cf. Ti. 46d; and Lg. 10.891e). However, the Ti. recognizes two kinds of causes: intelligent and unintelligent (Ti. 46c–e, 68e). The former is identified with intelligence, personified as the cosmic demiurge (29a), while the latter is necessity, which is called ‘the straying cause’ (48a). The latter is evidently postulated to explain the pervasive resistance to orderliness. Plato’s search for the first cause of cosmic order, especially in Lg. bk 10, is a precursor of cosmological arguments for the existence of god by Aristotle and later theorists, though lower levels are dependent on higher in the Republic’s divided line (q.v.) as well.
Against the theory of the Phd. Aristotle objects that Platonic forms cannot be causes because causes produce their effects intermittently, although the forms exist perpetually and continuously. Again, health seems to be produced by a doctor rather than by the form of health itself (Gen. & Corr. 2.9.335b17–24). Aristotle assumes that Plato’s aitia is a rival to his own theory of four causes: for example, a particular statue has four causes, a particular sculptor (efficient cause) imposes a particular shape (formal cause) on particular bronze (material cause) for a particular purpose (final cause). He complains that Plato recognizes the formal and material causes of things, but overlooks the efficient and final causes (Metaphysics 1.6.998a8–10).
Recent commentators disagree over Plato’s understanding of aitia. Does he have in mind what many moderns would understand as a causal explanation of a natural phenomenon, or does he intend instead a logical or metaphysical explanation of phenomena? The causal interpretation is suggested by Socrates’ statement in the Phd. that he is seeking an ‘investigation of the cause of generation and destruction’ (Phd. 96a) and that he is concerned with problems like those discussed by the pre-Socratics such as why the earth has the shape it does and why it is located where it is (97d). If Plato is seeking a cause, what sort is it? Is it a formal cause (see Sedley 1998) or a final cause (see Taylor 1969)? Or does the Phd. anticipate the sort of comprehensive causal explanation found in the later dialogues, which arguably accommodates all four Aristotelian causes (see Hankinson 1998)? However, the causal interpretation has trouble with other examples in the Phd.: for example, Socrates is shorter than Simmias because he has smallness compared with Simmias’ tallness (Phd. 102b–3a), and three bringing oddness with it and excluding evenness (104d). These examples suggest that Plato is concerned with a logical or metaphysical explanation, such as a conceptual analysis of essences (see Vlastos 1969) or an account of truth-making conditions (see Sharma 2009). These interpretations would lead off into very different directions, but, arguably, Plato’s account of aitia shares features with both causal and metaphysical explanation.
CAVE, THE ALLEGORY OF THE
D. C. Schindler
The allegory of the cave that Socrates presents after the images of the sun (q.v.) and the divided line (q.v.) is an image of education (Republic 514a; q.v. Education), which Plato says elsewhere is the only acquisition one retains after death (Phaedo 108d). This cluster of images serves to unpack in detail the dense series of claims Socrates makes about the ‘greatest study’, which provides the measure for all other studies, namely, the idea of the good (R. 505a–6a). The cluster occurs in the middle of a discussion of the nature of philosophy and towards the end of the long interruption that occupies the central books of the R. (bks 5–7), and so falls between the ‘peak’ of the city as a kingship or aristocracy (445c–d) and its decline into increasingly less perfect orders. It can be said to represent a paradigm outside of the whole discussion that stands as the ultimate reference point for the city described within that discussion (cf. 472c–3a) just as the idea of the good explicated in these images represents the ultimate standard for all thought and deed. The argument regarding the good and the soul’s relationship with it that comes to expression in these passages is, among other things, the basic response to the challenges presented to Socrates by Glaucon and Adeimantus at the beginning of the main body of the dialogue.
Socrates insists the allegory must be connected with ‘what was said before’ (517a–b), that is the images of the sun and the line. If the sun image introduced the epistemological and ontological significance of the good, drawing a distinction between the realm of the sensible, which is mixed with darkness, and the realm of the intelligible illumined by the light, the line image subdivides the realms and articulates their relationships to one another mathematically. The cave image draws on the epistemological and ontological role of the good illustrated in the sun and on the notion of levels of reality and stages of the apprehension of truth illustrated in the line, bringing these together in what may be called a ‘moving image’, that is the mini-drama of education as a liberation from the slavery of ignorance. The various parts of the cave image symbolize an order of life (ethics and politics) based on the nature of reality and the soul’s apprehension of it (metaphysics and epistemology). Scholars have rejected any simple one-to-one correspondence between the segments of the line and the stages of education in the cave, but the inference that the cave allegory ought therefore to be read independently of the previous images, and in some cases independently of the dialogue as a whole, is unwarranted.
The sun in the cave image represents the idea of the good, which Socrates calls the ‘cause of all that is right and beautiful’ (517c), both of the sun and its light in the visible realm and of truth and understanding in the intelligible realm. The things outside of the cave are intelligible objects – presumably the forms (q.v.) – and the artefacts inside the cave presumably represent visible, that is physical things. While Socrates does not explain the significance of the shadows cast upon the cave wall, we may interpret them, in light of Socrates’ general discussion of the problem of education in the R., as the ‘imitation’ of reality in the poets’ (and the sophists’) speeches, and perhaps also as a reference to the ‘noble lie’ used to impose political order on the ignorant (cf. 414b–c, 459c–d).
The cave image presents three basic conditions of our nature in its education: first, we begin as bound at the bottom, so that the shadows and sounds reflected off the back wall constitute the whole of our experience (514a–15c); second, we may be turned around while still in the cave so that we may see the fire light and the artefacts that cast their shadows; third, we may be dragged out of the cave into the world illuminated by the sun. This last level unfolds gradually in five steps (shadows, reflections in water, things themselves, the heavens and heavenly bodies at night and the sun). Socrates explains that education is a ‘turning around of the whole soul’ (518c) – that is, not the introduction of intelligence, but a directing of this already extant power along with our soul’s spirited nature and appetites (cf. the ‘parts’ of the soul, 436a–b) towards the good. The educated and uneducated soul prove to be polar opposites: the latter measures everything it encounters against its ‘truth’, namely, the ‘shadows of artificial things’ (515c) and so experiences confusion in relation to reality; the former measures everything by the good, the most complete standard (cf. 504c) and so finds itself at a loss when it faces, once again, the darkness of the cave.
Because education involves a fundamental reordering of desire (q.v.), the prisoners must be released by someone outside of themselves and be forced out of the cave (since they would be able to liberate themselves only if their desires were already properly ordered). This, however, entails an infinite regress problem that Plato does not explicitly address. Socrates suggests that the prisoners would resist their liberator, and would in fact kill him if they had the chance (517a – a reference to Socrates?). When the prisoners are first released, they become dazzled by the firelight and so lose the ability to make out the shadows. What appears to be a state of confusion, however, is in reality an advance towards truth. The confusion intensifies when the prisoners enter out into the light of day, that is, the realm of the intelligible. However, once their eyes grow accustomed to the light at its source, they in turn come to pity those who are still inside the cave, and would ‘prefer to undergo everything rather than live that way’ (516d–e). The reason for the philosopher’s return to the cave, which Socrates insists is necessary (519c–d), remains controversial; the stated explanation is that, in the city, private interest must ultimately be subordinated to the common good (519e–20d). Thus, it is the universal truth of the idea of the good that requires both an ascent out of the cave and then a descent back into the cave, in both cases against one’s apparent desire.
CHARACTER (TOPIC)
Ruby Blondell
The English word ‘character’ may denote – among other things – both (moral) character and a theatrical dramatis persona. In the former sense it approximates to the Greek ethos, which embraces both moral qualities and the social and personal features that help to construct, embody and convey these qualities (such as age, status, social relationships, gender, way of life, deportment, physiognomy and manner of speaking). Ethos also covers intellectual traits, that is, the rational and rhetorical skills and attitudes that are used to reach and convey moral choices. For character in the latter sense – the theatrical or literary – Greek normally uses a different word (prosopon); yet the two concepts remain intimately linked. Literary characters are conceived of, and represented, in the first place as embodiments of moral qualities, while philosophers show a strong concern with character types and their external expression both in actual people and in the arts, especially theatre.
In English, ‘character’ often refers to moral character as detached from physical circumstances, or as opposed to individual quirks of ‘personality’, which are often viewed as ‘non-moral’, or irrelevant to assessing a person’s character. But in ancient Greek terms all such features have potentially ethical implications, since they are viewed as constituting, expressing and/or representing ethos. Characteristics that might now be seen as quirks of personality tend to be viewed as simultaneously formative and indicative of both social identity and moral character. Yet, the human ideal remains one of simplicity and harmony. In literature, philosophy and the visual arts, idiosyncrasy, whether physical or psychological, tends to denote not special beauty or appeal but a departure from some ideal and more homogeneous ethical and/or aesthetic standard.
There is a close relationship in Greek culture generally, and Plato in particular, between character in both the above senses and education. Almost all ancient Greek writers assume that the representation of persons exerts on its consumers (actors, audience, readers or listeners) an emotional effect that tends to assimilate them to the characters represented (on this ‘mimêtic pedagogy;’ see Blondell 2002:80–112). Traditional educational models, such as Homer’s heroes, may have certain positive traits, but in general, their impact is presented as overwhelmingly negative. Plato’s characters, especially Socrates, often criticize the educational use of such poetry; in addition, Plato as author defuses the threat of traditional character models both by co-opting them for his own purposes and by supplanting them in his own works. In Hippias Minor, for example, he uses Socrates to challenge the educational value of Achilles and Odysseus, but also appropriates these heroes for his own use (Blondell 2002:113–64). The most important positive character model in Plato’s works is Socrates, who is marked, paradoxically, by an unparalleled degree of physical and intellectual idiosyncrasy.
Plato’s pervasive concern with human character, its formation and representation, is central to the Republic, which provides a fully developed picture of the character required for the philosopher-rulers of Callipolis. This ideal incorporates a long list of admirable qualities, which may be summarised as vigour and gentleness in mind and body. It is to be achieved through three stages of character formation. First, the young guardians must have the right natural inclinations and capacities. Second, these traits must be fostered from infancy by cultural education, including poetry and the visual arts as well as physical training; at this stage the young guardians’ characters are to be ‘molded’ by the right kind of poetry and storytelling, which will use appropriate literary role models to ‘dye’ their souls indelibly with right opinion (429c–30b). Finally the guardians are subjected to many years of higher education (519c), largely mathematical in nature; this culminates in dialectic, which eventually allows the truly superior soul to reach the vision of the forms.
The resulting ideal character is uniform and homogenous since, as Socrates puts it, ‘there is one form of virtue, but the forms of vice are unlimited’ (445c). This means not only that there are many more ways of being bad than being good, but also that within each individual complexity and variation of character are to be frowned upon in contrast to the simple and homogeneous. The belief that the virtuous ethos is simple, the complex inferior (604e), is one important reason for Socrates’ famous disapproval of imitation (q.v.), since sympathetic identification with a range of characters is expected to fragment the guardians’ own ethos. This quest for a single perfect character-type is a central aspect of the dialogue’s pervasive concern with stability, homogeneity and unity, and hostility to plurality and change. The philosopher-rulers are defined by their ability to see beyond the distracting multiplicity of the phenomenal world to the homogeneous unity of the forms (474b–6d). The same vision informs their characters. Like the statue of the perfectly just man (361d), the undifferentiated model of the philosopher-ruler lacks distracting personal detail, providing an abstract, impersonal ideal of philosophical perfection. Only their level of progress on a linear scale differentiates the guardians.
This ideal is developed still further in the Theaetetus, where ‘likeness to god’ (176b) – an idealized state of epistemic, ethical and personal self-consistency and stability – is presented by Socrates as the ultimate human ideal. Ironically, however, this ideal remains unattainable as long as we are, in fact, embodied human beings. Plato seems well aware of this. The ideal philosopher in the Theaetetus is paired with his anti-ideal, the orator, who is fully engaged in the messy business of Athenian social and political life. We are left to infer that the best any real human being can do is to negotiate between these two poles, striving for ‘likeness to god’ while acknowledging her inescapable embeddedness in the material and social world that makes such a goal ultimately unattainable. The ever-paradoxical Socrates models this mediating role for us.
CITY (POLIS)
Richard Stalley
In his political and moral philosophy, Plato takes it for granted that he is dealing with life in the Greek polis (plural poleis), a small independent city state. His two longest works, the Republic and the Laws, both describe imaginary cities. While they are in many respects different from each other, they arguably embody very similar conceptions of the nature and purpose of the polis. The underlying principles are brought out most clearly in the R., which describes an ideal that is unlikely ever to exist. The Lg. shows how they might be embodied in a more practical form.
The city comes into being because individuals in isolation cannot provide all they need for survival (R. 369b7–73d). But its main function is certainly not to accumulate wealth. The ideal location for a city is one that will provide all the necessities of human life without producing a surplus to permit trade and luxurious living (Lg. 704a1–5c7). There are, in fact, three main kinds of functions which must be fulfilled effectively if a city is to survive and prosper. The first is to provide for the production of food and manufactured articles and for the buying and selling of these. The second is to wage war and the third is to govern itself wisely. A distinctively Platonic idea is that each of these roles should be performed exclusively by people with the appropriate training and aptitudes and that confusing them can undermine and even destroy the city (R. 412b9–15d3).
To avoid this confusion of roles, the ideal city of the R. would be based on a division of the citizens into three classes: (a) those involved in farming, manufacture and trade; (b) the soldiers or guardians (phulakes); and (c) the rulers (R. 373d–4e). Those destined to be soldiers would be selected in early childhood and undergo a long training. The rulers would be chosen from the best and wisest of the guardians to undergo a philosophical training that would ultimately enable them to achieve a rational understanding of the good and the just (R. 502c–41b). In the more practical city of the Lg. the confusion of roles is avoided by different means. Citizens will be forbidden to engage in trade and manufacture – those tasks will be left to resident aliens (Lg. 846d1–7b6, 918a6–20a4). All citizens will serve in the army and take some part in government but the latter is still conceived as a work of reason. The city is therefore controlled by a strict code of law (q.v.) established by a wise legislator and the most important positions are assigned to the oldest and wisest citizens.
Plato believes that the good of the city requires that its citizens possess the virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance and justice. A central concern of the city is therefore to provide an education (q.v.), which will develop the right kind of character in its citizens. In the R. there is a long account of the training in poetry, music and gymnastics that will inculcate the virtues and a similar education is prescribed in the Lg.
Plato also assumes that whatever makes for the unity of the city is good, while anything that pulls it apart is bad (see Schofield 2006:212–33). Unity requires shared feelings and friendship (q.v.) among the citizens. One major obstacle is the pursuit of wealth. In existing cities rulers use their power to pursue their own economic interests and to exploit their fellow citizens (R. 416d–17b). Differences in wealth also create conflict between the rich and the poor (R. 421d–3b). To avoid these outcomes soldiers and rulers in the ideal city of the R. would have no homes or property of their own but would live together like soldiers in a camp. In the Lg., a different, and presumably more practical, solution is suggested. Each citizen family will have its own farm, which will be inalienable. The farms will be of equal size and the amount of wealth that can be accumulated in addition to the farm will be limited (Lg. 737b5–d8, 739e7–41a5, 744d2–5b2). The disruptive effect of differences in wealth will thus be kept to a minimum (see Morrow 1960:95–152; Stalley 1983:97–111).
Another threat to the unity of the city is that citizens may feel loyalty to their family rather than to the city as a whole. In the ideal city of the R., this danger would be avoided by the abolition of the family. Mating among the guardians would be arranged by the rulers and the children resulting from this would be brought up in common. No one would be able to identify their biological parents or offspring (R. 457b7–66d7). This would ensure that citizens share feelings of pleasure and pain. There is no such proposal for the city of the Lg. Indeed, its citizens would be legally required to marry (Lg. 772c5–4d2). The point seems to be that, in practise, the unity of the city will be preserved by the careful regulation of the family and by institutions such as common meals and shared religious rites.
In the R. Plato uses the tripartite structure of his ideal city to elucidate the structure of the human soul. This, together with the emphasis on the unity of the city and abolition of property and families for the guardians, has led some commentators to suppose that Plato is concerned for the good of the city as opposed to that of its citizens. The latter are seen merely as parts of a larger whole, having no independent value. Other commentators have argued that, when Plato speaks of the good of the city, he really has in mind the happiness of all the citizens (see Taylor 1986). Plato would probably see a false antithesis here. On his conception a worthwhile life requires membership of a city. The good of the individual consists in possessing the very virtues that are needed for the survival of the city and cannot be acquired outside it.
CONVENTION (see Law)
COSMOS (KOSMOS)
Gretchen Reydams-Schils
The Timaeus is the principal dialogue for studying Plato’s view of the cosmos, though relevant comments are also found in several other dialogues.
The cosmology of the Ti. (26c) draws on the fundamental distinction between ‘being’, or intelligible reality, grasped by understanding and the object of truth, that is, unchanging versus ‘becoming’, or sensible reality, grasped by sense-perception and the object of opinion that is always in flux (Brisson 1994; Johansen 2004; Zeyl 2000). That which ‘comes to be’ presupposes a cause of its coming to be. In the case of the universe – which falls under the heading of becoming because it is visible, tangible and corporeal – the cause is a good god, or divine artisan and demiurge who knows no envy, and makes the world as good as possible, introducing order in a state of disorder (Ti. 30a), by using being as his model, not becoming. The demiurge’s model for the universe is also referred to as the ‘living thing’ that contains all different kinds of intelligible living things. Given that things that have intelligence are superior to those that do not, the world soul, which gives life to the entire universe, is endowed with a mind.
Timaeus also stipulates two types of accounts that have the same characteristics as their respective objects. The account of being shares as much as possible in being’s stability and truth-value. The account of becoming as an image, or likeness, of being, can at best be only ‘likely’ and convincing. Plato’s point here turns on the verbal pun in the connection between ‘likeness’/eikôn and ‘likely’/eikôs. This is a first epistemological restriction applying to any account of the universe: given what the universe is, it cannot be an object of true knowledge. A second epistemological restriction follows from the limitations of human nature in its attempt to speak of things divine and the origin of the universe.
Mathematics plays a key role in the structure of the universe, as a vehicle for the transfer of order from being to becoming. Both the world body (Ti. 31b–2c) and the world soul (35b–6d) are governed by proportional ratios. The traces of the elements in the receptacle have different regular solids, made out of triangles, assigned to them. These triangles and solids also account for the elements’ transformations into each other and formations into things. The fixed stars belong to the circle of the same in the structure of the world soul, and the planets to the circle of the other.
Timaeus’ account has three main parts: (a) the works of intellect (29d–47e); (b) the works of necessity (47e–69a); and (c) the combined works of intellect and necessity (69a–92c). The second part, on necessity or the wandering cause, introduces a third principle, in addition to being and becoming, namely the receptacle. Plato’s account of this ‘third kind’ reveals fundamental tensions (Algra 1995; Sayre 2002). A first tension exists between the receptacle as some kind of space or medium or as a constituent component of sensible things. The most likely hypothesis is that the receptacle constitutes the condition for things in the phenomenal world appearing as corporeal and sensible. A second tension occurs between the two accounts of the receptacle as being, on the one hand, completely neutral, and as being endowed with traces of the elements in disorderly motion, on the other.
The ending of the Ti. has its own version of the ‘becoming like god’ theme (90a–d; Sedley 1999). Whenever a human soul enters a human body, the rational component of its soul, modelled after and made of the same ingredients as the world soul, becomes disrupted (42e–4c). This order, however, can be restored by realigning one’s soul with the world soul, both through thinking and the contemplation of the revolutions of heavenly bodies that follow the revolutions of the world soul. Hence, the order of the cosmos becomes directly relevant for an ordered and happy human life.
The speech which the demiurge addresses to the younger gods (who will create the human body and the irrational parts of the human soul), and the rules he gives the rational human souls (41a–2e) have several themes in common with the afterlife and soul myths of the Republic (the Myth of Er, 614b–end), the Phaedo (107c–15a), the Gorgias (523a–7a) and the Phaedrus (246a–57b). These accounts display a judgement of the soul’s first or previous life, with rewards and punishments, and reflections on the consequences of earlier choices for subsequent lives, in the process of reincarnation. They also present a view of the cosmos, least developed in the Grg. myth, that reflects this moral order, with clear distinctions between a higher realm more or less close to intelligible reality and lower realms for souls weighed down by corporeal and sensible reality.
The myth of the origin and governance of the world in the Politicus, as told by the Stranger (Plt. 268d–74e), posits an ongoing alternation between two phases of the universe: one governed by the supreme god, who delegates the supervision of parts of the universe to other gods and demons, and another in which the world is left to itself. The governance of god represents a blissful state, whereas the other phase leads to a gradual decline until the god eventually takes matters in hand again. Corporeal entities such as the world cannot remain in an immutable state, but inherently contain a factor of disorder.
Based on the principle that self-motion presupposes soul, bk 10 of the Laws (896c–9d) posits the existence of a disorderly soul as a counterpart to the rational and beneficial world soul that governs the heavens and the universe as a whole. The exposition emphasizes that the universe is ordered and governed by providence, rather than chance. The Philebus (23c–31b) assumes as the basic components of reality limit, the unlimited, a mixture of these two, and a divine maker called Zeus as cause; it restates key claims about the order of the universe, the world body and the rational nature of the world soul (Kahn 2010). Finally, the Epinomis, wrongly attributed to Plato and probably by Philip of Opus, assigns all levels within the universe their own kind of demons, according to a principle of plenitude.
CROSS EXAMINATION (see Elenchus)
DAIMÔN
A. A. Long
Daimôn is one of the terms employed to designate supernatural beings by Plato, and is used in a number of different, but related, ways in the dialogues.
The polytheistic religious beliefs of ancient Greece were remarkably fluid (q.v. Religion). They conformed to subsequent Western notions in regarding divinity as exponentially more powerful than every human capacity or possibility, but beyond that, how one conceived of the divine was susceptible to great variation. Plato made a virtue of this fluidity in two related ways. From his literary and philosophical predecessors he selected attributes of divinity that discounted or discarded the anthropomorphic and often fearsome features represented in mythology and civic cult. Second, and more significantly, he emphasized the idea that divinity is always providential and never responsible for any harm to human beings or to the universe. In advancing this thesis, Plato chiefly employs the singular or plural of the term theos, which is the standard Greek word to apply to Zeus and other leading gods. But in his late work, Laws, he often combines theos or theoi (plural) with the term daimôn (singular or plural) and sometimes adjoins to these terms the word heros, producing the providential triad ‘god(s), divine spirit (s), and hero(es)’. The point of this complex expression was to be as comprehensive as possible in reference to everything in Plato’s culture that could be deemed divine, ranging from the most exalted divinities to those former men worshipped after their deaths as deified heroes. By this token a daimôn was a divine being of lesser status than a theos.
Although Plato generally marks that difference, he also employs ‘god or daimôn’ or ‘god and daimôn’ as a hendiadys (e.g. Cratylus 438c6; Lg. 730a, 906a). Such fluidity in the use of these terms goes back to the earliest Greek literature. Homer sometimes calls Olympian gods and goddesses individually or collectively daimons, but he chiefly uses daimôn to refer to divine power impersonally – as we might say ‘the divine’ or ‘divinity’. In an important extension of this usage, daimôn stands for the fate or lot allocated to mortals, which they are powerless to withstand. ‘Oh daimôn’, cries Oedipus in Sophocles’ tragedy, when he learns that he has fulfilled his terrible fate; and the Persian King Xerxes uses the same expression in Aeschylus’ Persians at the point of his total defeat by the Greeks. Such pessimism was due to the belief, widely reflected in early Greek literature, that the Greek gods, far from being providential, were often ill-disposed to human beings. Plato rarely uses daimôn in this impersonal or negative way. His daimons are most typically guardian spirits attached to particular persons. As such, they may be compared with the function that Plato and Xenophon applied to the divine sign or divine voice that Socrates experienced from time to time, and which these authors (and very likely Socrates himself) called daimonion. However, that was a special usage of this term, signifying Socrates’ peculiar claim to be the object of an individual providential concern.
Hesiod, who was more or less contemporary with Homer, foreshadowed Plato’s providential conception of daimons in his account of the post mortem destiny of the blissful people from the Golden Age: ‘Because of the plans of mighty Zeus they are good daimons, earth-dwelling \ guardians of mortal men, who keep watch over court judgements and \ wrongful acts, clad in mist, roaming all over the earth, and givers of wealth’ (Works and Days 122–6). Plato drew directly on this passage in the Cra. (398b) where he has Socrates say:
Hesiod and the other poets are right, who say that, when a good man dies, he has a great dispensation and honor, and becomes a daimôn, which is a name given to him because it accords with wisdom. Accordingly, I myself propose that every good man is daimonios, whether dead or alive, and rightly called a daimôn.
In spite of its spoof etymology (deriving daimôn from daëmon, meaning ‘wise’) this is a seminal text for the ways Plato uses the term daimôn to signify a guardian spirit, whether in life and/or after death.
He does this most elaborately in the eschatological myths (q.v. Myth) that conclude the Phaedo and Republic. Common to both contexts is the allotment to souls of a daimôn responsible for watching over persons during their embodied life. In the Phd. (107d–8a), the daimôn ‘allotted to each person’ conducts the post mortem souls to the underworld’s place of judgement, but in the R. (617e, 620d) the story is more complex. There the narrative starts from souls that are awaiting rebirth. After drawing lots, to determine who goes first, the souls are required to choose their next lives from a vast selection of lives (animal as well as human), and then, having made that choice, make the further choice of a daimôn ‘to watch over their life and fulfil the choices made’.
Guardian spirit is Plato’s exact expression, but in using it he does not anticipate the modern, entirely protective or kindly sense of a guardian angel. What Plato’s daimons ‘guard’ or secure is the necessity that embodied souls conform to the lives they have chosen. When the mythological trappings are removed, his guardian spirits are tantamount to personifications of each person’s inevitable destiny as determined by their prenatal choices. A hundred years earlier Heraclitus had expressed this idea in his lapidary statement: ‘Character is a human being’s daimôn’. As to the mythology, Plato was influenced by eschatological ideas associated with Orphic mystery cults, which are diffused in earlier literature and thought, especially Empedocles, Pindar and Euripides.
Does Plato’s conception of a guardian spirit fit the notion that divinity is always providential and never harmful to human beings? It is quite consistent with that idea, when qualified by the following Platonic assumptions – first, that human beings, not divinity, are entirely responsible for the choices they make and the outcomes of these, and second, that divinity is always just. Accordingly, human beings are justly rewarded in the afterlife for good conduct and punished for the reverse.
Plato interprets the concept of a guardian daimôn most creatively in the context of the Timaeus (90a–d) where he expounds the anatomy of the soul:
As regards the most authoritative form of soul present in us, we should think of it thus: that God has given it to each person as a daimôn, that thing which we say dwells at the top of our body and elevates us from earth to our celestial kinship.
Here Plato uses daimôn to refer to what he elsewhere calls the ‘rational’ part of the tripartite soul. As the passage continues, Plato describes the truly philosophical person as someone who, by always keeping his cohabiting daimôn well-tended, must be supremely prosperous (eudaimôn). Eudaimonia (often translated by ‘happiness’) is the standard word for prosperity. In everyday Greek it connoted material well-being or good fortune, and was thus taken to be subject to the arbitrary dispensation of gods rather than under a person’s control. Plato, by contrast, makes eudaimonia (q.v. Happiness) depend primarily on the virtues of a rationally governed character. In the Ti. passage he plays on the etymology of eudaimonia (literally, ‘a god-favoured condition’) by associating it with both the traditional idea of a guardian deity and his entirely nontraditional conception of reason as a human being’s normative guardian.
Plato’s principal uses of daimôn have now been covered. Two further well known contexts remain to be discussed. According to Diotima in the Symposium (202d), Eros (q.v. Love) is not a god (theos) because, rather than having good and beautiful things, he is in need and desirous of them. Is he then a mortal? The answer is negative because Eros, being ‘in between mortal and immortal’, is a great daimôn, ‘for everything daimonion’ has this intermediate status. Categorical though this sounds, it should not be taken to be Plato’s theological axiom. As already stated, he likes to use phrases such as ‘theos and/or daimôn’. But, though he generally treats daimons as lesser beings than that which he signifies by theos, his concept of the divine is sufficiently capacious to include daimons as well as more exalted deities. This finding is borne out by the passage in the Apology (26c–8a) in which Socrates refutes his accuser Meletus’ charge that he does not believe in gods at all. Socrates’ argument, in summary, runs thus: Belief in divine matters (daimonia pragmata) entails belief in daimons. Socrates, by Meletus’ admission (referring to the indictment of his introducing ‘novel daimonia’), believes in divine matters. Therefore, Socrates believes in daimons. Daimons are either gods or children of gods, from which it follows that Socrates believes in gods.
Did Socrates take his divine sign to be the voice of a daimôn? No firm answer to this question can be given, but the word daimonion (literally ‘divine thing’) is just as appropriate to a visitation from a fully fledged god, in which case its most likely source for Socrates would be the god Apollo whose oracle initiated his interpretation of his mission to the citizens of Athens.
For further information on daimôn, see Burkert (1985), Greene (1944), Long (2004), McPherran (1996) and Vernant (1980).
DEATH
E. E. Pender
Plato understands that the fear of death (thanatos) afflicts humankind in waking hours and in the terrors of dreams (Republic 330e; Laws 904d). He observes the abhorrence of the underworld familiar in Greek culture from Homeric poetry onwards (R. 386c–387a) and captured in Achilles’ famous lament at the loss of life (Odyssey 11:489). He also offers sensitive and moving reflections on grief, where the advice to those mourning the ‘calamity’ of death is to bear such sorrows as lightly as possible (Menexenus 247c–d; R. 603e–4d). Both Aspasia and Socrates refer to the need for ‘healing’ (Mx. 247d2; R. 604d1–2), but where Aspasia counsels gentle consolation through social practise, Socrates’ prescription for grief is reasoning and proper training of the mind. While both of these responses to death speak in familiar cultural terms, Socrates’ articulation adumbrates the greater achievement of the philosopher explored elsewhere: the realization that death is to be welcomed.
Plato’s redefinition of death is accomplished over various dialogues but key texts are Apology, Phaedo and Timaeus. In Ap. Socrates’ judgement is that death is one of two things: either it is ‘like being nothing’, with no perception of anything, or it is a sort of migration (metoikêsis) of the soul (Ap. 40c6–10). The former state, likened to a dreamless sleep, would be a ‘marvellous benefit’. And the latter experience, likened to travelling abroad to a place of good company, would also be a good thing. Indeed, if a person arriving in the other world is to find true judges and more blessed men, ‘as people say’, then Socrates is willing ‘to die many times’ (Ap. 40c–1c). The idea of migration is taken up in Plato’s fuller examination of death in Phd.
The crux of the Phaedo’s account of death is that it is ‘nothing other than the separation (apallagê) of soul from body’ (Phd. 64c4–5). The state of being dead is therefore where soul and body have come to be apart (cf. Gorgias 524b). Socrates explains (Phd. 64a–7d) that since the body causes desire for physical pleasure and hinders the gaining of wisdom, the philosopher gladly welcomes this ‘release’ (lusis) of his soul. Socrates then presents four individual arguments on the immortality of soul, culminating in the conclusion that due to its essential nature as life force, the soul cannot admit death and so cannot die (Phd. 102a–7b). Socrates’ various arguments recall earlier views on the afterlife, including the poetic conception of Hades and the ‘ancient doctrine’ of reincarnation held by the mystery religions and the followers of Pythagoras (q.v., Phd.). But Plato radically transforms earlier ideas in line with his own teleology and account of abstract reality.
Plato’s thought on death is founded upon his arguments for immortality and his commitment to the forms as the basis of existence, knowledge and goodness. For while all souls will necessarily exist after death, the incarnate and discarnate periods of their eternal lives are revealed as determined by their level of knowledge of the forms and their consequent virtue. When soul is fully rational it will be as separate as possible from the corrupting influence of the physical and will achieve its true nature as an immaterial entity. During human life degrees of separation can be attained through contemplation of abstracts (Pakaluk 2003) but full and permanent withdrawal requires death as the removal of the last obstacle to uninterrupted contact with the forms. This ability of soul in human life to withdraw into itself gives rise to Plato’s striking claim that the life of philosophy is the practise of death (Phd. 64a).
The Ti. shares with Phd. the view that death can allow the soul to return to its primary state, separated from physical matter, and provides a closer account of the process of death itself. While the language of liberation is dominant in Phd. (e.g. 67d, 82e), there is also a more neutral presentation of soul as an object bound in the body (e.g. 81e, 92a1), a dual perspective continued in Ti. The gods create the human being by binding together the parts of the body (Ti. 43a), and then binding the soul within it (69e, 70e, 73c). Conversely, natural death is identified (81d, 89b) as the breaking apart of the bonds of the body which in turn loosen the bonds of the soul. The theme of liberation is recalled as the unloosened soul is said to ‘fly away with pleasure’ (81e). On the inverted perspective of the philosopher, death is to be welcomed as the freeing of soul – the source of the person’s identity. In contrast, the body is to be disposed of as a mere ‘bulk of flesh’ (Lg. 959a–c; Phd. 115d–16a) and funerals are to be conducted with modesty and restraint (Lg. 959d–60a).
Plato’s account of death is extended through his various eschatological myths – Phd., Grg., R., Phaedrus and Lg. bk 10 (see Stalley 2009:188–94) – which depict the afterlife rewards and punishment of souls and support the convictions that the gods are good and the universe just. Plato uses established terms and story patterns in his afterlife myths (Edmonds 2004) but each is subtly crafted to fit its specific dialogic context. Although the myths do not form a composite whole and individually continue to pose significant hermeneutical challenges (Ferrari 2009; Halliwell 2007; Kingsley 1995 on Phd.), nevertheless, they consistently support Plato’s insistence that the consequences of our human behaviour are not to be escaped along with the body (e.g. Phd. 107c5; Lg. 959b). For, each myth depicts how the event of death initiates different experiences depending on the soul’s condition. The souls of philosophers, who have spent their human lives contemplating the forms, will be rewarded by transport out of the physical realm altogether, to an eternity in blessed, divine regions where they will enjoy even greater access to truth (e.g. Phd. 114c; Phdr. 247b–e; Lg. 904e; see also Ti. 42b). Less virtuous souls who are nevertheless ‘curable’, the majority (Phd. 90a), will pass through a series of bodies, experiencing not one but multiple deaths. The death events of these souls cause the afterlife periods during which they pay the penalty for misdeeds, periods which will be followed by new incarnations as opportunities for improvement. Therefore, while physical death is the same for philosophical and other souls, their respective states of being ‘dead’ are very different. Plato’s accounts of death necessarily stretch the normal life/death polarity, a point particularly borne out in the case of evil people.
In his famous image of the cave (q.v.), Plato suggests, in a further striking inversion, that the unenlightened life is itself a state of ‘death’ (Laird 2003; O’Connor 2007). Incurably corrupt people in their Hades-on-earth will then find their souls, upon their actual death event, separating from their bodies and departing to an afterlife of punishment, imaged in the myths as in Tartarus, the place of retribution (Phd. 113e; Grg. 523b; R. 616a). These evil souls, beyond all hope of reform, have experienced their final death in bodily form and will gain no further incarnation. Tartarus is then to be seen as an end state: the souls here remain alive but their death experience is more like a cessation of life, the ‘nothing’ envisaged at Phd. 91b2. Thus, in their lack of any fulfilling life, evil people suffer a more intensive set of ‘deaths’. Moreover, if their incurable vice is recognized during their civic lives, their woes may be compounded by the death penalty (Lg. 735e, 957e). For execution will hasten their physical dissolution and the transition of their soul to Tartarus. However, while it is permissible for the journey to Tartarus to be expedited by human judges, Plato is careful to point out that decisions on the timing of other people’s departures must be left to the gods. Thus suicide – even for a philosopher – is forbidden (Phd. 62a–c).
DESIRE (APPETITE) (EPITHUMIA)
Antonio Chu
There are two theories of how desires bring about intended actions in Plato: one the intellectualism (q.v.) of the Socratic dialogues, the other a theory that makes room for irrational desires bringing about actions in the Republic and other dialogues.
The intellectualist account takes it as a psychological fact that all humans desire the good (i.e. happiness) as our ultimate end (Euthydemus 281c–e; Symposium 204d–5a). This common desire of ours is egoistic: it is our own happiness that we each seek to realize in life. In a given situation, this fundamental desire for the good will naturally give rise to the general desire for whatever is the best means to the agent’s happiness in the given circumstances. Through the agent’s judgement as to what specific action in the given circumstances is the best means to happiness, an indefinite desire for whatever is the best means becomes the executive desire for the particular action which is judged to be the best option available. Executive desires so generated all have a means-ends structure, aiming at a particular action that has the agent’s happiness as its ultimate end (Gorgias 467; Lysis 217). Since these executive desires are shaped jointly by the agent’s general desire for the good and the agent’s judgment concerning which action in the given circumstances will maximize happiness, they are all rational desires for the good (Penner 2005). And given that every executive desire is fashioned in this manner, it will follow that all desire is for the good (Meno 77b–c). Moreover, since it is the real objective good and not the apparent good which we desire (78a), it will further follow that we never desire bad things. Due to misjudgement as to what is the best option in the given situation, the desire generated from this intellectual error may bring about an action that is in fact bad. This action, however, is not the action the agent really wants to do. This explains why tyrants, despite their enormous political power, only manage to do what seems best rather than what they want (Grg. 467a–b). In virtue of their political power, tyrants undoubtedly can bring about whatever action seems best. Unfortunately, by downplaying the relevance of the science of the good in determining what is the best option in a given circumstance, there is little hope that they will ever do what they want, that is, do what will in fact maximize their true happiness (Penner 1991).
Given the egoistic nature of our desires, it is no surprise that no one errs willingly (in securing their own happiness) (Protagoras 357–8). This also rules out any straightforward akrasia (q.v.): acting intentionally contrary to what one judges to be the best option. It is impossible to form an executive desire for an action that the agent does not at the time judge to be the best. Insofar as the agent has an executive desire for the problematic action, it will indicate a momentary lapse in judgement or a desire that results from a temporary change of mind as to what is best (Prt. 356d–e; Men. 97–8). Failure to maximize one’s happiness in one’s action is due strictly to ignorance of what is best. Hence, an unexamined life is not worth living (Apology 38a). For unless we regularly examine and reexamine the web of beliefs we utilize in determining what is the best option in a given situation, it is unlikely that our rational desires will result in actions that actually maximize our happiness. It is therefore important to engage regularly in the type of intellectual conversation made famous by the Socrates of the Socratic dialogues.
The intellectualist account of desire is both a form of psychological egoism and a form of intellectualism. It is the former because it explains every intended action in terms of the agent’s fundamental desire for personal happiness. It is the latter because it maintains that bad actions are not the result of bad motives or the agent’s desire for bad things but the result of intellectual errors and ignorance of what is good.
The theory of desire developed in the R. proceeds on the assumption that, in addition to rational desires which reside in the rational part of the soul (q.v.), there are irrational desires (residing in the appetitive part and the spirited part of the soul). In fact, it is this assumption which enables Plato to divide the soul into parts without committing himself to there being indefinitely many parts (Penner 1971). Since irrational desires are blind to all considerations concerning the good, their strength varies independently of reason’s estimation of the good that will result from their realization. In situations where an irrational desire is in conflict with an opposing rational desire (e.g. the appetitive desire to drink simpliciter opposed by the rational desire not to drink given the belief that not drinking is best for the entire soul), a clear-eyed akrasia will occur whenever the irrational desire is strong enough to overwhelm the rational desire. Consequently, intellectual training alone will not suffice to direct most individuals towards good actions. Nonrational trainings will be required to tame irrational desires and bring their strength in line with the good expected from their realization. See, for instance, the education programme in physical training and music outlined in R. bks 2–3 where habituation replaces intellectual conversation as the means for shaping our desires (at least as far as our irrational desires are concerned).
In the late dialogues, Plato’s sympathy is usually with the theory of desire developed in the R. (although Laws is an exception). Whether this is indeed a superior account of human desire will depend in part on whether it provides a plausible and coherent account of our psychology of action. That this is so has been challenged (see Penner 1990). And given the richness of Plato’s language, there are alternative interpretations of his views on desire (see Anagnostopoulos 2006; Annas 1981; Bobonich 2002; Cooper 1984; Irwin 1995; Price 1995). These alternative interpretations generally see Plato’s postulation of irrational desire as providing (a) a more adequate account of the complexity of human psyche and (b) a more plausible psychology of action. In addition, they generally take his argument for irrational desire in R. bk 2 to be compatible with the attribution of some limited form of means-ends reasoning to the appetitive part of the soul.
DIALECTIC (DIALEKTIKÊ)
Dirk Baltzly
As a method for discovering important philosophical truths, Plato’s dialectic has a degree of fame that is inversely proportional to our evidence for what it actually amounts to. Heidegger confidently pronounced it a ‘philosophical embarrassment’ in a tone that suggests that he thought he knew just what dialectic was. I think he was overconfident. Dialectic is hard to pin down.
The noun ‘dialectic’ (dialektikê) is formed from an adjective (dialektikos) whose broader sense is ‘conversational’. The associated verb can mean ‘to converse’, as well as ‘to sort things’ – an etymological connection noted in Xenophon’s account of Socrates (Mem. IV.5.12). The term seemingly acquired an association with philosophy early on. A fragment from Aristotle credits its discovery to Zeno of Elea (f. 65). Yet we should be cautious in assuming that this means that there is a single philosophical method – dialectic – found in the works of both Zeno and Plato. Indeed, we should be cautious in assuming that when Plato himself writes about dialectic, he always has in mind one and the same thing. The give and take of argument was, and remains, characteristic of philosophy and that give and take can resemble a conversation, even when written and there is but a single author who takes both parts (as in Aquinas’ Summa Theologica). So it is unsurprising that the method that is peculiar to philosophy should be called dialectical or conversational. But this uniformity of terminology may hide a diversity of opinion about what conversational activities are best suited to reveal philosophical truth.
At one time scholars used the term ‘dialectic’ to describe the method of philosophizing that one finds in all Plato’s dialogues – those called early, as well as the middle or later dialogues (Robinson 1953). It is common now to call the method putatively employed by Socrates in the early dialogues the elenchus (q.v.). Perhaps the most influential characterization of Socrates’ method has been Vlastos (1983) (see, however, Scott 2002). It has also become customary to distinguish the ‘method of hypothesis’ that is described or illustrated in Men. 86e–7b and Phaedo 99e–100b (Benson 2003; Van Eck 1994). Currently, when scholars talk about Platonic dialectic it is typically the philosophical method described by Socrates in Republic 531d–9e that they have in mind. The relation of dialectic as it is described in the R. to the method of division illustrated in dialogues such as the Sophist and Statesman is unclear. Plato certainly uses the term ‘dialectic’ in these contexts (Sph. 253d–e; Plt. 285c–6b), yet it is not easy to see how the divisions illustrated in these dialogues’ search for an account of the sophist or the statesman conform to what we are told about dialectic in the R.
The nature of the dialectician’s inquiry in the R. is contrasted with the manner in which mathematicians pursue the truth in the divided line (q.v.) at R. 511a–c. Not only are the methods different, but so too are the mental conditions that result from following them. Let us examine the latter first.
Exercise of the methods characteristic of mathematics results in a cognitive state called dianoia, while the practise of dialectic yields a superior cognitive condition called noêsis. Translations of these terms vary across different authors, for the contrast drawn between them answers to no convenient distinction in English. In the subsequent Platonist tradition (q.v. Neoplatonism), however, dianoia is associated with discursive reasoning which is secondary to noêsis. The latter is a kind of direct, intellectual insight that results from the exercise of the faculty of intellect (nous). In keeping with the conversational sense of dialektikos, Socrates insists that the person who masters dialectic is able to give an account (logos) of the essence (ousia) of each thing, and especially of the good (R. 534b–c).
The method of dialectic is contrasted with that of mathematics on two grounds. First, mathematical reasoning allegedly makes improper use of hypotheses. While dialectic treats hypotheses as hypotheses, using them as steps to ascend to an unhypothetical starting point or first principle (archê), mathematics proceeds from hypotheses to a conclusion (510b4–9, 511b3–c2). Moreover, we are told that dialectic ultimately ‘does away with’ these hypotheses (533c8). Second, mathematical reasoning involves the use of images and things that are visible, while dialectic does not (510d5–11a1, 511b8–c2). It is for this reason that Socrates describes mathematical studies as merely a ‘prelude’ to dialectic (531d7) and they are often referred to as ‘propaedeutic’.
It is not easy to know what dialectic is given this very abstract description. The notion of an unhypothetical first principle is particularly vexed. Is the form of the good, which clearly occupies a special role in the metaphysics of the R., the unhypothetical first principle (Adam 1902)? R. 532a–b describes dialectic as the soul’s journey from visible to invisible, intelligible reality – a journey that ends with the grasp of the good itself. This requires that we assume that dialectic’s end point is also its unhypothetical starting point.
Another related question is whether the method that is described in the middle books of the R. is practised in any of the Platonic dialogues. Some interpreters think so. Consider, for example, that the R. implies that dialectic could turn the unquestioned hypotheses of mathematics into knowledge (533b6–c5). Consider also that in the Parmenides, Parmenides appears to deduce the existence of numbers and the kinds into which they fall from some abstract considerations about what follows if we take up the hypothesis ‘if one is’ (Prm. 143b–4a). One suggestion is that an unhypothetical starting point is a proposition that is established by showing that its denial is self-refuting in a certain sense (Baltzly 1996, 1999; criticized in Bailey 2006).
Roughly, the first strategy that identifies dialectic’s unhypothetical first principle with the good is ontological and equates the unhypothetical aspect of the archê in dialectic with the ontological supremacy of the form of the good (R. 509b6–10). The second strategy is epistemological and treats the unhypothetical character of the dialectician’s archê as a matter of the kind of argument used to establish it.
The dialectician’s avoidance of images or visible things is perhaps easier to understand. In the R., Socrates repeatedly contrasts forms with sensible things and we have seen that he treats dialectic as part of the soul’s turning away from the realm of sense objects or the ‘coping stone’ of such studies as lead the soul upward (R. 534e).
Other puzzles about dialectic in the R. include the relation of what is said there to descriptions of dialectic given in other works. One example is Sph. 253d–e. Here again dialectic is the distinctive method of the philosopher. However, now the dialectician is likened to the grammarian or musician who knows which letters or notes are which, and also which can combine with one another (cf. Philebus 16c–17e). Similarly in Phaedrus 266d, Socrates describes the person who masters the art of collecting particulars into their proper kinds and dividing those kinds ‘along nature’s joints’ as a dialectician. Here, perhaps, the sense of the verb dialegein that means ‘pick out’ is relevant. In neither dialogue, however, do we find mention of an unhypothetical first principle. Moreover, the kinds of dichotomous division practised in dialogues such as the Sph. or the Plt. readily lend themselves to forking diagrams, at least as an aid to memory. Finally, it is unclear how far the method of division concerns itself with forms (Trevaskis 1967).
In spite of these apparent differences, there are also some important commonalities between the description of dialectic in the R. and Plato’s remarks on dialectic and the illustration of the method of division in later dialogues. First, there is the fact that dialectic deals with something intelligible and not with sensibles (R. 531e; Plt. 286a), though it is disputed whether what is divided in the later dialogues are the same things as middle period forms. Second, the dialectician can give an accurate account that can be defended in question and answer (R. 511c; Cra. 390e). The latter point seems to militate against an understanding of dialectic as a state of mental fitness that permits one to simply see a philosophical truth without being able to communicate or defend it in argument (cf. Epistle 7, 341c).
Here, then, are the threads that interpreters attempt to weave together to arrive at an account of Platonic dialectic. If there is a uniform and explicit picture of Platonic philosophy’s distinctive method in the dialogues, then it has remained well hidden for over two and half millennia. In my view, students of Plato do well to treat authoritative pronouncements such as Heidegger’s on ‘Platonic dialectic’ with great caution.
DIVIDED LINE
Nicholas D. Smith
The divided line passage begins at Republic 509d6 by comparing the relative ‘kind and place’ (trans. Grube and Reeve) of the form of the good and the sun to a divided line. All but one of the manuscripts say that the line is to be divided unequally. Contemporary editions and translations prefer ‘unequal’, given the emphasis on proportions throughout the passage.
But scholars have disagreed about the orientation (vertical, horizontal or diagonal) of the line and also about which of the subsections described in more detail in the passage should be supposed to be represented, and by which lengths. The literature on the line is perhaps more extensive than on any other passage in Plato’s works. Lafrance (1986) provides a 275-page annotated bibliography (in French) of everything published on this single passage from 1804 to 1984. Many new articles and sections of books have been added to this literature since then. For detailed discussions with citations of all of the scholarly debates about this passage, see Smith (1996). As for orientation, it seems decisive that some subsections are said to be higher than others (see R. 511a6 and 511d8), which rules out a horizontal line, and since no right–left distinctions are made, most representations depict the line as vertical, rather than diagonal.
The relative lengths of the different sections are still debated. Plato first claims that the lengths of the line represent different degrees of clarity and obscurity (saphêneia kai asapheia:509d9) and also truth and untruth (alêtheia te kai mê:510a9), which is compatible with the longer sections representing more of the positives but also with representing more of the negatives of these comparisons. See the debate between Proclus and Plutarch, as reported in Denyer (2007:293); Denyer himself thinks that the choice is ‘arbitrary’. In Plato’s concluding remarks (at 511e3), however, only the positives are mentioned, so the proportions appear to indicate degrees of clarity and truth represented by each section of the line.
Immediately after the first division, Plato subdivides the original sections in the same proportion as in the first division (509d6–7). Let the line be AE (with A at the top), the original division at C, and subdivisions at B on the top section and D on the bottom section; the overall proportions of the line will now be (in algebraic notation) AC/CE = AB/BC = CD/DE, with AB the highest and longest of the subsections, and DE as the shortest at the bottom.
A mathematical consequence of this construction is that the two middle subsections (BC, CD) are equal in length. Scholars debate whether this equality is significant. On one hand, the same sorts of objects (particular sensibles) are mentioned in relation to both of the relevant subsections: as the originals at CD of the images at DE (509e1–10a3) and as the images at BC of the originals at AB (510b4–5, 510b7–9, 510d5–6, 510e1–11a1, 511a6–7, 511c1, 511c7–8). Moreover, given Plato’s own proficiency in geometry, it would be strange to see him perform an operation that (surely he knew) would require the middle subsections to be equal – but this is precisely what happens at 533e7–4a5, in which Plato recalls the earlier proportion in such a way as to switch the two middle terms in the proportion (which would now be, in algebraic notation: AC/CE = AB/CD = BC/DE). However, there are also good reasons for resisting making the equality a significant feature of the line’s construction. For one thing, Plato never explicitly mentions this consequence. But also recall that the proportions are supposed to represent differences in the degrees of clarity and truth in the different subsections of the line. Even if we grant that the same objects belong at both of the middle segments, it is clearly not the case that Plato thinks that what is represented at BC (assigned to thought (dianoia) at 511d8) is no more clear than the segment (assigned to belief (pistis) at 511e1) immediately below it. Indeed, Plato later (at 533d5) explicitly says that dianoia is clearer than doxa which, according to 510a9, would appear to be represented by either the higher only or else both of the lower two subsections.
Still others have claimed that the second highest level (BC) should be associated with images, but not sensible ones; instead, some scholars claim that the ‘mathematical intermediates’ of the sort Aristotle says (at Metaphysics 1.987b15–18) Plato included in his philosophy were intended for BC. Though still defended by many scholars, this view has the defect of basing an interpretation on something that Plato himself fails to mention in the text itself. Complicating this debate further is the interpretive business of how exactly the image of the cave is supposed to ‘map’ onto the distinctions made in the line passage, and how many sets of objects are to be found in that subsequent simile, and in the theory of higher education that follows it in bk VII. At any rate, the highest subsection represents the practise of dialectic, which is associated only with forms and reasoning up to a first principle and only then down to conclusions (511b3–c2); the second highest represents the mathematical disciplines, which use images and hypothesize forms, drawing conclusions directly from these hypotheses, but failing to link them with an unhypothetical starting point (510c1–11a1, 511c3–d5). The second lowest subsection is associated with visible particulars (510a5–6), and the lowest subsection is associated with shadows and reflections of the sensible particulars (509e1–10a3).
In the closing sentences of the divided line simile, Plato arranges each of the subsections in the proportion and now associates each one with a distinct ‘condition in the soul’ (pathêma en tê psuchê – 511d7). Scholars remain unresolved on the exact relation of these to the cognitive powers (dunameis) discussed at the end of bk 5. Of these powers, ignorance seems not to be represented on the line at all, whereas knowledge (epistêmê) is associated either with the highest subsection (associated at 511d8 with understanding (noêsis)) or with both of the top two subsections, and opinion (doxa), as I have already said, with either the higher or both of the lower subsections.
EDUCATION
Samuel Scolnicov
Education, as a direct consequence of his ethics, is, implicitly or explicitly, the central concern of Plato’s thought. Plato aimed at providing the epistemological and metaphysical basis for his Socrates’ educational convictions, as he interpreted them. Traditionally, the aim of Greek education (q.v. Education as background) was aretê (human excellence, often somewhat misleadingly translated as ‘virtue’), which the Sophists claimed to teach as a technique. Socrates opposed this view, since any technique is double-edged: the best doctor is also the best poisoner and the best guardian is also the best thief. But aretê cannot be misused and cannot be passed on from master to pupil. Plato’s Socrates insists throughout on the personal character of learning. ‘Answer as you think’, he demands (Gorgias, Meno, Euthydemus). Even a wrong answer is preferable to an insincere one (Men., Tht.) Thrasymachus, Socrates’ bitter adversary in Republic bk 1, complains that Socrates always asks and never answers; and when he does, he is always suspect of speaking ironically and dialectically.
Plato’s Socrates summarized his educational aim in one sentence: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being’ (Apology 38a). This he called ‘the care of one’s soul’ (Ap.), cleansing the soul of contradictions in thought and deed (Grg.). Socrates’ main educational tool was the elenchus, the confrontation of his interlocutor with the logical and, more often, emotional consequences of his received opinions. The horror of contradiction is natural to the soul, but is seldom immediately felt. Once the soul is rid of its inner contradictions, the truth will follow of itself, so Socrates believed. (Objective) reality is in the soul, but in an indistinct manner, distorted by false and muddled opinions.
In Grg., the crucial distinction is explicitly made between pepisteukenai (having been persuaded) and memathekenai (having learned). To have learned is to be able to give a proper account of the matter at hand; to be persuaded is to be convinced of it for reasons extraneous to the matter. In Men., the parallel distinction is drawn between doxa (opinion) and epistêmê (knowledge, in the strict sense). The ‘geometry lesson’ in Men. and the simile of the midwife in Tht. demonstrate this distinction. The interlocutor is enjoined to recollect what he somehow already knows in an indistinct manner. In recollection (anamnêsis, q.v.), the content arising in the mind is not perceived as something new, but gradually recognized as if it had been in the mind beforehand, like remembering something that has been forgotten and is recognized as such. Anamnêsis, however, is not in the proposal of answers. These can, for example, be suggested by Socrates, quoted from poets, presented as dreams. Anamnêsis involves working through the reasons for or against the view entertained, until it is abandoned or else transformed from opinion into knowledge. (Cf. Men. 82e12: ‘Mark how he will go on remembering’, Tht. 160e3: ‘Shall we then say this is your newborn?’)
Education as a personal project is necessarily a product of erôs (q.v., Love) in all its manifestations. Aristophanes in the Symposium introduces the theme of man’s incompleteness, his awareness of it, and his longing for what he lacks. Socrates transfers Aristophanes’ insight from the natural to the metaphysical plane: a person is not incomplete, but imperfect. Education is the process of helping someone to reach the perfection that is his, but not yet grasped.
The R. and the Laws see the state as primarily an educational institution, whose function is the promotion of eudaimonia, human flourishing (not quite the modern concept of ‘happiness’, with its subjective connotations), as a result of aretê. Human excellence or perfection is his rationality. But reason will arise only in those souls that are already predisposed to it (R.). Early education is the nurturing of reason by irrational means: gymnastics and music (including poetry). Much importance is given to the educational role of myth and art. But Plato is also wary of the force of poetry, and of art in general; hence the necessity of careful censorship (R.; Lg.).
Higher education in the R. is for the future guardians and philosophers, in the Lg. for all, in the measure of their capacities. It is education in the five mathematical sciences (arithmetic, plane geometry, stereometry, kinematics (‘astronomy’) and acoustics (‘harmonics’)). Mathematics is the paradigmatic science, the science of structure. It leads to the idea of the good, viz. the idea of the nontemporal, well ordered, self-contained teleological system of ideas, of necessity imperfectly exhibited in this sensible, moving world.
Plato sets himself in R. bk 2 the task of showing that justice, as hierarchy under reason, is desirable for the soul and for the state not only for its consequences but also, and foremost, for itself. Hence, eudaimonia is not in the consequences of one’s actions, for these are beyond one’s control. But aretê itself has no masters and the god is not to blame (R. bk 10 617e3–5). Aretê is in the êthos, one’s moral character and the locus of one’s moral responsibility, not in what happens but in one’s relation to what happens. The end of education is the development of this êthos informed by reason.
In the famous simile of the cave (q.v.), education is a long and arduous process. The prisoner is taken out of the cave against his will and complains that the shadows were much clearer than what he is now shown. Education is not ‘like putting sight into unseeing eyes’. It is turning the eye of the soul, together with the whole soul, from the sensible to the intelligible, a Gestalt switch from everyday, instrumental to ideal, normative rationality.
In the final myth of R. bk 10, the first soul to choose its new life had lived a life of demotic aretê, by custom, without philosophia. In matter of overt behaviour, demotic aretê is not different from true aretê. But it has no true moral worth. No one in that myth achieves true aretê. Perhaps only Socrates could, in Plato’s eyes. Thus, in Lg., Plato must satisfy himself with leaving a detailed prescription for the good life in the good city, like the itinerant doctor of the Politicus. These laws are introduced by preambles, so as to achieve obedience through understanding of their instrumental civic advantages, insofar as possible. Even the well intentioned rulers will not be the philosophers of the R. and will have had neither their vision of the good nor their understanding of the normativity of reason. They will, at most, be able to imitate the good order of the heavens and educate their citizens according to it.
For further reading, see Jaeger (1939–44), Nettleship (1935), Scolnicov (1988) and Stenzel (1928).
ELENCHUS (CROSS-EXAMINATION, REFUTATION)
Harold Tarrant
Elenchus is a name now applied to the arguments most characteristic of Socrates in the so-called early dialogues. Indeed, its presence has been used as a developmentalist criterion for a dialogue’s inclusion in this group (Vlastos 1994:29–37). The word derives from the Greek elenchos, meaning a ‘test’ to determine how sound something or somebody is, and is closely related to a verb for ‘refute’ exelenchein. The simple verb elenchein may be found in this meaning, though more often as ‘put to the test’. While it is unclear whether Socrates preferred to characterize his philosophic activity as elenchus, Plato’s dialogues show that such terminology was in widespread use in his intellectual world for a variety of verbal challenges to somebody considered to be an opponent in a debate.
Regardless of Plato’s use of the term, it is clear that his Socrates adopts a distinctive approach to refutation that merits some technical name to describe it. The approach is directed at both the moral views held by opponents and their moral integrity. In the words of Plato’s Nicias at Laches 187e, Lysimachus does not know that whoever joins in a close discussion with Socrates, regardless of the original topic of conversation, must necessarily ‘not cease to be dragged around and around by him in argument until he is drawn into giving an account of himself – both how he now lives and how he has lived his past life’. Plato regularly shows Socrates manoeuvring an interlocutor first into some kind of moral discussion, and then into revealing – and indeed seeing problems with – the false moral assumptions upon which his life is founded. The procedure is founded on Socrates’ conviction that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ (Apology 38a), and the falsehoods standardly relate to areas in which interlocutors were highly regarded, whether a professional area (e.g. rhetoric, sophistry, ‘musical’ performance), or a socially prized quality such as one of the virtues. Though Socrates may deny that he can improve upon another’s account (e.g. Charmides 175e; La. 200e), he compares favourably not only because his own image does not rely on claims to moral virtue or moral knowledge but also because it is obvious that he has long been scrutinizing the issues as they apply to him. Conceived as I have described it so far, ‘elenchus’ does not apply to all Socratic questioning, only cases involving claims to social or intellectual standing, so the slave in Meno or young men in Lysis and Euthydemus are not seen as targets of ‘the elenchus’. Once an interlocutor has been engaged in debate Socrates elicits a premise that he challenges. The challenge comes not by direct confrontation but by eliciting from the interlocutor unforced admissions that serve as further premises, and which, taken together, can be shown to entail the contrary of the premise challenged. The consequences are usually spelled out clearly and politely, so that the person being refuted is given no good reason to attack Socrates for hostile conduct and is more likely therefore to blame himself, as Socrates points out on Protagoras’ behalf at Theaetetus 167e–8a. As the Alcibiades I (112e–13e) fully argues, free and honest admissions leading to the refutation of an interlocutor reflect his own views, not those of Socrates. While it is not necessarily the challenged proposition that is refuted, since any one of the premises might be faulty, all admissions are assumed to coincide with the interlocutor’s beliefs, so that his total set of moral beliefs is found wanting and any special claims to moral expertise are thereby undermined.
Since Vlastos’ seminal article (1983) much of the discussion about the elenchus centres on whether Socrates is committed to its use as a vehicle for the refutation or demonstration of moral theses. Central to this question are the arguments with Polus in the Gorgias, where Socrates claims that (a) the truth is never refuted (Grg. 473b) and (b) it has been demonstrated that his claim was correct (479e). The former would not in itself justify certainty that anything left unrefuted must be true, and for Socrates it justifies only the assumption that it is so (509a–b). The latter would be more meaningful if it were clear that demonstration were used in its modern philosophic sense, but Polus has already used the verb at 470d2 for what history can ‘demonstrate’. Besides, the demonstration-claim is followed by ‘So if this is true . . .’, a conditional clause that would be redundant if the truth had indeed been demonstrated. Similarly, at 509b, the conditional clause ‘so if it is so’ confirms that Socrates is not making a knowledge claim, and that there remains scope for challenging positions that have survived all attempts to refute them. Grg. has less to do with the irrefutable truth or falsehood of moral propositions than with which of them may be rationally adopted as the foundations of our public lives. Conversely, outside Grg. where philosophic and rhetorical refutation compete for legitimacy, Socrates gives little hint that he has reflected deeply on precisely what the elenchus achieves or the conditions that enable it to work (Vlastos 1994:34–6). The consequence of the paucity of what one might call ‘meta-elenctic’ outside the Grg. means that articles on individual elenchi (several examples in Scott 2002) are often more rewarding than those offering an overall theory.
One constant, however, is the conviction that the truth is best approached in discussions involving at least two good minds, as Protagoras 348c–e demonstrates. When two perspectives are brought to bear on an issue it is far less likely that conclusions reached will be fatally flawed by false admissions arising from an individual’s personal viewpoint (Tarrant 2006). That people view things differently in the heat of the moment is argued at Prt. 352d–8e, where moral lapses are explained as temporary misjudgements. We know from Thucydides, History 3.82 (Price 2001) that pressures led to radical misuse of moral vocabulary in Socrates’ time. Such misuse is reflected in the extreme positions adopted by some interlocutors, for example Euthyphro 4a and Grg. 482e–95d. The temporary nature of moral mistakes (unlike moral knowledge) is underlined by such passages as Euthphr. 11b–c, Alc. 1. 116e–17a and Men. 95c–6b.
Hence, Socrates sees himself as offering the divine service of reawakening people to their moral selves through elenchos and close examination (Ap. 29d–31a), as if restoring their minds to the natural condition. Vlastos (1983:52–5) accordingly saw not only Socrates as having access to the moral propositions required to negate an interlocutor’s mistake but also the interlocutor himself. The systematic manner in which he built such requirements into his theory finds little support today, but the naturalness of moral knowledge is implied by the metaphors of recollection and giving birth that are applied to Socrates-induced discovery in dialogues that Vlastos placed later. If moral awareness is the default position for human beings, and ignorance an aberration, then one might indeed expect an interlocutor to recognize some moral truths unsystematically, and the seasoned philosopher to recognize most of them, seeing them more as an organic whole.
EPISTEMOLOGY (KNOWLEDGE)
Mi-Kyoung Lee
Nowhere in Plato’s writings does he articulate and unequivocally endorse a theory or definition of knowledge. Admittedly, the Theaetetus is devoted to the question, what is knowledge? Yet, because the dialogue is aporetic – that is, contains a rejection of all three conceptions of knowledge considered – it is controversial what, if anything, Plato intended us to conclude from that dialogue. Even so, there are indications in the Tht. as well as in earlier dialogues, especially the Apology, Meno, Phaedo and the Republic, of Plato’s views about knowledge. The following theses about knowledge are found in these dialogues: (a) knowledge is, above all, expert knowledge, which allows its possessor to give an explanatory account of things, and which gives one the ability to withstand critical examination; (b) coming to acquire knowledge is a kind of ‘recollection’ (q.v.); (c) the primary objects of knowledge are the forms (q.v.); (d) knowledge ideally comes with an understanding of the full causes of things, which would require a teleological explanation of why things came to be for the best, or for some good; (e) finally, some scholars believe, Plato defines knowledge as a state involving true judgement with an explanatory account; others however think that he reserves for knowledge of the forms themselves a different, self-certifying kind of knowledge.
In the ‘Socratic’ or aporetic dialogues, very little is said about methodological or epistemological matters; Plato’s character, Socrates, does not explain what he is doing, or explain what is needed for success in the inquiries about virtue and happiness he undertakes. Nor does Socrates take any pains to spell out what knowledge is, and how it differs from true belief. What we get, instead, is Socrates’ keen interest in coming to have knowledge – something he denies possessing – about how one ought to live. He displays little interest in asking, for its own sake, what knowledge is; rather, he is interested in finding out whether anyone has knowledge of what the good life is (Ap. 20e–4a, 29b–30b). As he makes clear in dialogues like the Euthyphro, Men. and Laches, he expects that one should be able to give an account of concepts like virtue, piety, courage and justice, one that can survive scrutiny, that is, Socrates’ elenchus or ‘testing’ of his interlocutors (q.v.). Typically, the dialogues end with the interlocutors giving up, and admitting puzzlement and confusion.
In the Men., however, Plato has Socrates address the question whether coming to have knowledge is really possible: if we do not know a thing, why should we think that we will be able to discover anything about it? The puzzle has the following form: if one does not know what one is looking for, how will one know what to look for? And how will one know it, if one should find it? The answer is that the inquiry is guided by one’s conception and understanding of what one is looking for. These fall short of knowledge, but are sufficient to guide one nonetheless, and help one to recognize the correct answer, when one finds it. To demonstrate how successful inquiry occurs, Socrates offers a demonstration using a slave boy, who, asked questions by Socrates, is prompted to consider and reject two incorrect answers to a geometry problem, and then arrives at and recognizes as correct the true answer. Socrates calls this ‘recollection’, by which he seems to mean that we possess innate knowledge or true beliefs.
The Men. also explores the distinction between knowledge and true belief. Socrates compares true beliefs to the statues of Daedalus, a famous sculptor: like Daedalus’ statues, true beliefs ‘are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man’s mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why’, that is, why they are true (Men. 97e–8a). Whether Plato means to endorse Socrates’ claim that knowledge is true belief ‘tied down with a reckoning (or account, logismos) of the reason why’ is not clear – since in the R., Socrates seems to think that knowledge is not a species of true belief at all.
In the central books of the R., Plato has Socrates argue that knowledge is only possible if one has a grasp of the forms. With this argument, Plato makes an attack on the ‘sight-lovers’, who deny that anything universal can be said about what makes things beautiful, just or good, and insist on the multiplicity of beauty, justice or goodness. They cannot have knowledge, because knowledge requires a grasp of the forms, that is, minimally, of what all things of a kind have in common, and what it is to be a thing of that kind. Plato illustrates the contrast between knowledge and reality in a series of famous analogies: the sun (R. bk 6.507a–9c; q.v.), the line (R. bk 6.509c–11e; q.v.) and the cave (R. bk 7.514a–21b; q.v.). Scholars disagree about whether Plato endorses, in these analogies, the idea that knowledge is foundational, that is, that there is a special kind of certain or self-certifying knowledge (concerning the form of the good and other forms) upon which all other knowledge is based. It is clear, however, that Plato retains Socrates’ idea that knowledge derives from dialectic – an idea present already in the Men., endorsed in the R. and more fully developed in the rich conceptions of dialectic and division in the Sophist and Politicus.
Finally, in the Tht., Socrates and his interlocutors Theodorus and Theaetetus examine and ultimately reject three accounts of knowledge: (a) perception, (b) true judgement and (c) true judgement with an account. Knowledge as perception is linked with Protagorean relativism and a thesis of Heraclitean flux and variability, both of which Socrates proceeds to reject. Knowledge as true judgement is quickly dispatched by means of the example of a jury that is correctly persuaded of the truth by a good lawyer, but still lacks knowledge of the truth since they are not eyewitnesses. Knowledge as true judgement with an account appears to some scholars identical with the thesis put forward in Men. (97e–98a); however, Socrates and his interlocutors are here unable to find a kind of account which, when added to true judgement, would transform it into knowledge, because one falls into the problem whether this account is knowledge or opinion, and hence into infinite regress. Thus, the Tht. presents an interpretive puzzle about whether Plato thinks knowledge is something besides these options, or whether he has left clues for the astute reader about why Socrates rejects an option which should continue to be taken seriously as a definition of knowledge. Solving the puzzle most likely requires, as Cornford suggested, that one take into account the ways that the Tht. looks forward to the Sph. and other late dialogues.
Despite the lack of clearly endorsed doctrines, Plato’s dialogues are full of rich and imaginative ideas about the nature of knowledge and are the source of the following seminal ideas, whether endorsed by Plato or not: that knowledge might be innate, that knowledge can only be of universals (i.e. of forms), that knowledge is foundational, that mathematics and geometry offer a paradigm of what knowledge might look like, that knowledge must be a science that offers teleological explanations, and finally, that knowledge is true belief or judgement with an explanation or justification.
For further readings, see Benson (2000), Fine (1990), Fine (1992), Lee (2005), Lee (2008), Matthews (2008), Polansky (1992), Scott (2006), Sedley (2004), Taylor (2008) and Vlastos (1983).
ERISTIC (see Antilogy and eristics)
ERÔS (see Love)
ETHICS
Richard Foley
Plato’s ethical theory is eudaimonist, for he, like most ancient philosophers, holds that all good actions aim at happiness (q.v., eudaimonia) or its Greek equivalent, faring well (Meno 87c–8d; Republic 621c–d). He additionally believes that the human virtues (or excellences, aretê; q.v.) govern the attainment of happiness, and consequently much of his ethical and pedagogical writing passionately advocates cultivating virtue. The precise relation between virtue and happiness is disputed (Brickhouse and Smith 1994:103–36), although many take Plato to believe that the virtues are necessary and sufficient for happiness (Irwin 1977a; Vlastos 1991a). Plato’s further view on the relation between happiness and pleasure is more controversial. Plato does reject hedonism if pleasure is identified with the satisfaction of the appetites, but it is challenging to harmonize his opposition to hedonism in the Gorgias (500d) with its endorsement in the Protagoras (351b–4e). Irwin (1995:78–126) offers an important discussion of this topic, and advocates distinguishing two versions of hedonism.
Beyond this basic commitment to eudaimonism, Plato’s ethical theory frustrates attempts at systematic, unified, comprehensive treatment. Scholars often divide his work into two distinct groups. This division generally correlates both with the division of Plato’s works into earlier and middle periods, but also with the exegetical and theoretical methodologies that are brought to bear on the dialogues. It is also often cast, though unproductively, as a distinction between the historical Socrates (q.v.) and the mature, emancipated Plato.
Plato’s early dialogues present his readers with some important challenges regarding the reconstruction of his ethical theory. These dialogues contain a welter of historical, biographical, dialogical and literary details that substantially complicate their ethical message. Additionally vexing is that although many end aporetically, these conversations are richly insightful and guided with skill, which suggests that they may contain an implicit ethical doctrine. There is widespread speculation that one element of Plato’s early ethical theory is ‘intellectualism’ (q.v.), the doctrine that the virtues are a type of knowledge. The further assumption that Plato thinks virtue is knowledge of the good specifically leads some to argue that the virtues are not just necessarily coincident, but in fact identical (Ferejohn 1982; Penner 1973).
The ethical position of Plato’s early works is distinctive for advocating a method (q.v.) which it prioritizes above any specific moral tenets. Plato depicts philosophy as simultaneously a process of critical self-examination and an investigation into the definitions of central moral terms like ‘piety’, ‘courage’ and ‘temperance’. Socrates repeatedly contrives to shift the conversation to an evaluation of the life led by his interlocutors (Laches 187e–8c). The ensuing Socratic elenchus usually results not only in the refutation of proposed definitions but also in the erosion of the putative expert’s original self-confidence. In contrast, Socrates appears as a paragon of virtue, perhaps because he has thought critically about his actions (Vlastos 1983), though such direct self-examination on Socrates’ part is rarely depicted by Plato. Socrates asserts that this examination is necessary (Apology 38a) and sufficient (Ap. 41c–d) for happiness, which offers confirmation for intellectualism: philosophical activity yields knowledge, which is identical to virtue, which is itself necessary and sufficient for happiness.
It must be stressed, however, that the emphasis for Plato is on Socrates’ method. Plato himself raises doubts about the desirability or even possibility of deriving moral practise from philosophical theory, but this is not to say that Plato is a moral sceptic (Kraut 1992c:3). Instead, he is an ethical reformer, seeking to liberate normative terms from an earlier aristocratic tradition that valorizes wealth, strength and power, to something we would recognize as genuinely moral. Some of the tenets of this new ethical theory are so surprising that they are often labelled paradoxical: the virtues are unitary (Prt. 329b–d; La. 198d–9e), virtue is a type of knowledge (La. 199c–e), akrasia (q.v.) is impossible (Grg. 459c–60b; Men. 77a–8b), it is better to suffer than to do injustice (Grg. 469c), it is never just to mistreat another, even in retaliation (Cri. 49c–d) and a worse person cannot harm a better (Ap. 30d).
Progress in ethics can perhaps be made through Socratic inquiry into ordinary moral beliefs. Pursuing a strategy similar to one Rawls later named ‘the method of reflective equilibrium’, Socratic dialogues seek to expose and diminish inconsistencies between our general moral principles and our ethical convictions in specific cases (Rawls 1971). Many dialogues make progress in this regard, since early definitions are improved in compelling ways over the course of the conversation. Yet puzzlingly, all end aporetically, progressive trajectory notwithstanding (Charmides; Euthyphro; Hippias Major; La.). The reader should build on this preliminary work by adopting the Socratic method, in which case the aporetic conclusion conceals the hortatory aspect to Plato’s writing. It should be noted, however, that Socrates defends his ethical views more explicitly in some early dialogues (Ap.; Cri.).
The ethical works of Plato’s middle and late periods reveal a shift to a more assertive style, although Plato will sometimes employ contrasting speeches or intermittent use of the Socratic method (R. bk 1; Symposium; Phaedrus). This transformation also correlates with an alteration in the techniques of exegesis and evaluation used by the scholarly community. Theoretically minded ethicists object that the Socratic method of striving for consistency is inappropriately deferential to one’s starting point. Instead, normative questions require a philosophical account of the good (q.v.). This approach to Platonic ethics emphasizes R. above other dialogues. Bks 6 and 7, specifically the analogies of ship, sun, line and the allegory of the cave (q.v.), explain the source from which ethical claims derive their authority. On this theory, the good is prior to virtue (Santas 1985:223), which means that aporetic discussions can be resolved through the study of the good. Some argue that the problems encountered in the earlier dialogues led Plato to this new theory of the good (Irwin 1977a:132–76; Kraut 1992c:10). However, any understanding of the good itself presupposes elaborate metaphysical and epistemological theories (Kraut 1992:6; Santas 1985:223). The allegation that this ethical theory is empty for failing to show how to derive ethical maxims from abstruse metaphysics spans the history of philosophy (Aristotle Metaphysics 1096b8–7a13; Popper 1962:274–5n32).
Reconciling Plato’s diverse writings on ethics thus continues to pose challenges. Although developmentalism (q.v.) provides one avenue for thinking about this issue, it is difficult to accept that the lively debates of the early works could have been supplanted by the abstract and relatively uncritical theorizing of the later works. Plato’s enigmatic shift from moral critic to dogmatic theoretician thus endures as one of the most compelling topics in Plato scholarship.
EUDAIMONIA (see Happiness)
EXCELLENCE (VIRTUE) (ARETÊ)
Naomi Reshotko
‘Excellence’ is one of the two most common English translations of the Greek word aretê. In translating Plato’s dialogues, the English word ‘virtue’ is also used. Translators tend to use the two English words ‘excellence’ and ‘virtue’ in distinctive, although not unrelated, contexts and their different uses can be understood to capture a primary and a more derivative notion of aretê for Plato. There is discussion of the excellence of a tool or a craft in many dialogues. The excellence of a tool or craft is that which enables it to do what it alone is designed to do and also that which it does best. This task of a tool or craft is also distinguished as its proper function (ergon): the excellence of a knife is the sharpness that enables it to cut (i.e. to perform the function of cutting) and the excellence of cobbling is its ability to make shoes. The rationale would seem to be that the tool or craft becomes excellent when it can excel at its proper function.
The proper function of a human being, which can in turn be honed and perfected, is that person’s aretê – human excellence – and which concerns the soul (q.v.). In Republic 1 (353a1–4a4), the function of the soul is ruling, deliberating and living. Justice (q.v.) is that excellence of the soul by which it rules well, and insofar as it does so, it lives well and is happy. The word ‘virtue’, as the translation for aretê, would, in the case of the human being, point to that aspect or part of the human being – the soul – that can be honed and by the improvement of which a human becomes excellent or virtuous. The good human being is the excellent one and is the virtuous one – but the good human being, we would also say, ‘has’ virtue.
Some dialogues, as just seen, are marked by the character Socrates’ preoccupation with the relationship between aretê and eudaimonia. Plato seems here to make an effort to isolate the relationship between virtue – understood as the excellence of the function that is particular to humans – and human flourishing. There is, to his mind, a very important connection between being virtuous and flourishing or, to state it more boldly, between being virtuous and being happy. There has been extensive debate over what exactly this relationship is. That virtue is sufficient for happiness, that it is necessary for happiness, that virtue and happiness (q.v.) are identical, that, not virtue, but, virtuous behaviour is sufficient for happiness, and that the pursuit of virtue, while it does not guarantee happiness, is the only way to purposefully pursue happiness are all claims that have been attributed to Plato or to the historical Socrates via the exegesis of Plato’s texts.
Since ‘virtue’, a burdened and storied Latinized term taken to be a moral term often stands in for the Greek aretê, it is evident that aretê is understood by many to be a moral term as well. But, it is not obvious that Plato always (or, some would say, ever) uses aretê with a moral tone. It is widely agreed that a subgroup of dialogues, often referred to as ‘Socratic’ on the assumption that they represent the views of either the historical Socrates or Plato during a period in which he was under the influence of Socrates, use the word aretê to refer only to knowledge. Socrates, who asserts that the only thing that ever benefits us is wisdom (Euthydemus 281e2–5; Meno 87d4–8, 88c6–d1), says that aretê always benefits us (Men. 87e3) and even says that aretê is wisdom (Men. 88c4–d3; Ferejohn 1984:107). While it is argued that Plato intended to single out a particular kind of knowledge that might be associated with consequent moral behaviour, there is also support for the notion that, according to Plato, all knowledge is equally important and equally a component of virtue.
Plato discusses several human character traits under the umbrella of arête. While he singles out five ‘virtues’ (sophia or wisdom, sôphrosynê or temperance, andreia or bravery, dikaiosunê or justice, hosiotês or piety), and addresses them individually in particular dialogues, in the R., he narrows it down to four ‘demotic’ virtues (omitting piety). One central doctrine of the Socratic dialogues (particularly Protagoras and Laches) is known alternatively as ‘the unity of virtue’ or the ‘the unity of the virtues’, depending on one’s reading of the text. Those who adopt the ‘unity of the virtues’ find Socrates claiming that a person cannot have only one of the virtues, but each person is, for example, if brave then also wise, etc. (Vlastos 1972). ‘The unity of virtue’ finds the claim to be that all of these are names for one and the same thing (Penner 1973). That thing is taken to be the psychological state that causes virtuous behaviour. These virtuous behaviours are then distinguished by context: bravery is what virtuous behaviour looks like on the battlefield, temperance is what virtuous behaviour looks like at the banquet table, etc. Thus, the unity of virtue thesis resonates with the notion that virtue is all knowledge and that virtuous behaviour is simply knowledgeable behaviour and wise people on the battlefield act bravely while wise people in the courts act justly.
It is widely recognized that Plato brings the notion of aretê, here best understood as ‘excellence’, into his conception of justice and the structure of his republic. The kallipolis – the fine city proposed in the R. – is just because in it each person does that to which he or she is best suited and that at which he or she excels. The people are, in turn, placed into three classes according to their interests and abilities and each of those classes as a collective does that at which it excels. Here, rather than there being some generic human excellence that is the function of humans generally, Plato is looking upon the function and excellence of individual people in the same way he looks at the function and excellence of tools. Knives are made of certain materials that promote their function and allow them to be excellent at cutting. Likewise, retailers have specific physical and mental abilities that make them suited to and allow them to excel as retailers whereas farmers have a different and complementary set. Those who should become auxiliaries and guardians are distinguished by their mental and physical abilities as well. Thus, the republic fails when its individual members do jobs to which they are not well suited but most of all when the classes no longer interact according to their excellences. It is central to the guardians’ excellence that they look out for the interests of the republic as a whole, while it is central to the craftspeoples’ excellence that they concern themselves with their own affairs and trust the guardians to deal with larger issues.
FORMS (EIDOS) (IDEA)
Kenneth Sayre
Perhaps the best known doctrine associated with Plato is his so-called theory of forms. Yet that theory is never fully articulated in his extant writings. It has even been questioned whether Plato’s thoughts about forms constituted an actual theory (Sayre 1995b). A consequence is that there is considerable disagreement about the contents of the account in question. This article summarizes the account’s main features without attempting to arbitrate disputed issues.
Aristotle reports (Metaphysics 1078b12–15) that Plato was led to his theory of forms by being persuaded that knowledge requires permanent objects and that sensible things are always in flux. To meet this requirement, Plato posited eternal and incomposite forms as proper objects of thought. Forms thus are both immutable and entirely what they are, without parts to admit opposing features. A plausible example is the form justice (q.v.), which (setting aside for now the problem of self-predication) is wholly just and in no respect otherwise.
Another consequence is that forms can be presented immediately to thought or intellect, whereas particular things are presented only in sense perception (q.v.). Thus forms can be known as they are, in and by themselves, independently of their relation to sense particulars.
Forms and sense particulars are related by participation (q.v.), whereby particulars take on determinate properties. Thus, sense particulars (otherwise in constant flux) become beautiful (just, large, etc.) by participating in the corresponding form (beauty, etc.). Whereas forms are what they are independently of other things (are absolute), features of particulars are caused by participation.
As a result of this causal dependency, sensible things also share names with forms in which they participate. In effect, forms serve as paradigms for naming sense particulars that participate in them. Thus we find Socrates in the Euthphro saying he must know what the form holiness is in order to tell whether a particular act should be called holy (cf. Allen 1971).
These several tenets comprise what is often described as a ‘two world ontology’. On one hand are forms which are absolute, wholly real (nowise other than they are) and knowable by thought. On the other are sense particulars which are dependent on forms for their properties, are subject to opposing properties and can be apprehended by sensation but not by intellect. Due to these differences, forms are said to be ontologically separate from the world of sense experience.
These are the main tenets of the account associated with Plato’s so-called middle dialogues, notably in the Phaedo, Republic and Symposium. As it stands, this theory raises various problems which have been subject to extensive debate. One is the issue of what participation amounts to. This shows up in the question of what things have corresponding forms.
The theory maintains that things are called by the same name (or described by the same predicate) by virtue of participating in the same forms. Conversely, a single form is involved whenever we assign the same name to (R. 596a) or predicate the same property of (Parmenides 132a) many things. But we apply the same name in the case of dirt and other such paltry things. Does this mean that there are forms in which such objects participate? If so, this deviates from Plato’s practise in the dialogues of emphasizing preeminent forms like goodness, beauty and justice.
A related question pertains to self-predication. At Protagoras 330e, for instance, Socrates says that holiness is holy, and at Phd. 100c that beauty is beautiful. But is the form oddness (Phd. 104d) odd, or the form largeness (Prm. 132a) large? Not only do self-predications like these seem senseless, but they give rise to the notorious third man argument attacking the notion of participation itself. Although entire books have been written about such issues (see Allen 1971; Cohen and Keyt 1991), the debates they raise will probably continue indefinitely.
Perhaps the biggest anomaly affecting the theory of the middle period, however, is that several of its key tenets are challenged in later dialogues. Questioning the youthful Socrates in his namesake dialogue, Parmenides attacks in rapid sequence the theses that forms are incomposite, causes of sensible properties, knowable by thought, paradigms for naming and separate in and by themselves. Although commentators disagree on the seriousness of these attacks (for a classic disagreement, see Cherniss 1957; Owen 1953a), they clearly call attention to aspects of the original theory that require rethinking.
Apart from Parmenides’ problems, the Sophist contains an account of forms (or kinds) that directly opposes certain tenets of the original theory. Forms here admit opposing characters, inasmuch as sameness is different from difference and difference is the same as itself. Forms in the Sph. also are no longer changeless, since a form’s status alters when it becomes known.
Another departure from the original theory appears in the Timaeus. Participation initially was a two-term relation between forms and sensible objects. In Ti., it is represented instead as a three-term relation involving forms (or paradigms), a characterless receptacle and sensible copies (‘reflections’) of the forms in the latter. Another innovation here is that forms take on geometrical features, enabling a mathematical description of the makeup of physical properties.
An even more radical departure appears in the Philebus, where the forms and receptacle of Ti. are replaced by the ontological principles of limit and unlimited respectively. Forms here become limits in the sense of measures or numbers (terms used synonymously in Aristotle’s Physics 4.11). In this late dialogue a wide array of sensible things are said to derive from the imposition of limit on the unlimited, ranging from grammatical phonemes and musical scales to good health, fair weather and an orderly universe.
Recent scholarship has indicated that the conception of forms at work in the Phlb. may correspond to claims Aristotle makes about Plato’s forms in the Metaphysics (see Sayre 2005, 2006). One claim is that forms are numbers. Another is that forms come from participation of the indefinite dyad in unity. Equivalent claims, in the language of the Phlb., are that forms are measures and that they arise from a mixture of unlimited with limit.
If this correspondence holds true, yet another tenet of the original theory is rejected in the later dialogues. A key provision originally is that forms are incomposite, whereas in Phlb. they are composed of limit and the unlimited. In other respects, however, the initial theory holds firm. Forms still are knowable by intellect, paradigms for naming and responsible for determinate properties of sensible things.
FRIENDSHIP (PHILIA)
David Konstan
A discussion of friendship in Plato encounters two major problems. The first pertains to Greek terminology: for philia, the word normally translated as ‘friendship’, has a far wider range, embracing almost all that English includes under ‘love’ (q.v.), and more (e.g. social concord and foreign alliances). When the adjective philos, ‘dear’ or ‘loving’, is accompanied by the definite article and thus nominalized (‘the dear one’), it usually means ‘friend’, although in the plural it occasionally includes kin (‘dear ones’). Rather than distinguishing sharply between friendship and other types of affection, such as familial, Greek employed a single inclusive term. Philia was, however, clearly differentiated from erôs, ‘erotic love’, which a man typically felt towards a woman (in amatory rather than domestic contexts) or an adolescent boy. Thus, to determine Plato’s views of friendship, one must distinguish it both from erôs, which Plato discussed imaginatively, and love or philia in general.
The second difficulty is specific to Plato: for Plato was not much interested in analyzing friendship as such, though friendships, like that between Socrates and Crito, are illustrated in his dialogues. The dialogue commonly read as Plato’s treatment of friendship, namely the Lysis (sometimes subtitled ‘On Friendship’; cf. Bolotin 1979), has as much to do with erôs and other kinds of affection as with friendship. Plato was chiefly concerned with the nature of desire or attraction in general, of which friendship is one type. Erotic desire in particular seemed to him a better emblem of the philosophical aspiration to pass beyond the world of changing appearances to the timeless realm of ‘ideas’.
Although the Ly. does treat philia, it is not a typical ‘dialogue of definition’ (Sedley 1989). It opens with Socrates advising a young man named Hippothales on the right way to court Lysis, the boy with whom he is in love; indeed he claims that his only skill is detecting ‘who loves and who is loved’ (erônta te kai erômenon, 204B8–10). Note that these are two roles, lover and beloved; erôs is typically an asymmetrical relationship (the age difference between Hippothales and Lysis is relevant). Hippothales hopes Lysis will feel affection for him (prosphilês, from philia), not erôs (cf. Plato Phaedrus 255d; Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 8.4,1157a6–9; Eudemian Ethics 7.3,1238b36–9; Dover 1993:197; Halperin 1993:418). By contrast, the relation between friends (philoi) was understood to be mutual. As Socrates puts it, ‘unless both parties love, neither is a friend’ (Ly. 213A; cf. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 8.2, 1155b31–6a5; Hutter 1978:6). The frame of the dialogue concerns erôs, not friendship.
Engaging Lysis in conversation, Socrates asks whether his parents love him: the term is philein (eran, the verb corresponding to erôs, would be inappropriate, though stergein, referring mainly to parental affection, would have been possible). Socrates argues that they love him for what he knows and is good at. Nothing prevents affection on this basis from being mutual, but Socrates is interested here in the cause of affection, not in friendship per se. Socrates then inquires what kinds of things are dear (philon, neuter), and proceeds to argue that friendship resides neither in one party loving another or being loved, nor again – and this is surprising – in both parties mutually loving each other. Having overturned his own earlier description of friendship, Socrates considers whether we love those who are similar or different, and rejects both options; again, the focus is on the reasons for loving. In a series of subtle arguments, Socrates demonstrates that we love or desire something for the sake of something else, for example, medicine for the sake of health, but this leads to an infinite regress – there must be some first or primary object of love (prôton philon). Socrates finally suggests that we desire (epithumein) what we lack or have been deprived of, and this must somehow belong to us (oikeion); thus, Socrates declares, ‘erôs and philia and epithumia [desire] are for one’s own’ (Ly. 221E3–4; on the conflation of the three terms, cf. Cummins 1981; Robinson 1986:74–5). But this too turns out to be a false lead, and the dialogue ends in aporia. At all events, friendship is clearly of interest only as one species of affection (cf. Penner and Rowe 2005; contrast Nichols 2009:169).
Plato touches on philia again in the Laws, here too in association with erotic love and desire (Lg. 8.836E). He explains that we call ‘dear’ (philon) what is similar in respect to virtue, and also what is dissimilar when one party is in need of the other; in either case, when it is intense we dub it erôs (837A). Plato’s attention is on erôs here, and more particularly on pederasty (q.v., paiderasteia); philia is incidental.
Like ancient Greeks generally, Plato often contrasts friends and enemies (ekhthroi). But because the disjunction tends to be exhaustive, the class of ‘friends’ may become so wide as to include (absent civil dissension) all fellow citizens (cf. 694–5, 708); indeed, taking to an extreme the adage that the possessions of friends are in common, Plato concludes that in an ideal state there will be no private property at all (Republic 424A, 449C). In Greek one could speak of such solidarity as philia (cf. Aristotle’s politikê philia, Nicomachean Ethics 8.11; Eudemian Ethics 1241a32–3), but rendering the term as ‘friendship’ is misleading. In the R. (335), Socrates ventures the definition that a philos, properly speaking, is anyone who is good, an ekhthros one who is bad, but he goes on to affirm, against common wisdom, that it is not just to harm anyone, since that is to make a person worse. Plato is clearly undermining the conventional opposition of friend and enemy.
Of course, the Greeks recognized more intimate degrees of friendship, and Aristotle denied that one could have many close friends (Nicomachean Ethics 9.10). But unlike Aristotle, Plato did not investigate such friendship systematically, though he no doubt appreciated it: Socrates much admires, for example, the bond between Lysis and his agemate Menexenus. When he visits Socrates in jail, Crito affirms that he will never again find such a companion (Crito 44B), and tries to convince Socrates to let him bribe the jailer, since it is shameful to value money more than friends. But for Socrates evading the law is wrong, and so he refuses the aid proffered by his friends. So too, Phaedo assures Echecrates that Socrates died in the presence of many friends (Phd. 58C), but he is amazed that Socrates conversed with them unsentimentally, as on any other day (58E–9A). Though Socrates may have described himself, tongue in cheek, as an expert in ta erôtika, when it came to philia what most interested him, and Plato, was the love of wisdom or philosophia.
GOODNESS (THE GOOD, AGATHON)
Rafael Ferber
The good is for the Platonic Socrates that for which everything is done (cf. Gorgias 468b). This is an ‘axiom’ to which Plato seems to adhere during his whole writing career (cf. Symposium 205e–6a, Republic 505d–e, Philebus. 65a). But the Socratic good becomes for Plato in the R. the idea of the good, which is also the ‘greatest thing to be learned’ and the ‘greatest lesson’ (megiston mathêma, R. 505a, 519c).
We may find a first allusion to this idea in the Lysis in ‘what we like in the first place’ (prôton philon, Ly. 219d), cf. Penner and Rowe (2005:278–9). The Politicus may touch on this idea under the title of the ‘exact itself’ (284d; cf. Ferber 2002:190). But the idea of the good is treated explicitly only in the sixth and seventh book of the R. in the course of three similes, though caution is warranted: the Platonic Socrates gives in these similes only his ‘opinions without science’ (R. 506c) and even these opinions are incomplete (506e1–3). First, he distances himself from existing philosophical conceptions of the good, where the good consists in pleasure or in knowledge (cf. 505b–c). Both conceptions are refuted, one because there are also bad pleasures (cf. Grg. 499c6–7), the other because this conception would be circular (cf. Euthyphro 292e3): knowledge would be knowledge of something, namely, the good. Second, the Platonic Socrates says positively three things about the good: (a) it is not sought like ‘just and beautiful things’ (505d), where we may be satisfied also with the appearance, but as something which really is good. So we may be conventionalists concerning the ‘just and beautiful things’, but we are realists concerning the good. We want not the apparent, but the real good. (b) It is the final cause of all that is good in desire and action (517b7–c4). (c) The knowledge of the idea of the good is the condition of the knowledge of just and the beautiful things, that is, the ideas of justice and beauty (506a). This means that if the ideas of justice and beauty were not also good, they would not be ideas of real but only of apparent justice and beauty. Since without knowledge of the idea of the good no other knowledge is of any use to us (cf. 505a2–3), knowledge of apparent justice and apparent beauty would not be of any use to us. Therefore knowledge of the idea of the good is required to know the goodness and usefulness of just and beautiful things.
These two negative and three positive (formal) determinations are supplemented by the substantive description which the Platonic Socrates gives in the three similes. Common to them is that the idea of the good figures as cause (q.v.; aitia, 508e3.517b2) or principle (archê, 510b7). In the simile of the sun (q.v.), it functions as the cause of knowledge, truth and being, although it is itself not being (ouk ousias ontos tou agathou, 509b8–9), but ‘surpasses the being in dignity and power’ (epekeina tês ousias presbeia kai dynamei hyperechontos, 505b9–10). Thus Plato seems to found his ontology and epistemology on a supreme principle which – if the cause is not the same as that which is caused – must be ‘something else and more beautiful than knowledge and truth’ (508e5–6) and being (but cf. Baltes 1997; Ferber 2005; Seel 2007). We can see in this description of the good the inauguration of the problem of the third between and above being and thinking: As light and its master, the sun, functions as a third item (R. 507d.e), so the idea of the good functions as a third item between and above thinking and being. In the simile of the line (q.v.), the idea of the good, though not mentioned there, functions as an unhypothetical principle (anhypothetos archê) of the mathematical ‘presuppositions’ (hypotheseis, 510c6), that is, the four arts of the quadrivium (on the text of the simile cf. Lafrance 1994; on interpretations between 1804 and 1984, Lafrance 1987).
The image of the cave (q.v.) shows us what education means for Plato. It is ‘a leading of the soul’ (psychês periagogê, 521c1) that is also a return of the soul’s attention to the really good. But the idea of the good functions also as a principle of Plato’s politics so that not only every soul in her private life, but ‘anyone who is to act sensibly in private or public must see it’ (510c). Because the philosopher-kings and -queens know the really good, they will also, in the sense of the Socratic paradox that virtue is knowledge, realize the good in the city (on all three similes cf. Ferber 1984:49–166, 1989:49–219; Schindler 2008:139–75).
The Phlb. starts with the search for a certain state of the soul which can render the life of all human beings happy (cf. Phlb. 11d4–6). But it asks nevertheless the Socratic question ‘. . . what in fact is the good . . .’ (13e5–6) and holds on to a ‘single form’ (mia idea) of the good (65a1), which Socrates tries to hold down with the conjunction of three qualities (poia): ‘beauty, symmetry and truth’ (65a2; cf. Ferber 2010). In his old age, Plato seems to have held a public ‘lecture on the good’, although this lecture may go back to earlier ‘seminars’ or ‘synousiai’ ‘on the good’. (cf. Simplicius, in Aristotelis Physica commentaria Phlb. 542.1012, 545.24). After an anecdote reported by Aristoxenos about Aristotle, the hearers of the lecture expected to be told
. . . something about one of the recognized human goods, such as wealth, health or strength, or, in sum, some marvelous happiness. But when it appeared that Plato was to talk on mathematics and numbers and geometry and astronomy, leading up to the statement that there the good is one (hoti tagaton estin hen), they were overwhelmed by the paradox of the whole matter. Some then thought little of the thing and others even reproved it. (Aristoxenus, The Elements of Harmony II)
In this lecture, Plato may have presented the idea on the good in a dialectical way, where unity as we find it in the abstract structures of mathematics may have played a significant role (cf. Burnyeat 2000). From this lecture, only fragments from notes taken by his hearers, especially from Aristotle, survive (cf. the collection of fragments in Gaiser 1963:441–557; Isnardi-Parente 1997:406–84, 1998:5–115; Krämer 1990:203–17). But we find in Aristotle’s Metaphysics a ‘short and principal’ summary (987a27, 988a17) of the public lecture whose content Plato may have already communicated earlier to his advanced students (cf. Ferber 1989:211–16).
HAPPINESS (EUDAIMONIA)
Rachana Kamtekar
In contemporary usage, ‘happiness’ is sometimes taken to be a feeling, as temporary or permanent as feelings are. In ancient Greek usage, in contrast, eudaimonia, the term translated ‘happiness’, characterizes a whole life and not just a moment of feeling, and has an objective dimension: the happy life not only feels good to the one who lives it, but is good. Sometimes translators use ‘flourishing’ instead; one ground for this is that not only humans, but other species as well, are said to flourish when they are in a good condition relative to their capacities, but it was for the ancients a philosophical issue whether eudaimonia ought to be conceived this way, and indeed whether a life of pleasure not only feels good to the one who lives it but also is the best life; the same philosophical issue arises today about happiness, and it cannot be settled by a translation (see Kraut 1979).
Plato takes it as uncontroversial that all of us wish to be happy, that is, to live well (Euthydemus 278e; Meno 78a–b; Symposium 205a). He does not mean by this that we wish that our desires, whatever they are, be satisfied; rather, happiness requires possessing, and correctly using, genuinely good things (Euthd. 280d). But happiness is not divorced from desire-satisfaction either, for we all do in fact desire the genuinely good things obtaining which will make us happy (Gorgias 468b; Men. 77b–8b; Republic 505d–e); evidence of this includes our pursuit of what appears good, our loss of desire for things once we learn they are not good, and our efforts to determine what really is good.
What are the genuinely good things the possession and correct use of which make us happy? In the Philebus, Socrates argues that the good or happy human life contains a mixture of knowledge and pleasure (Phlb. 20d–2a). In the Grg. (470e) and R. bk 1 (354a), Socrates says that our happiness depends entirely on whether or not we are virtuous, but at other times he makes the weaker claim that having virtue makes one happier than any of those who lack virtue, no matter what else they have and one lacks (R. 360e–2c, 387d, 392cd, 580b). The comparative claim allows nonmoral goods, such as health and wealth, to contribute to the virtuous person’s happiness. (The case that the R. makes only this ‘comparative’ claim about happiness’ relationship to virtue is made in Irwin 1995:191–3 and contested in Annas 1999:84–7; the alternatives for relating happiness and virtue are canvassed in Vlastos 1999.) To explain how virtue contributes to happiness, the R. (443d–4e) describes justice as a harmonious condition of soul, analogous to health for the body and wisdom as the perfection of our best capacity, reason, in knowledge of the forms and especially of the form of the good (R. 518c–d, 504e–5a). In both cases, the happiness described involves both the satisfaction of desires and the possession of some genuinely good thing(s).
On the grounds that happiness consists in contemplation of the forms, an activity which is interrupted by our bodily condition, Plato sometimes (e.g. Phaedo, Phaedrus) seems to restrict true happiness to life after death for philosophers.
The universal desire for happiness serves as the cornerstone of a number of arguments in Plato: in the R., the (presumed) desire of his interlocutors for happiness enables Socrates to justify being just on the grounds that being just is (at least) necessary for our happiness; in the Euthd., Socrates wins Clinias over to philosophy on the grounds that wisdom is the condition for benefiting from any other goods (Euthd. 278e–82d); in the Protagoras, Socrates convinces a hypothetical majority that what we call being overwhelmed by pleasure is actually ignorance on the grounds that no one knowingly goes for anything other than what they judge best, viz., most pleasant (Prt. 352a–8d). Many scholars take the desire for happiness to be a foundation that structures Plato’s ethics, committing him to ‘ethical eudaimonism’, according to which to be rational, action must aim at one’s own happiness (e.g. Irwin 1995). Some also take Plato to be committed to ‘psychological eudaimonism’, the descriptive thesis that our actions in fact aim at our own happiness (e.g. Penner 1991). Yet Plato does seem to consider some noneudaimonistic reasons for action: the desire to reproduce, and thereby approximate, the immortality one desires (Smp. 207a–9e); the love of beauty (Phdr. 249d–56e); the debt philosophers owe to the city that educated them (R. 520a–e; White 2002 discusses this and other noneudaimonistic passages in Plato).
Happiness is important to Plato’s political thought as well as his ethical thought. Thus, legislation should aim at the happiness of the citizens (Laws 743c; the R. uses the language of aiming at the happiness of the city in order not to beg the question of whether the citizens, who are virtuous, will thereby be happy, see Kamtekar 2010), and political justification consists in showing that the government is competent to make citizens good or happy (Politicus 293a–e). (Kamtekar (2006) and Reeve (1988) offer alternative accounts of how happiness figures in political justification).
IDEA (see Forms)
IMAGE (EIKÔN)
Richard Patterson
Images (eikônes) are of great importance to Plato for several reasons. For one, the traditional Homeric and tragic images of gods, heroes, humans and the afterlife had for many generations exercised a corrupting influence on all of Greek society, and the reform of these images was of fundamental importance for Plato’s vision of proper religious, civic and moral education (see esp. Republic bks 2–3; cf. bk 10 for further criticisms of epic and tragic imagery). Second, in that same general spirit of harnessing the power of images to positive effect, Plato casts his own philosophical writings as verbal images of encounters among philosophical ideas and theories, and of diverse choices concerning how one ought to live, all fashioned so as to reveal to the receptive reader their true nature and value. Third, the relation of images to the ‘real things’ of which they are likenesses furnishes Plato’s principle illustration of his radically counterintuitive views about reality, understanding and value. This brief article will focus on the second and third of these points.
Although the Platonic Socrates appears in different roles – refutational gadfly, barren midwife of ideas, planner of the just city – he remains a philosophical counterweight to the great Homeric images of heroism and excellence: in philosophy lies the greatest agôn (struggle, contest) – that to discover and lead the best life. This requires not only wisdom and self-control, but also the traditional heroic quality of andreia (‘courage’, ‘stout heartedness’). For the philosopher must take on powerful advocates of false conceptions of excellence and happiness (Homer, Thrasymachus, Callicles, Protagoras), defend the truth even if his views meet with scorn and ridicule (R. bk 5), persevere in the most protracted and difficult of investigations and, if need be, choose death rather than abandon philosophy (Apology; Phaedo).
The philosophic hero does not cease to become an image of justice itself or wisdom; rather she becomes a true and accurate enactment or imitation (mimêsis; q.v. Imitation) of wisdom and justice. By contrast, the reputedly wise Homer, along with the legendary fifth-century sophists (literally, ‘wise men’) are not only distorted but deceptive imitations of wisdom. As the Sophist suggests, the latter appear wise only to the unwise, who are in no position to judge – just as colossal sculptures have their proportions cleverly altered so as to look right to those who must view them from an inferior perspective (Sph. 235d, ff.). The philosophic mimêsis of wisdom is a genuine likeness (eikôn) rather than a semblance (phantasma), and so can help convey, to those adequately equipped to respond appropriately, the true nature of wisdom. Indeed, the philosophic life becomes an ‘imitation of god’ (Theaetetus 176b), where divinity is invested not in scandal-ridden Olympians, but in eternal, purely intelligible standards of goodness.
These imperceptible but intelligible ‘forms’ (q.v.) provide standards of excellence not only for individual lives but also for human communities, and even for the cosmos as a whole. In all three spheres goodness lies in correct imitation or enactment (mimêsis) of standards that obtain whether or not anyone or anything ever discovers or lives up to them. A philosopher can shape her own life in the image of wisdom, can fashion an image of a just city in words, and might, if put in charge as philosopher-king, create an actual city in the image of justice itself (R. 472, 540a, 592a–b). Analogously, the divine craftsman-creator of the world makes the best possible likeness (eikôn) of his good, intelligible, model (paradeigma, Timaeus 29b), bringing rational order into an initial disorderly motion in the ‘receptacle’ (hypodoche; something like ‘place’, chora Ti. 49a–52c).
If a truly good life requires apprehension and mimêsis (imitation, enactment) of eternal, immutable, world-independent standards of goodness, this requires in turn that Plato’s new and radical metaphysics of forms and worldly imitations be itself coherent. But this has been in dispute since Plato’s own day. Putting aside a host of thorny subordinate issues, the central question is this: did Plato think of forms as perfect or complete exemplars of various kinds of things, and their worldly images as imperfect or incomplete examples? Or are forms abstract entities that are not in general instances of themselves – something like properties themselves (e.g. equality, justice, humanity) – with worldly images being things that embody or possess those properties? Both approaches have advocates dating back to antiquity. (For two modern influential versions of the first interpretation, see Vlastos and Owen in Allen 1967; for defence of the second, see Allen and Cherniss in Allen 1967; Patterson 1985; Prior 1985).
On a ‘perfect/complete exemplar’ reading of forms, worldly imitations are imperfect copies or duplicates of forms. But this makes most forms into impossible objects. For example, humanity itself is both the perfect human being and a bodiless, imperceptible, purely intelligible thing. Or (on another version of this first type of reading) equality itself becomes a thing whose equality is ‘complete’ in and of itself; equality is equal without being equal to anything. Either way, the theory is plainly incoherent. It also gives rise to an infinite regress of forms rather than a single form for a given property, as first explained by Plato himself via the eponymous protagonist of his Parmenides (132a–b; 132d–3a).
But the image analogy in fact strongly supports a reading on which forms are abstract natures and worldly imitations are embodiments or enactments of those abstract natures. The form of human itself, for example, and its worldly images are related in the way that paintings, reflections, dreams and verbal images of a human being are related to a living human being. Although the painting or reflection is rightly labelled ‘human’ (rather than ‘ox’) it is not a second human being at all, perfect or imperfect. Similarly, the flesh-and-blood human being is not a more-or-less imperfect copy of the intelligible form of human; on the contrary, it is not an intelligible (or eternal, immutable, bodiless) thing at all. Rather, it is an enactment or embodiment of the intelligible nature common to all earthly humans. Both are rightly called ‘human’, but they are very different kinds of ‘human’ (R. 597b) – one the unique, nonspatial, immutable, intelligible form of human, the other a spatial, changing and perceptible embodiment of the form. It is precisely this combination of a critical kinship between image and model on the one hand, with the absence of garden-variety resemblance between the two on the other, that Plato emphasizes repeatedly by use of the image analogy. On this second sort of interpretation, then, the problems discussed above for the ‘image/model’ theory of the relation between forms and worldly things do not arise. And one may safely and quite sensibly say that being a just person is not a matter of trying to be, or almost being, another form of justice, but of exemplifying or enacting in one’s life the eternal and objective nature of justice.
IMITATION (see Mimêsis)
INCONTINENCE (see Akrasia)
INSPIRATION
Kathryn A. Morgan
Plato uses the concept of inspiration flexibly, although it plays a major role only in Ion and Phaedrus. The vocabulary of what we call ‘inspiration’ was expressed in Greek in various ways, as being ‘held’ by a divine force, ‘breathed upon’ or (mostly) as having a god inside you, being entheos. As had been recognized for centuries, this was the force that motivated prophets and poets, and made their gifts ‘divine’. There does not seem, however, to have been a consistent or systematic theorization of inspiration prior to Plato. Even within his corpus we still find the vocabulary of inspiration being used loosely. Phaedrus in the Symposium can speak of being ‘inspired’ by love to acts of courage (Smp. 179a7–8). Socrates in the Philebus says that one who has been seduced by the pleasures of discourse is also ‘inspired’ (Phlb. 15d4–e2) and in the Cratylus he has himself been ‘inspired’ to etymologize by Euthyphro of Prospalta (Cra. 396d2–5). By this assertion he attempts to disclaim responsibility for the material he presents. This strategy is central to more developed treatments of inspiration elsewhere in the corpus.
As Murray (1981) has shown, early Greek literature drew no dichotomy between divine empowerment and individual skill; inspiration was thus not irrational. Plato, however, bases his entire theory of inspiration as ecstatic possession on this dichotomy and develops it in the Ion. There Socrates suggests that poets are moved by a ‘divine force’ (Ion 533d3) and that the Muse makes them ‘inspired’ and ‘divinely possessed’ (533e3–8), but then expands the notion, suggesting that a poet cannot compose until ‘his mind is no longer in him’ and that god does this so that mortals will know that it is not the poet (or prophet) who is speaking, but the god himself (534b3–d4). Socrates here deploys the strong contrast between human skill and divine force as a way of explaining Ion’s inability to provide any rational basis for his talents in reciting and explicating Homeric poetry. As many commentators have seen, however, this view of inspiration, while couched as a compliment, is intended to disqualify poets from intellectual pretensions and discredit them as cultural authorities. Far from transparently reflecting his society’s beliefs, Plato has pushed them to a tendentious extreme.
The significance of this contrast stretches beyond poetry and has political and philosophical implications. In the Apology Socrates again contrasts poetic inspiration with knowledge, and (as he did in the Ion) connects poetry with prophecy (Ap. 22b8–c4). Here, crucially, his comment that poets compose not by knowledge but by inspiration is closely juxtaposed to his similar discovery about politicians: they are reputed to be experts but speak without knowledge (21b9–c7, 22a8–9). This connection is made explicit in the Meno, where he concludes that politicians succeed not through knowledge but by a kind of right opinion and in this respect are just like prophets:
We could say that politicians, no less than these, are divine and have a god in them; they have been breathed upon and are possessed by a god when they speak successfully about many great matters although they do not know what they are talking about. (99d1–5)
The focus in these passages is not so much on divine encroachment on an individual but on success achieved despite lack of knowledge. The notion of inspiration thus gives Plato a way of critiquing poetic and political accomplishment. It can even be deployed in an attack on Heraclitean philosophers, among whom there are no teachers and pupils, but who ‘arise spontaneously wherever each of them happens to catch his inspiration, and none of them thinks the others know anything’ (Theaetetus 180b8–c3).
Plato was an important figure in the development of an abstract vocabulary of inspiration. The noun enthousiasmos appears first in Plato and Democritus (‘DK’ 68B18), while the adjective enthousiastikos, the noun enthousiasis, and verb enthousiazô are first preserved in the Platonic corpus (q.v.). This reflects a general concern with the technical analysis and criticism of poets in the second half of the fifth century, but also reveals how suggestive Plato found the concept.
Phdr. marks the culmination of this interest, where the model of inspiration found in the Ion recurs and is superseded by a philosophical counterpart. Inspiration is prominent in the first part of the dialogue. Socrates’ two speeches on love are presented as inspired by various powers: the Muses, the Nymphs, Pan (among others). Moreover, the content of Socrates’ great palinode is concerned with inspiration, insofar as the speech starts with the observation that certain traditional manifestations of madness (q.v.) may be connected with the divine realm and are beneficial. Among these are prophetic, ritual (‘telestic’), poetic and erotic madness. Poetic madness, in particular, is said to come from the Muses and be a form of possession (Phdr. 244a6–5a5). So far, the model is the one familiar from the Ion, but once Socrates describes the fate of the soul before and after embodiment, things begin to change. Now we learn that the philosopher, when recollecting the forms seen while disincarnate, is often thought to be out of his senses because the many do not see that he is ‘inspired’. Similarly the lover is ‘inspired’ to recollect the form of beauty by seeing earthly beauty, and this is the best of all types of ‘inspiration’ (or ‘enthusiasm’) (249c4–e4). Enthusiasm or inspiration is now seen as a psychic reaction to a likeness of a form that carries one to the divine realm. We thus move from a notion of inspiration as possession and incursion, where the poet is a passive instrument of the god, to a philosophical mode where inspiration is associated with recollection (q.v.). In the best-case scenario of the Phdr. philosophical inspiration is married to reason and the philosopher uses contact with the divine to engage in systematic reflection. In the Phdr., then, Plato has returned to the coexistence of reason and divine experience that characterized earlier notions of inspiration, but this idealized combination exists not in the poet, but in the philosophical lover.
INTELLECTUALISM
William Prior
Intellectualism is a view attributed to Socrates in several of Plato’s Socratic dialogues that treats certain mental states, in particular virtue and vice, as states of the intellect alone, and which, as a result, denies the existence of moral weakness (akrasia; q.v.). Intellectualism is especially prominent in the Laches, Gorgias, Euthydemus, Protagoras and Meno.
(I) VIRTUE IS KNOWLEDGE
Perhaps the most prominent mental state that receives an intellectualist treatment at the hands of Plato is virtue. In the La., while attempting to define courage, Laches comes up with a definition of what Socrates calls ‘virtue entire’: knowledge of all goods and evils (La. 199c–d). Why is virtue knowledge? The Men. provides the following argument: virtue is good, makes us good and is thus beneficial. Other goods, such as health, strength, beauty and wealth, or the psychological qualities moderation, justice, courage, intelligence, memory and munificence, are sometimes beneficial and sometimes harmful. What renders them beneficial is right use; what produces right use is knowledge (understanding, wisdom). Thus knowledge, as the only intrinsically beneficial quality a person can possess, is virtue (Men. 87b–9a). A similar argument occurs in the Euthd. (278e–82d).
The Prt. offers a detailed account of what is meant by happiness and wisdom, one that is unique to the Socratic dialogues. In an argument with the many, Socrates leads them to admit that they regard pleasure as good and pain as bad (Prt. 354c). Given this account of happiness, Socrates argues that wisdom is an art of measurement of pleasure and pain (358a–b).
(II) VICE IS IGNORANCE
If virtue is knowledge, it is easy to understand vice as ignorance. In the passage of the Men. discussed above Socrates states, ‘all that the soul undertakes and endures, if directed by wisdom, ends in happiness, but if directed by ignorance, it ends in the opposite’ (Men. 88c). The Euthd., in the same vein states, ‘with respect to all the things we called good in the beginning, the correct account is not that in themselves are they good by nature, but rather as follows: if ignorance controls them, they are greater evils than their opposites’ (Euthd. 281d). The analysis of vice in the Prt. yields the following account of ignorance as vice:
If, then, I said, the pleasant is good, no one who either knows or believes other things are better than the things he is doing, and possible, then does those things if he is capable of the better; nor is the ‘being worse than oneself’ anything other than ignorance and ‘being stronger than oneself’ anything other than wisdom. (Prt. 358c. Tr. Prior)
This ignorance is identified as false belief; the belief in question is a miscalculation of the magnitude of pleasure and pain involved in a particular course of action, an error in perspective (356c–e).
(III) NO ONE DOES WRONG WILLINGLY
Perhaps the most paradoxical claim in the intellectualist position is the denial of akrasia (q.v.), moral weakness. The phenomenon of moral weakness is alleged to occur when one, in full possession of knowledge of the best course of action, nevertheless chooses an inferior course, under the influence of some other mental state. ‘The many’ think of knowledge ‘as being utterly dragged around . . . as if it were a slave’ (352c). The position shared by Socrates and Protagoras, in contrast, is that:
knowledge is a fine thing, capable of ruling a person, and if someone were to know what is good and bad, then he would not be forced by anything to act other than as knowledge dictates, and intelligence would be sufficient to save a person. (352c)
The most elaborate Socratic argument against akrasia, of which the above claim is a part, occurs in the Prt. and relies on the assumption of hedonism (354b–d). The many believe in akrasia because they believe that a person knowing full well that a given action is more beneficial than another, will nonetheless perform that other action because of being overcome by pleasure (352d–e). On the assumption that pleasure is the good, Socrates shows that this view of the many does not make sense by substituting ‘good’ for ‘pleasant’ in their position. The difficulty with this argument is that it only works on the assumption of hedonism, and the Prt. is the only dialogue in which Plato advocates hedonism, even for the sake of argument.
(IV) LATER DEVELOPMENTS
The intellectualist position described above is prominent in the ‘Socratic’ dialogues, though it is also present in Laws. The Republic offers a different moral psychology and a new theory of virtue. For some scholars (e.g. Penner 2002) this change marks a transition between the view of the historical Socrates and the view of Plato. The major development in the R. that gives rise to the modification or abandonment of intellectualism is the introduction, in bk 4, of the tripartite conception of the soul. The soul is divided into three distinct parts: reason, spirit and appetite. Whereas the intellectualist picture identified virtue as a whole with knowledge, the new theory allocates the virtues to different parts of the soul. Closest to the intellectual conception of the soul is reason, to which is assigned the virtue of wisdom. The spirited part of the soul is assigned the virtue of courage, while the virtues of temperance and justice are allocated to the three parts in combination (R. bk 4.442c–d). The Prt. had described wisdom as a powerful force, capable of ruling a person; the R., in contrast, describes reason, the seat of wisdom, as requiring the aid of spirit if it is to prevail over the appetites (441e). Further, whereas the Socratic dialogues had insisted that every desire was for the good (cf., e.g. Grg. 468b; also Kahn 2008:4 and Penner 2002:195), the R. defines thirst in terms of drink and warns against adding ‘good’ to the object of desire (R. bk 4.437d–8b). Despite this new theory of the R., aspects of intellectualism reappear in the dialogues generally considered late, in particular in the Lg. (5.731c; 9.860d) and Timaeus (86d; cf. Kahn 1996:72n). This renders doubtful the claim that Plato ever abandoned the central tenets of intellectualism.
See also: Brickhouse and Smith (2009), Irwin (1977a), Nehamas (1999), Segvic (2002) and Shorey (1903).
JUSTICE (DIKAION, DIKAIOSYNÊ)
Richard D. Parry
Justice is the overarching theme in the Republic. If people are to live in a political community, they must share equitably in such goods as wealth and personal security. However, in bk 2 of the R., Glaucon presents the common opinion that humans have a strong motivation to take more than their equitable share. Since all are equally vulnerable to suffering if each acted on such motivation, a community adopts rules to assure respect for persons and property (R. 358e–9a). However, there is a problem with this account of justice. After all, if someone – because of, for example, intelligence or strength – can act unjustly without being caught, he enjoys a significant advantage over the just person, who follows the rules. So, why should anyone want to be just who is intelligent or strong enough to act unjustly with impunity?
To answer the question, Socrates undertakes to show that justice is beneficial to the just person himself (357b). In developing his argument, Socrates’ goal is to show that justice is beneficial for one’s soul. This significant move relies on an idea, known in other moral systems, that the true value of justice is psychological; it affords an internal good that outweighs whatever external advantage one can obtain by acting unjustly.
In order to make this kind of argument, Socrates needs an account of the soul (q.v.), which up until this point in Greek thought has been conceived of as simply the principle of life. Socrates does something unprecedented by analyzing the soul as a structured whole of differing parts. In order to make such an account accessible, he compares the soul to the city, with its organization of differing parts (368e). Nevertheless, when Socrates begins we realize that he is talking about an ideal city, profoundly unlike Athens. In the organization of this city there are three chief functions; providing for the material life of the city, ruling and war-making. The first compromises such crafts as farming, weaving, cobbling, house building, animal herding and commercial trading, undertaken by those naturally suited to such work (369b–71a). Ruling is carried out by people with a philosophical nature; war-making by those with an aggressive and honour-focused nature but gentle to those they know (374e–6c; 412c–e). Justice in the city consists in each class sticking to the function for which its members are suited by nature and not interfering with that of another (433b–d).
This account of civic justice may seem strange in that it entails not a distribution of goods but a distribution of functions. Further, the distribution does not depend on a value like equality but rather on one’s natural ability to fulfil the function. In this account, justice is rendered to an individual when he is given the function for which he is suited by nature; justice is rendered to others when he fulfils that function. It is clear that, in this account, justice does not recognize or guarantee individual rights in the modern sense. For starters, no one has the right to decide for himself about his natural function. For Plato, however, individual rights are not so much suppressed as unknown.
After this account of justice in the city, Socrates turns to justice in the soul. He argues that the soul also has a tripartite structure with analogous functions for the parts (436a–41c). Reason (q.v.) is the part suited by nature to rule in the soul. The part corresponding to the producers is appetite (q.v.), primarily bodily appetites for food, drink and sex. The part corresponding to the military is called the spirited part (thumos or thumoeides). While contemporary readers will recognize reason and appetite, the spirited part is not so familiar. While it is the source of anger against others, it also becomes angry against appetites when they urge wrongful action. Finally, justice in the soul, like justice in the city, is constituted by each part doing its particular function and not interfering with that of another. The function of reason is to rule in the soul, exercising forethought for the whole soul. The function of the spirited part is to be the ally of reason. Together they keep guard over the appetitive part so it does not try to rule (441e–2a). Justice also respects the various functions. Guided by wisdom, reason is a benevolent dictator, looking out for the welfare of the other parts (442c). Thus, if reason tried to enforce a policy of asceticism on the appetites or of passivity on the spirited part, it would not be treating them justly because it would be frustrating their respective functions.
Justice in the soul, then, entails a healthy integration of various interests or tendencies – reason, spirited part and appetite. While a soul so well organized enjoys a great psychological good, there still needs to be an argument linking justice among the parts of the soul to the common notion of justice as respect for persons and property. Socrates argues that injustice committed by an individual against another arises from injustice among the parts of his soul. Unjust acts (forbidden by law or custom) such as embezzlement, betrayal of the city or of friends, breaking oaths and adultery are impossible for someone whose soul is justly ordered (442e–3e).
Not only does justice in the soul beget lawfulness, the law of the city should have a role in establishing virtue. In the Gorgias, Socrates argues that lawmaking and judging aim at what is best for the soul (Grg. 464b–d, 501a–c). Indeed, the good orator seeks to establish virtuous order and harmony in it; when the soul is disordered by undisciplined desires, his speech must curb them (503d–5c). Finally, judicial punishment can relieve the vicious soul of its injustice (478a–80b). The novel idea that punishment has a function other than retribution is developed in the Laws. The Athenian Stranger argues that punishment for serious crimes should aim to cure the soul of the criminal. However, if the judges determine that a cure is not possible they should pass a sentence of death, which will rid the city of an evil doer and deter others (854d–5a, 862c–3a).
The R. begins with the common idea that justice is a relation among individuals, defined by rules and the actions prescribed by those rules. However, by making this kind of justice the effect of what justice is really, that is, a hierarchical structure among parts of the soul, Plato has shifted the focus from justice understood as kinds of right action to justice as a psychological disposition, that is, the way the parts habitually interact, from which appropriate actions flow. Finally, by making justice primarily a psychological disposition, Plato is then able to make another argument, that is, that it is a more valuable disposition to have than any of its rivals. A soul with the disposition that results in its acting justly is simply finer as a soul than one with the disposition that results in its acting unjustly.
For further reading on justice, see Cooper (2004), Irwin (1995), Kosman (2007), Kraut (1992b) and Vlastos (1971b).
KNOWLEDGE (see Epistemology)
LANGUAGE
Susan B. Levin
Plato’s reflections on language engage substantially with predecessors in philosophical, sophistic, and literary traditions. When revising existing views in more promising directions, his concern is ever with the merit of ideas, not their source. While pre-Socratics and Socrates notice language in defending views of nature and thriving, Plato is the first to devote sustained, systematic attention to it. Many deem familiar linguistic usage misleading, but only Parmenides repudiates it altogether. Stopping short of his Eleatic forebear, Plato’s metaphysical discovery of forms and their spatiotemporal participants leads him to acknowledge a pronounced gap between optimal and commonplace deployments of terms, particularly those corresponding to mathematical concepts and values.
Through recollection (q.v.; anamnêsis) philosophers attain a grasp of reality wholly independent of language, thereby returning as fully as possible to the clarity attending forms’ initial discernment by souls alone. Plato’s treatments of ontological, epistemological and linguistic issues are deeply intertwined: the fact that reality is comprised of natural, stable unities enables understanding, and this insight in turn powers philosophers’ deployment of language.
Plato’s own theorizing on this topic emerges with force in Cra. (q.v.), the first work of Western philosophy devoted to language, which investigates the claim that the descriptive content of words or names (onomata) reveals their referents’ natures (phuseis). While controversy persists over what view of terms’ correctness Cra. envisions, many conclude that it rejects naturalism based on descriptive content as an adequate determinant of whether onomata are fittingly assigned. One requires a prior, independent grasp of reality to assess terms’ semantic (or phonetic) constitution since otherwise one can interpret even the most salient terms – for example, epistêmê (‘knowledge’, Cra. 412a, 437a) – through antithetical, ontological prisms. Precisely that awareness, however, renders otiose the quest to grasp natures through such linguistic study.
While Cra. targets an etymological approach to orthotês onomatôn (the correctness of words or names), Phaedo debuts a revamped version of eponymy, prominent in Greek literature, to provide the semantics of the form-participant tie (see Levin 2001:101–18). The primary referents of terms for mathematical concepts and values (e.g. triangular, beautiful) are transcendent, separately existing forms (eidê). Their secondary referents are forms’ participants, for example, Helen of Troy and Phidias’ statue of Athena, possessing a measure of beauty through participation in the corresponding form (q.v. Participation, Forms), and are thus properly named ‘beautiful’ (Phd. 102b, 103b). The limits on participants’ beauty (they are such in one regard but not another, at one time but not others, etc.) ground the restricted application of ‘beautiful’ to them. The form’s unblemished standing, in contrast, ensures that the term ‘beautiful’ applies to it eternally, without constraint (Phd. 103e). Far from being tied to the form, hence nature-disclosing, through descriptive content, on the view of many the link to phusis is via the onoma’s unique descriptive force. Though Plato is solidly committed to terms’ legitimate twofold application, Phd., Symposium and Republic underscore just how far philosophical awareness and linguistic usage diverge from the ordinary. While some, holding forms to be universals, assume that eponymy offers a general theory of predication, the fact that not all common nouns and adjectives have eidê corresponding to them (R. 523a–5a; Parmenides 130c–d) means that eponymy cannot function in this capacity.
How far, if at all, the third man argument (q.v. Prm.) calls the metaphysics and accompanying onoma-based semantics of these dialogues into question remains hotly contested. On one interpretation, the challenge to forms’ explanatory power stems from the fact that F-ness, too, is F (e.g. Beauty is beautiful, Phd. 100c), with some claiming that the theory of forms emerges unscathed only if their onomata do not carry unique descriptive force, serving instead as proper names or indications of identity. At this juncture, however, it is individual forms’ being what and as they are that warrants the relevant terms’ application to them, and it is only because forms’ onomata do so apply that participants’ appellations may derive therefrom.
While Plato’s linguistic focus thus far is onomata, the late writings evince a fascination with logoi. As before, his pursuit of linguistic concerns takes its compass from ontology. Whether or not Plato now sees a problem with the metaphysics and accompanying semantics of earlier dialogues, his late writings take the weight off self-predication to mark forms off from one another (see Moravcsik 1973). This transpires in part through the method of division (diairesis, q.v. Method) – debuted in Phaedrus (265e–6c) and elaborated in Sophist and Statesman – according to which the natures of eidê are disclosed through logoi, more than mereological sums, whose component onomata join to distinguish each explanandum (e.g. sophistry) from the rest. Though descriptive content may be relevant, as in Cra.’s conclusion terms merit does not hinge on their constitution’s illumining natures (see Levin 2008). Again, philosophers’ reflectiveness equips them alone to assess and deploy language reliably. Dialectic qua division may uncover what is wrongly thought to constitute elements of reality; such parts (merê) that are not also kinds (genê) are undeserving of onomata, which must therefore be excluded from a true, or philosophical, lexicon. The centrality of onoma-deletion and -construction to Plato’s late philosophical method is yet another indication of the distance separating philosophical deployment of language from ordinary, nontheoretical usage.
Plato’s handling of falsehood in Sph. has received tremendous attention. The sophist eludes the charge of speaking falsely if so doing involves speaking of ‘what is not’, construed as synonymous with ‘what in no way is’. Plato’s defence of false statement’s possibility rests ontologically on a discussion of forms’ interweaving, particularly the role of the different (heteron), and linguistically on a stipulation of statements’ divergence, qua bearers of meaning, from names. The referents of both onomata (here, ‘subjects’ or ‘agents’) and rhêmata (variously rendered by scholars as ‘verbs’, ‘actions’, ‘affections’ and ‘predicates’) are assumed to exist outside the mind (261d–2c); Plato’s account therefore excludes formulations taking unicorns or Narcissus as subjects.
Interpreters diverge on key points, including whether Plato distinguishes two or more uses of esti (existence, identity, predication). To those who (a) deem the third man argument worrisome when forms’ onomata apply with descriptive force and (b) contend that Sph. disentangles identity and predication, this distinction is a welcome innovation. Scholars who conclude that awareness of different uses of esti is lacking in Plato disagree on whether he confuses existence and predication, or predication and identity. Certain commentators (e.g. Kahn 1966) stress that Greek does not demarcate existential and predicative uses of ‘is’ and that the absence of differentiation is a boon to Plato’s account. Scholars even diverge on suitable terminology for the conduct of discussions (cf. Owen 1971 and White 1993).
In Sph.’s framework, difference supplants not being, allowing Plato to refute the view that ‘what is not’ (to mê on) and ‘what in no way is’ (to mêdamôs on) are synonymous. Since the difference is key to his handling of false statement, much hinges on how heteron is construed. Sph. 256a–b is often taken to focus on to mê on qua nonidentity (e.g. change is not the same). In contrast, Sph. 263a–b, citing ‘Theaetetus sits’ versus ‘Theaetetus flies’, appears (with 257b–8c) to involve negative predication. Yet, notoriously, this discussion purports to recur to the line of thought set forth in Sph. 256a–b. Persistent queries abound: (a) Does the earlier reference not involve nonidentity after all? (b) Does nonidentity somehow remain Plato’s focus or (c) does subsequent discussion expand to include negative predication while taking nonidentity for granted? (d) If heteron simply means separate things at the two junctures (e.g. ‘other than’ versus ‘incompatible with’), is Plato’s account of false statement unsuccessful? To those answering (d) in the affirmative Plato is confused, not realizing that he has made a switch; to those denying jeopardy, the difference is innocuous or even philosophically apposite.
Despite divergent constructions and assessments, many acknowledge the importance of Plato’s distinguishing onomata and rhêmata as functionally different and essential components of statements. Plato’s move away from using onoma to encompass ‘nearly all categories of words’ (Smith 2008:148) allows him to distinguish meaningfulness from truth value and hence jettison decisively a name based, either or model of statements’ correctness. Plato’s insistence that genuine statements bear meaning even when false is widely viewed as a salient innovation, as is his distinction of true and false logoi from positive and negative ones.
Scholarly debate on right terminology for discussions of esti in Sph. reflects in microcosm, a worry voiced by some that we go awry in our grasp of Plato by taking as the touchstone of interpretation modern discussions of logic and language. Though not everyone would agree where historical faithfulness left off and anachronism began, it is salutary to distinguish between what suffices as a response to Plato’s critical targets and the merit his inquiries might or might not have from our perspective. As these orientations are not mutually exclusive, some maintain that Plato’s theorizing succeeds admirably on both counts. Regardless of one’s stance on its degree of proximity to modern concerns, the observation of Frede (1992a:423) is apt: We must not forget that ‘in his day Plato was dealing with almost entirely unexplored issues for whose discussion even the most rudimentary concepts were missing’. Against this backdrop, Plato’s investigation of false statement – along with other semantic milestones gracing his dialogues – is a ‘singular achievement’, indeed.
LAW (CONVENTION) (NOMOS)
Richard Stalley
The Greek word nomos (plural nomoi) is standardly translated as ‘law’, but has a wider meaning than the English word. It may refer not only to what we would call a ‘law’ but also to any kind of custom or convention. So, Greek authors, including Plato, do not distinguish sharply between law and social customs or between law and morality (Ostwald 1962:20–54; Stalley 1983:23–4).
In the fifth century BCE some thinkers began to emphasize the contrast between human laws or conventions (nomoi) and what happens by nature (phusis). They argued that laws or conventions do not exist by nature but result from agreements made by human beings (see Guthrie 1971a). Some evidently took this to imply that law or morality has no real claim on us and would be ignored by wise individuals if they could do so with impunity (Republic 343c1–4c9). Others argued for something like a modern social contract theory. In order to avoid a situation in which people can injure each other at will, human beings have agreed to establish laws. They call what accords with the law ‘just’ and what contravenes it ‘unjust’ and punish those who transgress (358e2–9b5). Plato rejects such views. He argues that justice (q.v.) is a fundamental value and is not simply the product of human decisions.
In the R. Plato argues at length that being just is worthwhile in itself and is in our interests even if it brings us poverty, derision or death. He elucidates this conception by describing an ideally just city. In doing so he does not emphasize law, and focuses more attention on the education of the philosopher-rulers who will govern the city. He even suggests that people who have been properly educated will not need laws to govern the minutiae of personal relations or the details of commercial transactions (R. 425a8–6a4). Some commentators take this to mean that an ideal city with truly wise rulers would need no laws at all. But Plato uses the word nomos in referring to the ideal city and even makes Socrates refer to himself and his companions as legislating (nomothetein) for the city they are constructing in words (e.g. R. 417b8, 456c1). Plato’s position may be that citizens who have been thoroughly educated in the principles on which the city is founded will not need detailed directions as to how they should lead their daily lives. Equally, there may be little need for mechanisms of enforcement. But that does not mean that there will be no laws.
In the Laws Plato describes what seems to be a more practical ideal city. It does not depend on philosopher-rulers but is, rather, founded on the principle of the sovereignty of law. Genuine law is seen as the work of reason (Lg. 713a9–15d6). In the city of the Lg. it is embodied in a detailed code laid down by a wise legislator. The constitution is designed to ensure that law, thus understood, is always supreme. In particular, a complicated system of checks and balances ensures that those who hold office always conform to the law. The ultimate aim of legislation is the common good of the city, which is understood as requiring citizens to possess the virtues of wisdom, temperance, justice and courage. The wise legislator will ensure that all the city’s institutions and laws are directed towards this goal (631b2–2d7). This means that education is a central concern but it also applies to every other aspect of life. These points are illustrated with a detailed law code, covering matters such as marriage and the family, property, agriculture and trade, religious belief and practise, and crimes such as homicide and assault. A distinctive feature is that laws are accompanied by persuasive ‘preambles’. The idea here is that it is better if people are persuaded to obey the law voluntarily rather than coerced into doing so by fear of punishment (718a6–23d4). There are many examples of such preambles, some quite elaborate. It is a matter of controversy among scholars whether these should be seen as appealing primarily to reason or to emotion (see Bobonich 1992; Stalley 1994).
Plato rejects retributive accounts of punishment and sees it as serving primarily to cure criminals of their wickedness (Protagoras 323c3–4c5; Gorgias 472d6–80b5; R. 380a 6–c3; Lg. 933e6–4c6). He suggests, therefore, that judges should pay close attention to the state of mind and circumstances of the individual (Lg. 862b1–3a2). But his code draws heavily on Athenian practise and prescribes punishments of a conventional kind with little apparent scope for variation (see Saunders 1991; Stalley 1995).
Plato’s treatment of law in the Politicus has proved particularly controversial (e.g. Lane 1998:146–63, 197–201; Rowe 1995:15–18). In that dialogue the Eleatic stranger likens law to instructions left behind by a doctor who has gone away or is otherwise unable to give individual advice to his patients. On one line of interpretation, Plato is arguing that ideally the expert politician should rule without constraint but, where such a person is unavailable, rule by law is a second best. Indeed, a city without an expert ruler should stick rigidly to its laws, even if the processes by which those laws are chosen are not particularly rational. The Plt. has thus been regarded as marking a transition between the R. (seen as demanding the untrammelled rule of philosopher-kings) and the Lg. Recent scholarship has cast doubt on this view. A key point here is that the account of law in the Plt. seems to stand apart both from that of the R. and from that of the Lg. It is possible, therefore, that Plato sees the views he puts into the mouth of the Eleatic stranger as significantly defective. As he sees it, genuine law is not simply a substitute for the decisions of an expert ruler and should not be applied mechanically. It requires the right institutions and a properly educated populace to preserve and apply it.
LOGIC
Charles M. Young
Logic (following Quine 1986) is the systematic study of logical truth (or, equivalently, valid argument). A logical truth is a sentence that is true in virtue of its logical form. Logical form is relative to a set of grammatical categories, and logical systems may be classified by the categories assumed to matter for logical form. Since Frege (1879) the set of categories thought to matter begins with sentence and sentential operator, definitive of sentential logic and goes on to include term, predicate and quantifying expression, definitive of predicate or quantificational logic. From there one may go on, in various ways, to develop temporal, modal, conditional, relevantist and intuitionist systems of logic. (See Burgess 2009 for a helpful survey and sharp assessment of such developments.)
Plato has the ideas of logical form and logical truth. Republic 4.436b9, for example, affirms:
Exclusion: It is not possible for the same thing to do or to suffer contraries in the same respect, in relation to the same thing, or at the same time.
This is a kissing cousin of our:
Non-Contradiction: It is not possible for both a sentence and its negation to be true.
But whereas Non-Contradiction appeals to the grammatical category of sentences to tell us, for example, that if ‘Helen is beautiful’ is true, then ‘It’s not the case that Helen is beautiful’ is not. Exclusion appeals to the grammatical category of contrary to tell us, for example, that if ‘Helen is beautiful’ and ‘Helen is ugly’ are both true, then she is beautiful and ugly in different respects (appearance vs. character, say), in relation to different things (Quasimodo vs. Aphrodite, say) or at different times (youth vs. old age, say). The divergence between Plato and Frege emerges sharply if we note that the sentence ‘If justice is a virtue, then injustice is a vice’ is presumptively a logical truth in the logic of contrariety, but not in modern sentential or predicate logic.
Plato wrote dialogues and not treatises, and he does not engage in any systematic study of logical form and truth, in the manner, say, of Aristotle’s Prior Analytics (or even the Topics), and thus cannot be said to have a logic in the sense specified above (and hence ‘logic’ does not appear in the index of Kraut 1992a). What we get instead is a congeries of insights and speculations about what might matter for logical form and logical truth, often expressed in difficult Greek, that may or may not be capable of systematization. To give a sense of what we have and the problems we face, I take up three texts that deal in abstract and in various ways with predication.
Socrates says at Euthyphro 6e3–6 that if he learned what the idea of piety is, he would be able to use that idea as a standard and say that an action or person that is such as [it is] is pious. Here such as [it is] is a stab at translating the Greek toioutos, a combination of the indefinite pronoun toios (= of some sort) and the demonstrative pronoun houtos (= this); other tries include of that kind (Grube 2002), resembles [it] (Cooper 1974), agrees [with it] (Fowler D. H. 1999). Whatever the translation, the idea seems clear enough. Socrates thinks that if:
(1)Piety is (say) doing what the god wants done,
and if Socrates is such as [it is] – that is, if
(2)Socrates is doing what the god wants done,
then it follows that
(3)Socrates is pious.
If we note that ‘is’ marks identity in (1) and predication in (2) and (3), and that ‘doing’ is a gerund in (1) and a participle in (2), then it follows that:
(4)If piety is doing what the god wants done, and Socrates is doing what the god wants done, then Socrates is pious.
This evidently expresses a logical truth connecting noun phrases that mention properties with terms mentioning things that have those properties.
So far, so good. Consider Charmides 169e1–5, where Critias, with Socrates’ endorsement, states that ‘[one] is such as what he has: he who has quickness is quick, and he who has beauty is beautiful, he who has knowledge will know, and he who has knowledge that is of itself will know himself’. Here ‘[one] is such as what he has’ is very close to a generalization of the logical truth of the Euthphr. But two points might give us pause. First, the inference from ‘[one] is such as what he has’ to ‘he who has quickness is quick’ arguably presupposes ‘quickness is quick’, not unlike this English exchange: ‘You’ll have to be quick to do that’ – ‘Quick? I’m quickness itself!’. Second, we might balk, though again Socrates does not, at the inference to ‘he who has knowledge that is of itself will know himself’.
Anyone still on the bus at this point will surely get off faced with R. 438a7–b2: ‘Regarding things that are such as to be of something, those that are of certain sorts are of something of a certain sort, and those that are just themselves are of something that is just itself’, a principle that appeals to the grammatical category of a relative term to support the thought that thirst as such is for drink as such, and not for good drink, even though all desire is for the good. Shorey’s translation ‘But I need hardly remind you’ (of the particles alla mentoi with which Socrates introduces the principle) anticipates the incomprehension that Glaucon immediately expresses. The principle requires over forty lines for its elucidation.
Whether Plato’s various scattered remarks on contrariety, predication and relation can be brought under control and organized into a coherent logical system remains to be seen. Some worthwhile work has been done – for example Robinson 1966, Lloyd 1992a and, most recently and most systematically, Dancy 2007. But there is still much to do.
LOGOS (ACCOUNT, ARGUMENT) (DEFINITION, STATEMENT)
Kenneth Sayre
The term logos in Attic Greek carries dozens of meanings, many of which occur routinely in Plato’s writings. There are several occurrences, however, in which the term conveys meanings with particular philosophic significance. Sometimes the significance is relatively transparent, while in other cases it poses substantive problems. We begin with a few transparent cases.
One unproblematic sense of logos is that of reasoned argument or account. When Socrates asks Protagoras for an explanation of how virtue can be taught, the latter decides to respond not by a reasoned account (logô Protagoras 329C) but by telling a story (the myth of Prometheus). Yet Socrates eventually wins the disputation with an elaborately constructed argument (logon 361A).
Another philosophically significant sense is statement or judgement. In the Sophist, statement (logos 262A) is defined as a combination of names and verbs and said to possess both reference and truth value. And in his conversation with Phaedrus, Socrates examines what a true statement (alêthês logos Phaedrus 270C) would say about the soul’s nature.
There is also the standard mathematical sense of ratio or proportion (Republic 509D, 511E) where Socrates describes the ratio (logon) on which the divided line is based.
A further straightforward meaning is that of definition. Thus at the beginning of the Theaetetus, Socrates invites the young mathematician to formulate a single logos that applies to the many varieties of knowledge. In Theaetetus’ subsequent conversation with the Eleatic stranger, likewise, the two embark on the project of capturing the nature of the sophist in a clear definition (logô Tht. 218C) Other occurrences of logos in this sense can be found in the Phdr., the Laws and the Seventh Letter.
Closely related is the sense at Phaedo 99E–100A where Socrates is describing his so-called second best method of logos. The method consists of hypothesizing what appears to be the soundest judgement (logon) on a topic and then testing other statements for agreement with it (for detailed analysis, see Sayre 1995a:ch. 5). This use of the term is comparable to that at Tht. 151E, where Socrates expresses appreciation for Theaetetus’ initial account equating knowledge with perception. In such contexts the term logos can be understood to mean conjecture or hypothesis.
We turn next to senses that are philosophically significant but more problematic. A noteworthy case comes with the final hypothesis of Tht. (knowledge is true opinion plus logos) where the problem is explicitly stated. The problem is to specify a sense in which logos might convert true opinion into knowledge. Senses examined and found wanting are (a) mere speech, (b) enumerative account and (c) distinguishing characteristic. A striking feature of this list is that none of these three is a serious contender for the role, whereas more promising candidates (explanation, reason, ground) appear to be deliberately avoided.
Nonetheless, we find Socrates acknowledging at Tht. 202D that knowledge requires both logos and true opinion. Basically the same requirement is stated in several other contexts including Meno 98A, Symposium 202A and R. 533C (see also Timaeus 51D–E). Although the sense in question remains elusive, Plato seems to treat logos as a necessary ingredient of knowledge.
Another problem associated with the final hypothesis is what to make of the ‘dream theory’, which Socrates examines at length before taking up the three senses of logos mentioned previously. The theory in a nutshell is that every composite thing consists of elements that can be named but not described, and that a description (logos) can be given of a composite object by combining the names of its elements. While this sense of logos is more sophisticated than the other three, its relevance to the rest of the dialogue is not apparent. For one thing, it is not obvious how true opinion about an object could be converted to knowledge by adding a description in terms of its elements. Other puzzles debated by commentators are the source of this ‘theory’ and why Plato used so much space (four-and-a-half Stephanus pages) at the end of the dialogue in discussing it (for a detailed discussion, see Bluck 1956; Burnyeat 1970; Fine 1979; Sayre 1969).
Beyond these puzzling occurrences in Tht., appearances of the term logos in other writings pose problems of a seemingly more basic nature. Following his discussion of the mathematical curriculum in R. bk 7, Socrates attributes to dialectic the power to grasp forms through the exercise of logos (R. 532A). Proceeding thus, Socrates continues, the dialectician is able to reach the limit of the intelligible world and to grasp the nature of the good itself. This description of dialectic occurs against the background of three famous images depicting various aspects of the philosopher’s quest: (a) the sun (q.v.) as the visible analogue of the good which is the ultimate source of being, (b) the divided line (q.v.) representing the soul’s ascent to the intelligible forms and (c) the cave (q.v.) dramatizing the attainment of knowledge and the philosopher’s responsibility to the state. This background makes it clear that the philosopher’s quest is consummated with a grasp of the good through logos, which accordingly might be designated the ‘logos of dialectic’.
Moving beyond the gorgeous rhetoric of R., however, we find other texts that seem to deny logos this exalted power. One is the Ep. 7, where the author explains why philosophic understanding cannot be conveyed in language (logôn Ep. 7 343A). In this explanation, the author states explicitly that logos is inadequate to express the mind’s grasp of the good (342D). Whatever the dialectical logos of R. might be, it cannot be communicated verbally.
Another Platonic writing disclaiming the ability of language to convey philosophic understanding is the Phdr. One legitimate use of written discourses (presumably including the dialogues) nonetheless, as Socrates remarks, is to provide reminders of another kind of logos (Phdr. 276E) inscribed in the soul of the budding philosopher. This ‘soul-ingrained’ logos has potential not only of growing into fully fledged philosophic knowledge but also of spreading to other souls through the medium of dialectical discourse. Perhaps the dialectical logos of R. coincides with the soul-bound logos of Phdr., in that both mature in a mental grasp of the eternal forms.
One sense of logos not found in Plato (as in Heraclitus and the Stoics), however, is that of ordering principle in a rational universe. Plato’s closest approximation to such a principle is the world soul of Ti., which is not described as a kind of logos.
LOVE (ERÔS)
D. C. Schindler
Love (erôs) – one of the only things Socrates claims to fall under his expertise (Symposium 177d–e; cf. Theages 128b; Lysis 204c) – represents the primary theme in the two so-called erotic dialogues, the Phaedrus and the Smp., though it also plays a significant role in the Republic.
Love appears as essentially ambiguous in the R. On the one hand, Plato calls it a ‘tyrant’, presenting it as the most intense of the soul’s base desires (R. 403a, 439d). On the other hand, Socrates identifies love for knowledge of unchanging being as the defining characteristic of the philosopher (485a–b, 490b). In the one case, then, love is what imprisons us in a lawless dream world (576b), while in the other case love is what draws us to the real. Plato typically uses the plural when speaking of the tyrant’s ‘loves’, and calls philosophical love, by contrast, ‘true erôs’ (490c), but he does not explicate the precise nature of the difference thematically in this dialogue.
Greater light is shed on this ambiguity in the Phdr., in which Socrates presents two speeches on love as a response to Phaedrus’ reading of a speech by Lysias. In the first, Socrates reformulates, with more order and clarity, the view of love presented in the prior speech by Lysias, and in the second, a ‘palinode’ or recantation, he corrects the first, directly stating, ‘There is no truth to that account’ (Phdr. 244a). Socrates begins the first speech by defining love as a ‘desire for beautiful things’ (237d) – or, more specifically, the ‘beauty of bodies’ (238c) – and goes on to associate it with a desire for pleasures that runs counter to our ‘acquired opinion that strives for the best’ (237d–e). This love is similar to the ‘tyrant’ that appeared in the R., insofar as it is a force that seeks to dominate its object; it always leads to excess, and it is essentially opposed, as a ‘madness’, to the order and unity of reason.
The palinode, which is one of the literary gems in the Platonic corpus, begins with the claim that madness can be beneficial if it is a ‘gift from the gods’ (244a) – that is, ‘madness’ need not be sub or anti rational, but may also be supra rational, and so in principle able to include reason. This view of love requires a revision of both its subject and object: the soul is interpreted as having a transcendent origin and destination, and the beauty that provokes erôs is no longer a merely physical object, but now an essentially transcendent reality that distinguishes itself from all the other intelligibles by being also accessible to bodily sight (250d–e). Socrates memorably expresses love, thus understood, as the ‘wings’ that carry the soul from its mundane state to the sphere ‘beyond the heavens’, the realm of ‘really real reality’ (247c). Love, in this case, is not simply one of the soul’s desires, but is in fact the movement of the whole soul – which Socrates depicts as a winged chariot, with a charioteer (reason), an obedient horse (noble passions) and an unruly one (base passions) – towards its proper end. Because it thus serves to ‘bridge’ the difference between the transcendent and the bodily, the notion of beauty and its correlative love, that Plato presents in the Phdr. is seen by some as the hinge concept of his philosophy in general.
The most elaborate exposition of the nature of love in Plato’s work can be found in the Smp. It contains six speeches on love, followed by a speech by Alcibiades on Socrates (who thus seems to personify erôs). Scholars do not agree whether it is legitimate to identify Plato’s own view of love with any particular account, though a certain priority is generally accorded to Socrates’. The most famous speech is no doubt that given by Aristophanes, who expounds a myth to explain the origin of love: originally spherical beings were divided by Zeus because of their haughtiness, and each fragment now seeks his or her other half in order to recover the original unity. Socrates’ speech – in which he recounts a conversation he had with the prophetess Diotima and so sneaks in, as it were, the only woman ‘present’ in the group (cf. Smp. 176e) – is nevertheless the most comprehensive, insofar as it takes up elements from the other speeches, ordering and correcting them as it proceeds. In contrast to Agathon’s view of love as the supreme beauty, Diotima begins by showing that, as a desire, love is essentially constituted by a need or lack (200a–b), though she distinguishes this from complete absence. Instead, in line with the account in the Phdr., love appears as a ‘spirit’ that mediates between the human and divine and so connects them (202d–3a). It is identified with neither complete fullness nor complete emptiness, but is the child of Penia and Poros (poverty and plenty) (203b–c).
Also like the account in the Phdr., the (efficient) cause of love is beauty, though Diotima redescribes its object as goodness in order to provide its final cause (204e). As a desire for the good, love thus turns out to be the truth of any desire whatsoever, since all desires aim at their objects insofar as they are good. Whereas Aristophanes explained erôs as a desire for completion, and thus as essentially relative to the needy soul, Diotima shows that this need itself must be defined in turn by the good in itself (205e–6a). But the desire for the good in this complete sense is in fact a desire for eternal goodness, so that Diotima is able to specify the purpose of love further as ‘begetting in the beautiful, both in body and in soul’, for reproduction is a mortal image of immortality (206b–7a). This allows her to explain a variety of phenomena in the animal and human worlds, which had been alluded to in the previous speeches, in relation to the single desire for immortality.
Before elaborating what has come to be known as the ‘ladder of love’, Diotima confesses to Socrates that the ‘final and highest’ mystery of love is one that might exceed his capacity (210a). Some scholars have read this as Plato’s indication of where his philosophy departs from that of his teacher. Diotima presents an itinerary for the achievement of love in its purest sense: one begins by loving beautiful bodies, first one and then all bodies insofar as they are beautiful; then, one forgets bodies and learns to love souls and their deeds in noble actions and laws; and thirdly one comes to love knowledge of various sorts. In other words, there is a movement from physical, to moral, and then to intellectual beauty (which corresponds to the three parts of the soul elaborated in the R.). Finally, one encounters beauty in its absolute existence, that is, not as relative to anything at all. This beauty in itself is presented as the cause of all the foregoing instances of beauty, and described as completely transcendent of any beautiful thing, no matter how noble, as beyond what appears to the senses and to reason, and as incapable of diminution or change (211a–b).
Scholars have claimed that this description of beauty contradicts the beauty in the Phdr., which is an intelligible object that is also physically visible – but there is no reason in principle why it cannot both lie beyond the mind and senses and be accessible to them (for the transcendent form of beauty presents itself in the Smp. at every level up the ‘ladder’). Nevertheless, Plato does not himself address this problem directly. Scholars also complain that Plato’s account in the Smp. excludes the possibility of love for individuals, though others have argued that Diotima’s speech can be read as describing an increasingly nonpossessive love, which can in principle still be had for individuals.
MADNESS AND POSSESSION
Silke-Maria Weineck
The theme of madness serves several distinct functions in Plato’s dialogues. When linked to poetry, as in Ion and Phaedrus, madness as divine inspiration or possession (theia mania, enthousiasmos) allows Socrates to develop a distinction between poetry and philosophy. While poetry appears as a unique utterance the production of which is neither the result of specialized knowledge nor subject to the poet’s conscious control, philosophy emerges as the controlled, repeatable and teachable labour of thought.
At the same time, madness provides a corrective to overly rationalist thought. Thus, Socrates’ ‘inspired’ second speech in the Phdr. refutes the cynical argument of the first one. In the Republic, the example of madness serves to undermine the definition of justice as the habit of paying one’s debt and speaking the truth:
[I]f a man takes weapons from a friend when the latter is of sound mind, and the friend demands them back when he is mad, one shouldn’t give back such things, and the man who gave them back would not be just, and moreover, one should not be willing to tell someone in this state the whole truth. (R. 331c–d, trans. Bloom)
In the Ion, Socrates persuades the eponymous rhapsode to recant the mercenary account of his craft (‘if I set them to crying, I shall laugh myself because I am making money, but if they laugh, then I shall cry because of the money I am losing’, Ion 535e) in favour of a model of divine inspiration, for ‘to be held to be divine is far finer’ (Ion 542b, trans. Bloom).
Third, the question of divine – or quasi-divine – possession is at stake in Socrates’ daimonion (q.v.; Apology 31d, 40b–c; Phdr. 242c, 242b), the enigmatic inner voice that at times is said to negatively guide his speech and actions and further complicates the notion of Socrates as the philosopher of self-possessed reason (Burkert 1985:178–81; Destrée and Smith 2005; Gall 2009).
In general, Plato shows little interest in madness as an illness; in the Phdr. he distinguishes between ‘two kinds of madness, one resulting from human ailments, the other from a divine disturbance of our conventions of conduct’ (Phdr. 265a, trans. Hackforth), and as in Ion, it is only the nonsomatic kind that is of interest. The madness that matters, then, is nearly always a form of divine interference or possession, an intervention into what we might call conventional human subjectivity, and Plato’s two most important dialogues on madness, Ion and Phdr., take considerable care to distinguish it both from various forms of technê of speaking (e.g. rhetoric, dialectics, psychagogia).
Ion struggles to preserve an understanding of rhapsody as a skill or craft (technê) that necessarily presupposes knowledge (epistêmê) of the poetic product he delivers. Socrates contends that the accomplishments of rhapsody rest on divine inspiration, and that the rhapsode performs in a state devoid of knowledge, sovereign skill and reason (epistêmê, technê, nous). He develops that theory in the famous monologue about the magnetic chain of divine inspiration linking poet, rhapsode and audience. This speech contains the Ion’s most quoted lines: ‘For the poet is a light thing, winged and sacred, unable to make poetry before he is enthused and out of his mind and intelligence is no longer in him’ (Ion 534b). Though long neglected as a minor piece – Pangle (1987) calls it one of the ‘forgotten dialogues’, and Goethe (1796) called it a ‘persiflage’ of enthusiasm – the Ion nonetheless presents interpretative challenges worth exploring (Tigerstedt 1970), particularly when read as a disquisition not on poetry but on rhapsody. In this light, the central concern of the dialogue is not the nature of poetry but the question of poetry’s guardianship. If the possessed poet is himself dispossessed of reason and knowledge, the meaning of poetry needs to be mediated by those who are not poets themselves. As Ion loses his argument, philosophy emerges as the first form of a practise that will eventually become known as literary criticism (Weineck 2002:19–31).
While Ion operates with a notion of poetic inspiration that may be an already well worn cliché, the Phdr. develops a far more complex account of various forms of madness: prophetic, ritual, erotic and poetic mania, sent, respectively, by Apollo, Dionysus, Eros and the Muses. The dialogue is notoriously complex, consisting of three speeches that weigh the benefits that lovers and nonlovers provide to boys or young men. In the third speech, Socrates revokes the praise of the ostensibly rational nonlover and extols the virtue of erotic madness as a path to the recollection (anamnêsis) of the forms – provided that the mad lover can restrain his physical desire and thus transform the relationship into one of shared discourse.
Socrates’ account of madness reverses the steadiest assumptions of madness held in modern times. As ritual it is a remedy instead of an ailment; as prophecy it imparts the most reliable intelligence instead of the most unreliable; as erotic madness it leads to perfect attachment instead of perfect solitude. Madness is neither excluded from nor an episode in or a footnote to history. In fact, mania seems to hold a central place within what we might call the different orders of history – the history of the individual, of the great families, of the state, of the nation, of the human soul. In the Phdr., all of them, in various ways, depend on the interlude of madness – just as they depend on madness to be nothing but an interlude. At the same time, mania interrupts the usual progression of things and terminates the course of causality: in the Oresteia, clearly the backdrop of Socrates’ example of Dionysian mania, only madness can stop the self-perpetuation of ancient pollution.
This is not to say that the Phdr. breaks with the Ion’s tendency to privilege philosophy over inspiration as intellectual and rhetorical technê, but certain forms of madness emerge not only as compatible with philosophy (Phdr. 278c–d) but perhaps as philosophy’s necessary precondition (Weineck 2002:32–44). In other words, the Phdr.’s philosophy of madness solves, if ambivalently, the problem of the origin of meaningful discourse.
Neither written nor spoken, the prohibitions of the daimonion (q.v. Daimon) constitute a genre of its own that escapes the various taxonomies of logoi Plato proposes. It is the daimonion that prevents Socrates from leaving after his first speech and prompts Socrates’ recantation or palinode of cynical reason (if we can call it that): ‘This story is not true’ (Phdr. 243b). Truth, or more precisely the recantation of nontruth, then, depends in its origin on the event of words without a speaker, an event as unforeseeable and incalculable as the event of divine madness.
MATHEMATICS (MATHÊMATIKÊ)
Christine J. Thomas
Plato’s ‘encounter with geometry was to prove no passing infatuation, but a love match, a lifelong attachment as deep as it was intense’ (Vlastos 1991b:130). Plato’s fascination extended to number theory, harmonics and astronomy. Though the degree to which Plato was himself an accomplished, practicing mathematician is disputed, he is credited in antiquity with facilitating mathematical progress and even directing major lines of research (Cherniss 1951; Fowler 1999; Proclus 1970; Simplicius in De Caelo 488.20–4). Famously, the entrance to Plato’s Academy is said to have borne the inscription, ‘Let no one who is ungeometrical enter’. The exact nature and details of Plato’s attachment, however, are difficult to discern. The precision, methodical rigour and intellectual authority of successful mathematical proofs surely appeal to Plato; but it is not easy to identify the features of particular mathematical strategies or results that impress him most. Moreover, although mathematical education is regarded as propaedeutic to philosophy, any effort to determine exactly how or why mathematics is assigned this role quickly becomes an attempt to solve a provocative mystery. At best, we can confidently say that Plato deems mathematics a rich resource for pursuing his first love: dialectic (q.v.).
Plato often looks to mathematics for inspiration. Philosophical attempts at definition are to emulate the account of ‘the even’ as ‘the part of number that is not scalene but isosceles’ (Euthyphro 12d8–10) or the definition of ‘powers’ (i.e. incommensurable lengths) as ‘the lines that square off oblong numbers’ (Theaetetus 148a7–b2). Indeed, some of the dramas played out in Plato’s dialogues constitute historical evidence of developments and struggles in the geometry of incommensurability (Men. 82b–5c; Tht. 147c7–8b2), stereometry (Tht. 148b2; Republic 509d6–8, 528a6–b5; Timaeus 53dff), and harmonics and astronomy (R. 528e3–31c4; Ti. 32c5–40d5; Laws 821b5–2c9). Though the full import of Plato’s appeals to mathematical accomplishments is often difficult to unpack, he clearly aims to illustrate the sorts of approaches and results he hopes for in philosophy (Burnyeat 1978, 2000; Heath 1981; Knorr 1989; Lloyd 1992; Netz 2003).
As for mathematical method, Plato most explicitly calls on geometry. A successful geometric analysis either discovers premises required to complete a proof of a purported conclusion or it identifies construction procedures to solve an articulated construction problem (Menn 2002). Geometric synthesis reverses the direction of investigation and moves from given principles to conclusions. Plato self-consciously mimics both geometrical analysis (Men. 86e3ff.) and geometrical synthesis (Phaedo 100a1–1e7) in philosophical inquiries that proceed ‘from hypotheses’ (Mueller 1992).
Of particular interest to Plato, however, is the idea that an investigation might ultimately light on something ‘unhypothetical’. For although rigorous investigations from hypotheses might gain some epistemic entitlement to their results, those results are nevertheless conditional. Even the most successful mathematical proof fails to yield the highest kind of understanding (noêsis) so long as it begins from hypotheses which are not themselves sufficiently epistemically secure (R. 533b6–c2). For Plato, a consistent mathematical science is not guaranteed to yield truth, and convincingness is not sufficient for genuine understanding (Cratylus 436c8–d8; R. 510c1–d3, 533b1–d1). Ultimately, a nonmathematical (or metamathematical), dialectical inquiry must discover ‘the unhypothetical first principle (archê) of everything’ thereby providing epistemic foundations for mathematical and philosophical investigations at once (R. 511b5–7).
What, then, is the relation of mathematics to philosophy? For dialectic discovers epistemic grounds for mathematics, but mathematical study appears to be an essential element of any educational curriculum that aims to produce dialectically capable individuals (R. 522c–31d, 533a8–10). Like the most important philosophical objects and truths, the objects and truths of mathematics are discovered, for Plato, not constructed. Mathematicians do not ‘make their figures, they simply discover those which already are’ (Euthydemus 290c1–3). In the R., Socrates comments on the absurd, though unavoidable talk of practicing geometers who speak of ‘squaring’, ‘applying’ and ‘adding’ as if they are actually making and acting on their figures (R. 527a6–b6). In fact, mathematical arguments are for the sake of apprehending eternal, unchanging entities by means of thought alone. Number theory, geometry, pure harmonics and pure astronomy facilitate the soul’s cognitive contact with being or ‘what always is’. In the ideal case, then, mathematical study turns an inquiring philosophical soul away from the changing perceptible realm towards the realm of unchanging, imperceptible, eternal beings. Ultimately, the R.’s mathematical curriculum prepares a soul for cognition of the most important beings available to thought alone, Plato’s forms (q.v.; e.g. justice, beauty and goodness).
On the one hand, Plato is not alone in taking mathematics to supply paradigmatic examples of cognitions that are significantly independent of sense experience. Like many in the so-called rationalist tradition, Plato regards the mind or soul as having cognitive capacities through reason alone to grasp purely intelligible objects or truths, to recognize that such objects or truths are eternal or necessary and to see why eternal or necessary truths are true (i.e. to recognize what a priori justification or entitlement to such truths might be available). On the other hand, for Plato, mathematical study has a particularly important and surprising role to play. For, the ultimate aim of mathematical education is successful apprehension of a particular form, the form of the good (R. 526d8–e1). For Plato, the form of goodness (q.v.) itself plays the role of the unhypothetical first principle of everything; and mathematical study, along with dialectic and practical political experience, somehow make cognition of this form possible (R. 531c6–d4).
Some of the surprise perhaps diminishes in noting that the one who masters the educational curriculum of the R. comes to understand the governing principles of the richly mathematically constituted cosmos described in Plato’s Ti. The truths of the pure mathematical sciences are also the metaphysical truths grounding the unity, structure and motions of the cosmic soul and body, and of every soul, body and ordered entity in the cosmos (Burnyeat 2000). Grasping ultimate mathematical truths is, then, to grasp ultimate physical and metaphysical truths; it is to begin to understand how the cosmos has been mathematically structured by a divine, intelligent craftsman. Moreover, where the imposition of mathematical structure produces unity, order, concord, harmony and intelligibility, it also produces goodness (Ti. 29d7–30a6, 53a7–c1, 68e1–6; Phlb. 64d9– 5a5). The study of organizing mathematical principles is, in some sense then, the study of goodness (Burnyeat 2000; White 2006).
Finally, for Plato, any soul that is capable of understanding cosmic structure and motion must be like the cosmos; it must itself be mathematically structured. Insofar as a soul’s motions can become assimilated to cosmic psychic motions, it can become intelligent. The flourishing human soul is the one that has (among other things) studied geometry, astronomy and harmonics, thereby making possible the alignment of its motions with the divine motions of the cosmic soul (Ti. 47b5–e2). To become so aligned is to become like god, to become intelligent and happy (Ti. 90b6–d7).
MEDICINE (IATRIKÊ)
Mark L. McPherran
Plato’s attention to the craft of medicine, which is conceived of as a paradigmatic instance of expert knowledge that lesser fields should imitate (Gorgias 464a–7c), is evident throughout his work (e.g. Phaedrus 268a–70d; Republic 403d–10b; Politicus 292d–300a; Timaeus 64a–92c; Laws 889b–e). This is made particularly clear by his various uses of the analogy of soul to body, of psychic health to somatic health (e.g. Crito 47a–8b; Grg. 463e–5d; Phdr. 270a–e; Sophist 223e, 226e–30e; Plt. 292e–3c) and the microcosmic and macrocosmic conception of human nature found in the Ti. – a conception that parallels the similar one found in the Hippocratic work On Regimen (Jouanna 1998:70). Indeed, some take the frequency and force of the analogy to show that Socrates (s.v.) and Plato were the inventors of ‘scientific verbal psychotherapy’, beside whom ‘Gorgias and Antiphon are mere prehistory’ (Laín Entralgo 1970:137; cf. 126; cf. Moes 2000).
In Plato’s day medicine was just emerging as a science from its religious, magical roots. Hippocrates started off as an Asclepiad – born ten years after Socrates on Kos, the site of one of the four major healing temple-hospitals of Asclepius. The clinical work and success of the Hippocratic school, however, dates for the most part from the time subsequent to Hippocrates’ departure from Kos and its temple (Jouanna 1998:27, 30–1). Plato understands Hippocratic medicine to hold that illnesses result from an imbalance in the body of the four humours – fluids that are equal in proportion in healthy individuals (Timaeus 82a–6a). When these humours (blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm) are not in balance, sickness results. Hippocratic treatment focused on restoring a proper balance (see further, and on medicine in philosophy, Pellegrin 2009).
Two prominent uses of a medical analogy are found in the Cri. and Grg. Here Socrates’ theory of the soul (q.v.) is fairly minimal: it is that in us, separate from our bodies, that is the subject or agent of moral judgement, choice and action – that wherein vice and virtue reside (Cri. 47e–8a). It is the entire, real self: the ‘I’ of consciousness and personality, and the part of us that engages in intellectual activity. It is also more important than the body, and, like the body, can be harmed to so great an extent (by false moral beliefs or wrong acts) that one might no longer have a life worth living (Cri. 47d–8a; Grg. 479b–c). To care for this entity in the manner of a physician – that is, employing an analogous expert knowledge (technê (q.v. Art)) – is to endeavour to make it as good and happy as possible by improving it in respect of virtue and guarding it from the harm of vice, a task accomplished through correct philosophical training, elenctic testing and virtuous action (Cri. 48a–8d; Grg. 467c–81b). Although medicine is an important technê in comparison to the ‘knack’ of cookery, since the soul is more important than the body, philosophy is a more important field of knowledge than medicine in the final analysis (Grg. 464a–6a).
The medical analogy also shows up in the Charmides, where Socrates is presented to young, beautiful Charmides as a ‘physician’ with a cure for his morning headaches. Aroused by the youth, Socrates claims to know a medicinal leaf, a pharmakon, but one that is only effective if accompanied by the singing of the charm (epôidê) that goes with it. Socrates then endorses the view of those successful holistic Greek physicians who do not attempt to cure eyes by themselves, but ‘. . . try to treat and heal the whole and the part together’ (Chrm. 156c). Socrates next reports that he learned his charm while with the army, from one of the physicians of the Thracian king Zalmoxis (156d–7c). He tells Socrates that Greek physicians are acceptably knowledgeable, but that they often forget that just as one ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought one to attempt to cure the body without the soul . . . for the part can never be well unless the whole is well. One should begin by curing the soul, something done by using words that produce moderation in the soul (Chrm. 156d–7c; cf. Phdr. 269e–70e on this and Hippocratic method). Some have identified these charming words as those spoken by Socrates during his subsequent elenctic examination of Charmides and Critias; but in any event, by the end of the dialogue, Socrates emerges as a subtle diagnostician of both men’s lack of moderation, character defects so deep that neither of them can profit from further association with Socrates. The dialogue has also communicated the idea that philosophical ‘treatment’ is more central and more valuable than mere physical treatment.
It is natural to suppose that at least one of Plato’s purposes in employing the character of the physician Eryximachus in the Symposium is to convey the import of his own understanding of medicine insofar as it bears on the central topic of that dialogue: erôs. Although some have taken Eryximachus to be a bombastic dogmatist who serves primarily as a target of Platonic satire, others argue that his speech ‘is not a caricature but rather an historically correct picture of a [Hippocratic] medical man of that time’, Edelstein 1945:91). He does indeed give a Hippocratic medical account – but also a grand universalizing account of erôs – one that takes in both the realm of nature and that of the gods. Moreover, it is a theory supported by such stars of pre-Socratic science as Heraclitus (Smp. 187a–c). Here, it has been argued that Plato subsequently uses Diotima to insist that true physicians – unlike Eryximachus – must be philosophers who are pious by accepting the primacy of a philosophical erôs that will lead them towards the Platonic project of ‘becoming like god’ (Tht. 176a–7c; see further McPherran 2006; q.v. Piety; Religion; Love). Socrates seems cast as such a physician when he is likened to a midwife who helps deliver beautiful ideas in the Tht. (148e–51d).
The Philebus also employs Hippocratic notions (emptying, repletion and homonoia) in its analysis of pleasure (Phlb. 31a–3c; 44b–9a) in order to address its central topic, namely, the search for that ‘state or condition of the soul that can render the life of every man a happy life’ (11d). It has even been argued that if we follow this medical suggestion by construing the dialogue to offer a diagnosis of the ‘disease’ of hedonism, followed by an account of the philosophical cure for it, we can understand how its puzzling transitions and digressions actually contribute to a coherent overall unity (Moes 2000:113–61). Whether or not that is so, it has also been observed by scholars such as Dorothea Frede that the dualistic account of erôs as a physical, medical phenomenon we find outlined in the Smp. at 185e–9d makes a brief cameo appearance towards the end of the Phlb. account of the fourfold division of all beings (23c–7c), where there occurs what is arguably an allusion to the goddess Aphrodite (26b–c; Frede 1993:23, n. 1; see further Dorothea Frede 1992; McPherran 2010).
Besides using medical analogies, Plato is interested in medicine per se in determining how the medical theories of his day might be squared with his own theories of nature and the human constitution, and what role physicians would play in the idealized states of the R. and Lg. In his R., for example, Plato employs his health analogy once he has established that justice is good in itself, by claiming that justice and injustice are ‘in the soul what the healthful and diseaseful are in the body; there is no difference’ (R. 444c). But here Plato seems less willing than he was in, say, the Grg. to view medicine as a standalone technê. By arguing for a tripartite soul of intellect, spirit and appetite in R. bk 4, Plato is led to see the ‘intertwining of soul and body in the cases of spirit and appetite’ (Levin 2007:147). The result is that the practise of medicine must come under the purview of the philosophical rulers of his Kallipolis, who will guide physicians in their treatments so as to maximize the overall goodness of this ideal polis (Levin 2007). Here, as in the Smp., the primacy of philosophical treatment in comparison to medical treatment for Plato is made clear. Meanwhile, Hippocrates laboured to free medicine ‘from the yoke of philosophy’ (Pellegrin 2009:667).
METAPHYSICS (see Ontology)
METHOD
Hugh H. Benson
For Plato, philosophy is the love of wisdom. It is the search for and attempt to acquire knowledge of the most important things. Following Plato, I will be using ‘wisdom’ and ‘knowledge’ interchangeably. To engage in such a search methodically is to systematically – purposively and repeatedly – attempt to acquire such knowledge. Clearly, Socrates is not always engaging in this sort of behaviour. Sometimes, for example, he is simply attempting to persuade the jury of his innocence. Nevertheless, Plato often depicts Socrates as attempting to acquire knowledge and to do so in a systematic way.
If we look at both Plato’s depiction of Socrates and Plato’s explicit description of his method, we notice three distinct phases of Plato’s account – the elenctic phase, the hypothesis phase and the collection and division phase – each of which corresponds to a common division of the dialogues into early, middle and late, whether or not these phases indicate a development in Plato’s thinking on method (q.v. Developmentalism).
(I) THE ELENCTIC PHASE
In dialogues like the Euthyphro, Laches, Charmides and Protagoras, Plato depicts Socrates as engaging in a series of short questions and answers with various interlocutors. In every case, these interlocutors have some claim to knowledge of some relatively important matter. Euthyphro, for example, claims to know both that prosecuting his father is a pious action and what piety itself is. Socrates’ questioning is aimed at testing the reputed knowledge of these interlocutors. This questioning method (the elenchos) has the following structure:
(1)Socrates asks the interlocutor a question the answer to which, p, is meant to exhibit the interlocutor’s wisdom, usually, but not always, concerning the definition of some moral concept.
(2)The interlocutor provides answers, q, r and s to a series of other Socratic questions.
(3)Socrates goes on to show that these answers entail the negation of the original answer.
(4)Thus, the conjunction (p & q & r & s) is false.
The elenchos is not aimed at acquiring knowledge, but at testing the reputed knowledge of another. Moreover, its conclusion asserts only the falsity of a conjunction (i.e. that p, q, r and s are inconsistent) and not the falsity of one of the conjuncts. If Socrates is to come to know that one of these conjuncts is false (and so that its negation is true) by means of the elenchos, he must take the other conjuncts to have some special epistemic status. Unfortunately, Socrates’ descriptions of this method suggest that the conjuncts all have the same epistemic status. The only property the conjuncts must have is that the interlocutor believes them. As a method for acquiring the knowledge one lacks the elenchos looks ineffective (perhaps confirmed by Socrates’ profession of ignorance near the end of his life in the Apology, despite a lifetime of searching). (For a famously different interpretation of the Socratic elenchos see Vlastos 1981.) As a method for eliminating one’s false conceit of knowledge, a necessary first step in seeking the knowledge one lacks, the elenchos plays an important role in Plato’s philosophical method.
(II) THE HYPOTHESIS PHASE
In the Meno, Socrates asks how it is possible to acquire knowledge (Meno’s Paradox, 80d–e). In various places in dialogues like the Men., Phaedo, Republic and Parmenides Plato also depicts Socrates as describing and practicing the hypothetical method as an answer. This method consists of two stages in attempting to come to know the answer, p, to some important question (e.g. ‘Is virtue teachable?’).
Stage 1: find a second proposition, q, whose truth is necessary and sufficient for the truth of p, and show how q entails p.
Stage 2: confirm the truth of q:
(1)by finding a third proposition r whose truth is necessary and sufficient for the truth of q, and
(2)by examining the consequences of q to determine their coherence.
In the R., Plato explains that the first part of the second stage, which is simply the application of the first stage on the ‘higher hypothesis’, q, is to be repeated on successively ‘higher hypotheses’ until one reaches the ‘unhypothetical first principle’. This latter appears to be the form of the good. In addition, Plato describes the second part of the second stage in terms strongly reminiscent of the elenchos. Only when one pursues both of these confirmation procedures to their limit can one genuinely be said to have acquired the knowledge sought.
(III) THE COLLECTION AND DIVISION PHASE
In the Phaedrus and the Philebus, Plato describes a further method known as collection and division, which he depicts at length in the Sophist and the Politicus. It too consists of two stages.
Stage 1: collect together a scattered plurality into a unity.
Stage 2: divide the unity one has collected along its natural divisions.
In some dialogues, Plato appears to require that the division that takes place in the second stage be done dichotomously. In other places, however, he appears to allow for a more open-ended division.
It has sometimes been thought that the method of collection and division was intended by Plato to replace the hypothetical method of the so-called middle dialogues. But the appearance of the former method in the Phdr. makes such a view difficult to sustain. As a consequence, Plato’s method of collection and division must be understood as an alternative method to the hypothetical method or as an extension of or an addendum to the hypothetical method.
(IV) DIALECTIC
Plato’s philosophical method is often referred to as dialectic (q.v.), a kind of working through in words; but this should not be understood as indicating a distinct method from those we have just described. Rather, Plato tends to call ‘dialectic’ whatever method he is recommending at the moment. It is better to take Plato’s philosophical method (his dialectic) to be the combination of the three phases we have outlined, although how they are to be fitted together into a single method for acquiring knowledge is a matter of continued controversy.
MIMÊSIS (IMITATION)
Stephen Halliwell
The vocabulary of mimêsis, conventionally but often inadequately translated as ‘imitation’, is found in numerous Platonic contexts, applied to matters ranging from everyday life to speculative metaphysics. Its most significant use occurs in a series of dialogues from Cratylus to Laws in connection with two philosophical topics: first, questions relating to the representational and expressive capacities of poetic, musical and visual art; second, the epistemologically problematic relationship (construed in terms of image and original) between representation in general and reality. Mimêsis is a hallmark of certain Platonic habits of thought. There is no such thing, however, as a single Platonic theory of mimêsis.
In Cra. Socrates calls language itself mimêtic (Cra. 414b, 422e–7d): the ‘primary names’ of things were putatively based (by the hypothetical name giver) on natural likenesses between individual sounds and aspects of reality. But mimêsis embedded in semantics is differentiated from mimêsis in musical (including poetic) and visual art: the latter is taken, not without simplification, to represent only the sensory properties of things, whereas the former captures their essence (ousia). Socrates allows visual images to be ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’, but not, unlike discourse, true or false (430a–1d). Correctness here denotes something like basic resemblance, a qualitative not a mathematically exact relationship to objects (432a–d). Philebus, by contrast, gives the idea of an image quasipropositional force by characterizing thought itself as inner discourse (logos) accompanied by ‘paintings in the soul’ (Phlb. 39b–40b), a sort of illustrated book (38e–9b). Here the terminology of mimêsis is not used for mental images themselves, though it is used to describe the ‘false (i.e. ethically mistaken) pleasures’ associated with misconceived mental states (40c). Such pleasures are hardly ‘imitations’ of true pleasures, more like defective surrogates (cf., e.g. Politicus 293e, 297c for comparable usage).
The Republic approaches questions of artistic mimêsis from shifting angles. Socrates categorizes all visual, musical and poetic arts in the ‘city of luxury’ as kinds of mimêsis (R. 2.373b); they form a cultural fabric of image-making and dramatic pretence. Later, however, he temporarily restricts poetic mimêsis to one particular mode of discourse, that is, first person, direct speech, as opposed to third person narrative. He dwells on the psychic assimilation (‘self-likening’) which this requires of performers of such poetry (3.392d–8b), stressing the ethically destabilizing consequences of intense imaginative identification. The concept of mimêsis is applied (again) to music at R. 399a–400a, where Socrates acknowledges a debt to Damon in positing the expressive power of rhythms and melodies to convey equivalents to states of soul/character and even the ethical qualities of ‘a life’ (399e–400a).
Although mimêsis is glossed at R. 393c by appeal to vocal or bodily impersonation, the various stages of the argument entail more than a concept of imitation. mimêsis involves ways in which material media (shapes and colours, musical sounds, speech, the body) can communicate meaning through correspondence to, or simulation of, objects or states of affairs (real or imagined). But the extension of the concept fluctuates; its conditions are never clearly defined. Moreover, the limitation of artistic mimêsis to purely sensory properties at Cra. 423c–d is ignored; music’s expression of emotions and character traits demonstrates that point; and there is a broader hint of mimêsis qua embodiment of ethical values in artistic form at R. 399e–401a.
Fluidity in the scope of mimêsis helps to explain why in R. 10 Socrates returns to the subject and now asks what ‘mimêsis as a whole’ consists in (595c). But bk 10 adds new puzzles. Socrates develops an analogy between poetry and painting; the notorious mirror analogy at 596d–e seems to restrict mimêsis to mere replication of appearances. The idea of mirroring clashes, however, with depiction of gods and Hades at 596c, as well as with earlier references to idealized painting (e.g. 5.472d, 6.500e–1c). Moreover, a tripartite scheme of unchanging reality (‘forms’, q.v.), material particulars and mimêtic simulacra (596–7: influenced, though not precisely matching, the metaphysics of the middle books) apparently relegates mimêsis to ontological emptiness. Yet the tragic poet, disparaged with other mimêsis artists at 597e, is later said to produce works which overcome the souls of ‘even the best of us’ (605c–d): mimêsis remains psychologically powerful. Rather than diagnosing a crude flaw in the argument, we can read the rhetorically provocative critique of mimêsis in bk 10 as exposing art’s own deeply paradoxical combination of imaginative pretence with emotionally compelling seductiveness. Socrates admits nostalgia for the latter (607c–d); he leaves open the question whether it can be harnessed, as 3.401a–e suggested, to ethically beneficial ends.
In the Sophist, ‘the mimêsis’ is a large, diverse class of activities (Sph. 234b). But in order to trap the sophist himself as an impostor, the argument imprints mimêsis in general with suspicions of the false and fake: the production of ‘simulacra’ (eidôla, 265b). Visual mimêsis in particular is used as an analogy with which to construct a dichotomy between ‘original’ and ‘image’ (q.v.). But Sph. complicates matters by distinguishing between ‘eicastic’ (objectively accurate) and ‘phantastic’ (perspectivally adjusted) mimêsis (235c–e); it even contemplates mimêsis informed by knowledge (267b–e). While condemning the sophist as a ‘counterfeiter of reality’ (235a), therefore, the dialogue allows for superior and inferior forms of mimêsis (cf. e.g. Plt. 300c–d).
Variation between positive and negative paradigms of mimêsis occurs throughout Plato’s work. If the sophist consistently marks the second pole, the status of mimêsis art wavers between mere ‘play’ (e.g. Plt. 288c, R. 602b) and a power to change the soul. Lg. (esp. 2.653c–71b, 6.764–7.817) contains intricate attempts to appraise artistic mimêsis with multiple criteria, including those of artistic form, ‘correctness’ of depiction, and a mixed psychology of pleasure and ethical judgement. Plato’s own writing has a mimêtic dimension and can figure itself as a rival to poetry (Lg. 817e; cf. Critias’ remark, Criti. 107b–d). Some passages go further (providing a cue for Neoplatonists like Plotinus; q.v. Neoplatonism) and gesture towards the thought that all reality may be built on mimêtic correspondences: see the relationship between bodily and transcendent beauty at Phdr. 251a, or the notion (influenced by Pythagoreanism: cf. Aristotle Metaphysics 987b11–12) of the entire cosmos as mimêsis of a timeless model of being (e.g. Ti. 38a, 39e, 50c).
MUSIC
A. Gabrièle Wersinger
Plato’s philosophy is concerned with music not only as a metaphor (Phaedo 61a3; Republic 531d8–9) but as a model for physics, psychology, education, politics and dialectics.
Harmonics, as in the curriculum of the rulers (R. 531a1), applies a mathematical method (logistikê) to music based on numerical relations (logoi and analogiai). Musical concords are epimoric (n+1:n) or double ratios (2n:n), though not all epimoric ratios are concordant; discords are epimeric ratios (nm:n) (R. 531c3–4). These ratios play a central role in the generation of the cosmos in Timaeus. Plato knew from Archytas that one may supply a missing geometrical mean, G, in the ratio of an octave (2:1) by using the fifth and fourth as arithmetic mean, A, and harmonic mean, H, that is, G2 = A · H (Ti. 31c5–2a7, 36a1–4). He gives the world’s soul the structure of a ‘musical proportion’ (Epinomis 991a5–b5; Heath 1921:86–90). But this method does not work for concords smaller than the octave, so Plato divides the ratio of the fourth (4:3) diatonically, that is, into two tones and a semitone: 9:8, 9:8, 256:243 (Ti. 36a8–b5; Wersinger 2008a:171–4). Harmonics takes account of the ratios of intervals in scalar systems (Phlb. 17d1–4) corresponding to notes (phthongoi, R. 443d7–e1); in the conjunct system (sunêmmenon), two fourths are interwoven in the middle, producing a seventh (9 : 8, 9 : 8, 256 : 243, 9 : 8, 9 : 8, 9 : 8, 256 : 243). In the disjunct system (diêzeugmenon) the two fourths are separated by a disjunctive ratio (9:8) yielding a fifth within an octave (Wersinger 2008b:288–96). Such a system (9 : 8, 9 : 8, 256 : 243, 9 : 8, 9 : 8, 9 : 8, 256 : 243) structures the world’s soul (Ti. 36a).
Harmoniai, or patterns of tuning (often translated ‘modes’) attributed to Damon (West 1992:174) were initially irregular scales with ethnic names (R. 398d11–9c3). The notes and intervallic ratios of the Dorian harmonia, for example, exceeds the octave:
|
re |
mi |
mi+ |
fa |
la |
si |
si+ |
do |
mi |
|
9/8 |
28/27 |
36/35 |
5/4 |
9/8 |
28/27 |
36/35 |
5/4 |
(The + indicates a note raised by less than a semitone.) Theorists tried to reduce the harmoniai to a system at the end of the fifth-century BCE (Barker 1989:15), and Plato criticizes one such attempt (R. 531a4), perhaps that of Eratocles (described by Barker 1982:189).
In Plato’s own system, his model for dialectics (Phlb. 17c11–d4), four notes comprising a diatonic fourth delimit four harmoniai (Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian and Mixolydian) that give rise to four others (R. 400a7), fourths to fourths: Dorian-Hypodorian, Hypophrygian-Phrygian, Hypolydian-Lydian and Hypermixolydian-Phrygian (Ptolemy in Barker 1989:336). Those fourths build a diatonic conjunct octave (9 : 8, 9 : 8, 256 : 243, 9 : 8, 9 : 8, 256 : 243, 9 : 8) organizing eight systems of harmoniai from Hypodorian to Hypermixolydian. In the illustration of Plato’s system below, notes and intervals are listed vertically, and tonoi are horizontal. The systems generate one another by cyclic reordering of the intervals, moving up from the bottom. The highest pitch of the Hypodorian octave coincides with the lowest pitch of the Hypermixolydian octave so that in the nêtê all pitches are similar (homotonon, Phlb. 17c4 and R. 617b7).
Plato’s Systems of Harmoniai
When harmoniai are heard, they generate emotions in the mortal soul, corresponding to the heart’s being stressed or relaxed (Ti. 69c1, 70d5). The tuning of the strings of the lyre (Phd. 86c3–4; Wersinger 2010) influences the ‘strings’ of the soul (R. 411b4). Spiritedness (375b8) is softened by music (411b1; Protagoras 326b2–4), but too much music excessively slackens it, producing cowardliness (411a9–b5; Wersinger 2007:58–9).
To compose a melody (melopoiia) one has to select the rhythms and harmoniai (Smp. 187d1–2) appropriate to the specific genres of song (Lg. 700b1–c1), for example, the Syntonolydian for tragedies (R. 398e1). The aim of music is to show the image (theama, R. 402d4) of the character (êthos, R. 400d8–e3) of the soul, as in the verbal pictures of the virtuous man in war and peace by which Socrates illustrates selected harmoniai (399a5–c3). Only Dorian and Phrygian harmoniai, with their corresponding rhythms (400b1–4), are suitable in education (R. 399a; cf. Smp. 187d3; Lg. 673a3) because the city’s future guardians must imitate a character whose moderation and courage are prominent. Socrates disallows instruments (R. 399d3–4) that modulate continuously among the harmoniai because they accustom the soul to all emotions, including harmful ones (R. 395b9–7c6; Lg. 800d3). The so-called new music introduced by composers of dithyramb or tragic poets such as Agathon, Euripides or Timotheus (Wersinger 2001:78–82; West 1992:356–66) leads to the decay of the state (Lg. 700a3–1c5).
Although audible music is inferior to harmonics (Ti. 47c8–9; R. 522a), it helps to correct the disharmony inherent in sensation (Ti. 43a5–3d8, 47d5–6). In the choral city of Lg. (664c4–d4, 665b5), expert musicians, probably members of the nocturnal council, are able, thanks to numbers, to adapt harmoniai and rhythms to rational forms of virtue (670b2–6, 963c7, 964d2, 967e2–3). Elsewhere, however, if harmonics helps the soul in its conversion (periagôgê, R. 518d3) towards intelligible reality, dialectical knowledge of the good (R. 534e2–5) remains inaccessible to harmonics.
MYTH (MUTHOS)
Luc Brisson
In ancient Greek, muthos first signified ‘thought that is expressed, opinion’. This meaning was then modified in the course of the transformations affecting the verbs expressing ‘saying’ and the nouns designating ‘words’ or ‘speech’. This historical evolution found its final development in Plato, who is the first author to use the term muthos in the sense that we still give it. By using muthos in a nonmetaphorical way, Plato describes a certain type of discourse, fashioned by the poets of his society, with a view to substituting for it another one, the logos produced by the philosophers. Yet although he shows himself to be highly critical with regard to myths, Plato must admit that philosophers cannot do without them. Thus, he takes his inspiration from the poets to develop certain points of his doctrine, and he goes so far as to fabricate myths, thereby recognizing their efficacy in the fields of ethics and politics.
Plato presents myth as a message by means of which a given collectivity transmits from generation to generation what it keeps in memory of its past, considering it as part of its history. The past of which myth speaks has the origin of the gods as its starting point, and its lower chronological limit is a period distant enough for it to be impossible for the narrator to validate the discourse he holds, whether through having been a witness to the events he recounts, or by basing his story on the accounts of eye witnesses.
In ancient Greece, this transmission of the memorable initially took place exclusively from mouth to ear. And when, according to what Plato recounts in the Timaeus, Solon went to Egypt to refresh the failing memory of the Greeks, he was informed by a priest of Sais who did not decipher the characters engraved on the walls of the temple of Neith, for he knew the contents of the message he was transmitting by heart. For Plato, writing can only play the part of a ‘counter-role’, in the etymological sense of the term, with regard to muthos: ‘a double-entry register’. Yet this function remains important, for in view of the catastrophes that periodically fell upon ancient Greece, exclusive recourse to orality (q.v.) naturally entailed a progressive impoverishment of the information transmitted.
In an oral civilization, the fashioning of a message is inseparable from its emission, whereas in a written civilization, these two spheres are clearly distinguished. The ambiguity of the Platonic vocabulary on this point testifies to the gradual passage to writing around this time in ancient Greece. Nevertheless, Plato distinguishes, frequently and fairly clearly, between the fashioning of a myth and its narration.
Thus distinguished from its fabrication, the narration of a myth becomes the task either of such professionals as the poets (Republic 2.377d4–6) and their subordinates (rhapsodes, actors and choreutes, R. 2.373b6–8), or of nonprofessionals. Professionals recount myths primarily on the occasion of festivals, and particularly in the context of contests (Ti. 21b1–7; Critias 108b3–7; cf. 108d3–6). We recall that rhapsody contests took place at Athens during the Panathenaea, and tragedy contests during the urban Dionysia. Most of those who recounted myths, however, were necessarily nonprofessionals, who expressed themselves in all circumstances, and outside of any competitive context. In Plato, these nonprofessionals feature two characteristics: advanced age and feminine gender. Why is this?
In a civilization of writing, the accumulation of messages is independent of individuals: it is equivalent to the preservation of traces on material support. In a civilization of orality, by contrast, the accumulation of messages can only be individual. Consequently, advanced age appears as a necessary, if not sufficient, corollary of the amplitude of the reservoir of knowledge in a given individual: the more elderly the individual, the more memories he must have. In addition, the narrator’s old age allows a reduction of the degradation that affects every message transmitted in an exclusively oral way for a long period of time, a degradation that results from the transformation every story undergoes at each stage of its transmission. Between grandparents and grandchildren, one stage is skipped. The second feature is the femininity of the narrators: mothers (R. 2.377c2–4, 381e1–6; Laws 10.887d2–3), nursemaids (R. 2.377c2–4; Lg. 10.887d2–3) and old women (Gorgias, 527a5–6; R. 1.350e2–4). Thus, it is primarily women who tell myths, and this is simply because of their privileged relationships with those for whom myths are primarily intended: children. In sum, as far as the current description is concerned, it is old women who obviously present the greatest interest, for in them our two characteristics, advanced age and female gender, are combined.
The reception of myth, which in an oral civilization cannot be separated from its emission, and hence from its fabrication, is fundamentally a matter of listening for the audience addressed by both professionals and nonprofessionals. For instance, in the dramatic contests of the Dionysia, the audience was made up of Athenians and foreigners, rich and poor, accompanied by their wives and children; there may even have been slaves attending. Those who told myths occasionally, by contrast, had a much more limited audience, essentially consisting in children younger than seven years old (Lg. 10.887d2–3; R. 2.377a6–7), the age at which boys usually began to frequent the gymnasium in ancient Greece. In both cases, however, the narrator’s need to capture his audience’s attention and to maintain it constituted a formidable instrument of censorship. The narrator is always afraid of a hostile reaction from the audience.
In short, myth is a discourse by which all information concerning the distant past of a community is communicated, and preserved in the collective memory. It transmits orally the story of this past from one generation to another, whether this discourse was elaborated by a technician of the collective communication of the memorable, such as the poet, or not (see further Brisson and Naddaf 1999; Partenie 2009).
NATURE (PHUSIS)
Thomas Johansen
The Greek word ‘phusis’, like the English ‘nature’, was used in a range of different ways. Prominent among these in Greek philosophy is the notion of phusis as a principle of growth and change. Aristotle in Physics bk 2 develops a theory of nature as an inner principle or cause of change and rest (q.v. Causality). Aristotle saw many of the pre-Socratic philosophers as concerned with phusis in this sense, referring to them (e.g. at Metaphysics 986b14) as ‘natural philosophers’ (phusiologoi). Plato, too, presents Socrates as concerned with a tradition of studying nature in terms of causes of change (see Naddaff 1995). So, in Phaedo Socrates says that as a young man he was keen on ‘the wisdom which they call the inquiry into nature’ (phusis): ‘for it seemed to me to be magnificent to know about the causes of each thing, why each thing comes to be and why it is destroyed and why it is’ (Phd. 96a). Socrates, however, raises a fundamental objection to the way this study has been pursued: Socrates thinks the real cause of natural phenomena should be the good because of which they happen, just as the real cause of Socrates’ continued imprisonment was the good he intended to achieve. In contrast, the causes that have been offered by earlier philosophers – material processes such as coolings and heatings – make no use of the good and cannot be said to be real causes, at best they are necessary conditions for the real cause. While Socrates in Apology (19c) had indicated a general lack of interest in natural philosophy, Phd. thus suggests a positive view of the study of nature, as a study of the causes of change and being, as long as this inquiry focuses on the good (q.v.) as the cause. Plato pursues just such a project in the Timaeus. The aim of Timaeus’ speech is to offer an account of the nature of the universe, from its creation down to the nature of man (Ti. 27a). He shows how a divine craftsman, the ‘demiurge’, created the world for the best by imposing order on some chaotically moving materials. As his model, the creator used the eternal forms (q.v.), in particular the form of a complete living being, comprising within it all the other kinds of living being. Using mathematical structures, he made the world as a perceptible likeness (q.v. Image, Imitation) of this model. While subject to change and corruption, the natural world has, as a likeness of the eternal forms, a degree of intelligibility and goodness. It represents a paradigm of embodied order by imitating which we can become more intelligent and virtuous. This view of the cosmos as an ethical paradigm is echoed elsewhere in Plato’s works: Gorgias 508a; Republic 9.592b; Philebus 28d–30c.
Does the Ti. account really amount to a study of nature? First of all, since the world of change is only a likeness of eternal being, it might be objected that the natural world is not an object of study in its own right but only a means of indirectly studying forms (see Rowe 2003:30). However, Timaeus is clear that the study of the world as a likeness is distinct from that of the forms (Ti. 59c–d). To see why, it is important to distinguish between Plato’s notion of a likeness and that of a mere copy: for Plato the world has not been worked out so as to have the same properties as its original only in an inferior way. Rather, the cosmos is a likeness in the sense that it has attributes that are different from but analogous to those of the original. For example, the demiurge makes the cosmos (q.v. Cosmology) spherical so as to make it complete like its paradigm (33a–b, cf., 30c–d), but the paradigm has no spatial shape. Similarly, time, composed of past, present and future as its parts, is created as a moving likeness of an eternal, changeless paradigm without parts. To study the world as a likeness of the forms, then, means to work out which analogous features in the medium of change would best represent the eternal paradigm, a study that cannot be reduced to reasoning about the forms, but requires a different kind of practical or productive reasoning.
Another worry is that the world as an artefact is not properly natural. The Greeks commonly distinguished between nature and the products of human agency. Aristotle articulated this distinction by saying that nature is an inner principle of change, while craft makes and moves artefacts from without. So since the cosmos depends on an external maker, we may object that it does not exemplify nature (see Lennox 1986). In Laws bk 10 (889a), the Athenian argues against the view that nature and chance, not art, are responsible for all the significant and fine things in the cosmos. So the four elements and the planets ‘moved at random, each impelled by virtue of its own inherent properties’ (Lg. 889b). The view of nature here seems to involve the notion of what can move itself. The Athenian counters by arguing that matter is not capable of moving itself, while soul is (cf. Phdr. 245c8–9), so it is soul as the first moving cause that, properly speaking, is nature. A similarly view of the soul is present in Ti. (34b10–5a1, 36e2–4), which stresses the way in which the soul can transmit its motions to the world body by being interwoven with it (Ti. 36d–e). Even if the soul was first created by god, it could be argued that the cosmos now qualifies as natural by being ensouled. By the same token, individual living beings within the cosmos might be natural in having within them a soul similar to the world soul (41d–e). This leaves the question in what way, if any, inanimate bodies such as the four elements could be said to participate in nature.
NOMOS (see Law)
NON-PROPOSITIONAL KNOWLEDGE
Hugh H. Benson
For Plato, knowledge at least sometimes appears to be understood as a (cognitive) relation between a person and a proposition or set of propositions. For example, Socrates famously professes to know that it is wrong to disobey a superior (Apology 29b), that knowledge is different from true belief (Meno 98b), and even (perhaps somewhat paradoxically) that he knows nothing important (Ap. 21b and 23b). Such knowledge is often referred to as propositional knowledge. Nevertheless, Plato also appears to recognize other kinds of knowledge that cannot readily be understood as a relation between a person and a proposition. For example, Plato sometimes characterizes knowledge as more like a relation between a person and an object (Republic 476d–80a), or as skill or expertise (Ap. 22c–e), or even as some kind of non-discursive self-awareness (Seventh Letter 344b). Such characterizations indicate a commitment to non-propositional knowledge.
Perhaps the most significant feature of nonpropositional knowledge is that knowing something nonpropositionally cannot be completely described. Any attempt to describe what it is to know something nonpropositionally will be incomplete. For example, a skilled cobbler will no doubt possess considerable propositional knowledge. She/he will need to know that a specific type of leather is long-lasting, or that another type is particularly supple. But no list of such propositions will completely capture what an expert cobbler knows how to do. Again, someone who knows Meno will again no doubt know a variety of propositions, for example, that he is handsome and that he is well born. But one’s knowledge of all such propositions will never amount to Socrates’ knowledge of Meno, in virtue of Socrates’ actual acquaintance with the man.
This fundamental feature of non-propositional knowledge is importantly connected to its two other traditional features. Unlike propositional knowledge, the object of non-propositional knowledge does not admit of propositional truth and falsity. For example, the object of a cobbler’s knowledge, perhaps the discipline of cobblery or shoes, is not something that can be true or false, nor is the object of Socrates’ acquaintance knowledge, that is, Meno. It must be conceded, however, that Plato is quite willing to treat alêtheia, which is often correctly translated as ‘truth’, as a property of objects. In these circumstances alêtheia may be better translated as ‘reality’ and the adjective alêthê as ‘real’. In addition, non-propositional knowledge admits of degrees, again allegedly unlike propositional knowledge. One can know cobblery to a better or worse degree, as anyone who has taken shoes to an incompetent cobbler is well aware. Moreover, Socrates, while he knows Meno considerably better than any of us, does not know him as well perhaps, as Meno’s mother.
Given this rough characterization of the nature of non-propositional knowledge, the question arises whether Plato ever recognizes knowledge of this sort. And here the answer would seem to be that he does. In the so-called early dialogues, for example, Plato appears to take the paradigm of knowledge to be technê (craft or expertise). In the Ap., after examining the professed knowledge of the politicians and poets and finding it wanting, he discovers that the craftsmen did know many fine things; although they also thought they knew many things that they did not. Again, in the Laches, the dialogue in which Socrates seeks to determine which of the two Athenian generals (if either) knows what courage is, the inquiry is initially described as an examination of the expertise of the generals. But characterizing knowledge as craft or expertise is apparently to view knowledge as the sort of thing that cannot be completely describable, as being directed towards an object that does not admit of truth or falsity, and as being the sort of thing that can admit of degrees.
Again, in the middle books of the R., Plato is commonly thought to distinguish between knowledge and belief or opinion in virtue of the fact that knowledge is in some way restricted to forms, while belief is restricted to ordinary objects. These books indicate a willingness on Plato’s part to characterize knowledge as a relation between a person and an object (pace Annas 1981 and Fine 1990). Indeed, in dialogues like the Phaedo and the R. Plato often characterizes the knowledge of a form as analogous to a person seeing an object (q.v. Vision). Other passages throughout the dialogues indicate a similar propensity. As a result, Plato is sometimes thought to think of knowledge as some sort of cognitive vision or knowledge by acquaintance – a kind of direct and unmediated intuition between a person and an object (like a form). Again, this knowledge cannot be completely describable; its object does not admit of truth and falsity, but does admit of degrees.
Finally, in a famous passage from Plato’s Ep. 7, knowledge appears to be characterized as a kind of non-discursive intuition that follows a lot of hard intellectual work – the sort of thing whose content by its very nature cannot be expressed in words. This ineffable or indescribable experience might also be suggested by the failure in the definitional dialogues of anyone managing to pass the alleged Socratic test for knowledge, viz. providing a verbal account of Socrates’ ‘What is F-ness?’ question. Plato’s use of a geometrical question whose answer is an irrational number in the Men. like that of powers or square roots in the Theaetetus has also been thought to be suggestive of Plato’s willingness to characterize knowledge as non-discursive and so again incompletely describable.
It is, of course, one thing to see that Plato was tempted to characterize knowledge in these two apparently distinct ways, and quite another to suppose that Plato took one of these ways of characterizing knowledge as fundamental or even that he recognized the distinction between them. At least one reason for wondering whether Plato saw much moment to this distinction, if he recognized it at all, is the following.
In dialogues like the Men., Phd. and R. Plato appears to endorse a method of knowledge acquisition known as the hypothetical method. Whatever the precise details of this method turn out to be, the method itself appears to resemble the axiomatic-deductive method of the geometers being explored in the fourth and third centuries BCE (even in Plato’s Academy) and coming to expression in works like Euclid’s Elements in about 300 BCE. Such an axiomatic deductive system presupposes a logic of propositions (whether syllogistic (see Aristotle, Prior Analytics and Posterior Analytics) or otherwise) in which the premises of the deductions are propositions. Nevertheless, in describing this method in R. bk 6, Plato characterizes the starting points of this method non-propositionally, giving as examples of such starting points things like the odd and the even, the various figures, and the three kinds of angles. The reader is left to wonder whether Plato is being deliberately obscure, unaware of the distinction between propositional knowledge of the premises and nonpropositional knowledge of objects, or is simply unconcerned with the distinction.
THE ONE (TO HEN)
James Wilberding
In the Platonic tradition a systematic philosophy is ultimately developed in which the one (to hen) comes to refer to the single, highest principle of all things both sensible and intelligible. The Neoplatonist Plotinus (d. 270 CE) is the first in whom we find a clear and comprehensive exposition of the one and its production of other things. Briefly, the Plotinian one qua the first principle of unity transcends all plurality and thus all predicates, including that of existence; since Plotinus identifies true being (the forms; q.v.) and intellect, the one is also beyond all understanding, though some form of suprarational unification with the one is possible; finally, the one timelessly generates all things by a process of emanation. This process may be said to consist of two moments: from the one’s activity of, as it were, being itself, a secondary, indeterminate principle is produced, and this principle is then given definition by the one. In this way Plotinus accounts for the timeless generation of, first, intellect and the forms, then soul, and ultimately the sensible world (see O’Meara 1993 for an accessible introduction). This raises the reasonable question of just how much of this doctrine is already to be found in Plato, which is effectively to ask to what extent Neoplatonistm (q.v.) is in fact just Platonism.
There is no denying that Plato was interested in the problem of unity. The forms themselves are introduced in order to account for the so-called one over many problem (hen epi pollôn), viz. that many sensible things can share one property (Euthphro 5c–6e; Meno 72c; Phaedrus 249b; etc., cf. Aristotle Metaphysics 990b13–14, 1040b29–30, 1079a7–9, etc.), and the relation obtaining between unity and plurality is central to his discussions of collection and division (q.v. Method). But of course positing the one as a completely transcendent principle of forms is another matter entirely, and our primary evidence that Plato might have done this comes from the so-called indirect tradition, and in particular from Aristotle (e.g. Metaphysics 987a28–8b16), who gives us reports of Plato’s ‘so-called unwritten doctrines’ (Physics 209b14–15) and who also composed a report of Plato’s oral lecture on the good, to which Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. 205 CE) appears to have had direct access but which was not accessible to earlier Middle Platonists nor to later Neoplatonists (Dörrie 1987:74– 90, 275–308; see Gaiser 1968:441–557 for a collection of the testimonia and Erler 2007:406–16 for additions and a brief, more up-to-date and objective discussion). Aristotle tells us that Plato posited two principles as the ‘elements’ of the forms – the one as a determining principle and the indefinite dyad (also called the great and the small) as a material principle, and identifies this one with the good (e.g. Metaphysics 1091b13–15; Aristoxenus Elementa harmonices 2.1–2). Additional support is found in the reports on Plato’s immediate successors in the Academy, Speusippus and Xenocrates, who are also described as advancing systems involving the one and the dyad (Dillon 2003b).
A central issue here is whether this material can legitimately help us to better understand the dialogues and conversely whether the dialogues can help us unpack these indirect reports. There are wildly different responses to this issue. At one extreme Harold Cherniss (1944 and 1945) attempted to explain away this material as Aristotle’s misunderstanding of Plato’s dialogues. At the other are the somewhat speculative efforts of the Tübingen school (q.v.; Gaiser 1968; Krämer 1959 and 1964; among Anglophone scholars, Sayre (1983) notably goes in the same direction). They see the doctrine at work in the background of the middle and late dialogues and, by invoking both the testimonia and critical passages from the dialogues, claim to be able to reconstruct the Platonic doctrine, which turns out to be remarkably Plotinian.
Critical here is above all the interpretation of the second part of Plato’s Prm.. In a classic paper E. R. Dodds (1928) showed the striking parallels between the first hypothesis (Prm. 137c–42a) of the Prm. and Plotinus’ description of the one that transcends all predication including existence (as well as between the second hypothesis (142b–55e) and Plotinus’ intellect), but whether Plato intended such a metaphysical interpretation (as defended most thoroughly by Halfwassen 1993:265–405; more briefly in 2004) was a matter of contention even in antiquity(Proclus On Plato’s Parmenides 630, 15–645, 8) and is still more so today (see Erler 2007:227–9 for a brief overview of interpretations). The transcendence of the one is also seen by some (e.g. Halfwassen 1993:220–64) to be indicated in the Republic’s account of the good (q.v.). In the simile of the sun (R. 506e–9c; q.v.) the good is said to be ‘not being, but superior to it in rank and power’ (509b8–10). This might be taken to indicate transcendence, but it need not be. After all, the form of the good is repeatedly described as a form (505a2, 508e2–3, 517b8–c1, etc.) and as belonging to the realm of being (518c9, 526e3–4, 532c5–6), which strongly suggests that the good, if it is to be identified with the one at all (Hager 1970:102–56), is not a principle that transcends being and the forms but is rather the highest member of that class (Baltes 1999). Other aspects of the Plotinian one have been gathered from other passages, for example, emanation, the characteristic first moment of activity of the Plotinian One, has been thought to be lurking behind Plato’s light imagery, especially R. 508b6–7, and the interplay between the one and the dyad has likewise been thought to be at work in the Philebus (esp. 14c–18d, 23c–7b) and the Sophist (esp. 242c–53e).
The reconstructions of the Tübingen School have not been met with wide acceptance, and not just for hermeneutic reasons. Philosophically, this approach to the dialogues is seen by opponents to saddle Plato with an unfashionably systematic philosophy at the cost of other interpretations that are not only exegetically possible (and in some cases much more so) but also of more philosophical relevance to us today. Yet, Cherniss’ deflationary account of the testimonies has also failed to hold sway. The truth surely lies somewhere in between these two extremes.
ONTOLOGY (METAPHYSICS)
Allan Silverman
Of all the doctrines ascribed to Plato, perhaps the most (in)famous is what we would label a metaphysical thesis, namely that the real, or most perfect beings, are forms (q.v.). Of course the various subdisciplines of philosophy, for example, ethics, epistemology and metaphysics, and arguably philosophy itself, do not predate Plato and his student, Aristotle, from a later edition of whose writings the term ‘metaphysics’ actually comes. In thinking about Plato’s metaphysics, then, one should keep in mind that forms are the foundation of Plato’s whole synoptic vision. It is not unlikely that he comes to postulate forms (in the Phaedo) in order to support his teacher Socrates (q.v.) in countering challenges posed by ethical relativists such as Protagoras, and it is almost certain that one fundamental purpose of forms is to serve as the (objective, i.e. mind-independent) objects of knowledge.
What then are forms? Forms are properties or universals. A universal property is, typically, common to many things. A form is a ‘one’ over many. The many things are, typically, ordinary particulars. For instance, Shaquille O’Neal and Mt Everest are tall, a basketball and a penny are circular, Socrates and Mother Teresa are pious, and Plato and Aristotle are human. (It is disputed whether there are, in addition to forms and particulars, property instances or tropes, for example, the tall-in-Shaq, as distinct from both the tall-in-Everest and the form of tallness.) Plato, unlike Aristotle, is thought to have held that forms or properties exist regardless of whether there are any instances of them. Thus, even if there never has been, is not now, nor ever will be a truly wise person, nonetheless the form of wisdom is what it is, or exists. Plato’s forms are thus transcendent, as opposed to immanent or Aristotelian, universals. They are ‘separate’ from their particular instances.
Plato characterizes the difference between forms and particulars through several distinctions. Forms are perfect and independent beings; particulars are imperfect and dependent participants, getting (some of) their properties by having a share of forms. Forms are unchanging, immaterial and outside of space and time – they are abstract entities. Particulars change, are material, and exist in space and time. Forms are indivisibly simple (or ones); particulars are divisibly complex (have many properties). Forms are grasped by knowledge, particulars by perception or belief. Forms do not, whereas particulars do, suffer from ‘the compresence’ of opposite properties: whereas the form of equality is always equal and never unequal, particular sticks or stones, say, are at once equal and unequal, perhaps because a given stick is equal to a second stick but unequal to a third.
What precisely the perfection, simplicity, separation and nature or being of forms amounts to is controversial (Cherniss 1944; Silverman 2002). Relatedly, there is controversy over the range of forms, at least in the Phd. and Republic (where scholars think Plato introduces it). Looking at (many of) the forms mentioned in the arguments, scholars have argued that forms are limited to incomplete or relational properties, perhaps with special provision for ethical properties (Irwin 1977a; Owen 1957). So beauty (q.v.), goodness (q.v.), largeness, equality and justice (q.v.) are forms, because anything that is good, say, is good for a . . . diet, or a man, or whatever ‘completes’ the thought that X is good. Usually, the chief philosophical reason for positing forms of this sort is that particulars suffer compresence of opposites with respect to these properties; Socrates is larger than Simmias but smaller than Cebes. Since, or so it is argued, there must be entities that do not suffer such compresence, Plato posits forms that are simply and solely or perfectly and completely beautiful or large, and so on (Fine 1993). Other scholars think that the range of forms is not limited in this manner. Rather, there are forms for all the natural joints, forms corresponding to all the properties actually had by particulars. (One can also maintain that there is a form corresponding to every linguistic predicate, thus further expanding the range of forms.) How one understands the nature or being of forms varies, in part, with one’s view of their range. The starting point for questions about the nature of forms is the self-predication statements sprinkled throughout the dialogues, for example, piety is pious, justice is just. Some think that justice is just in the same way as Socrates is just – it is characterized by justice (Vlastos 1981). (Since forms are ‘causes’ (q.v.) of the way particulars are, some think that forms transmit (via participation; q.v.) the property they respectively have to the particulars.) Others, approximationists, think that forms are perfect instances of the property whereas particulars are defective instances, say in the manner in which no physical circle is perfectly circular (Malcolm 1991). Finally, others think that forms are different kinds of beings from particulars: forms are simply and solely what they are, whereas particulars get all of their many properties via participation, a special ontological relation (Silverman 2002).
In other dialogues, many of the metaphysical issues involving forms and particulars are given closer scrutiny. So, many, who think that initially forms are limited, concede that later works reveal a much broader range of forms. In the Parmenides, Plato seems to call into question the foundations of the theory in what is known as the Third Man argument. If forms have the property in the same way as particulars, and if forms cannot ‘explain’ why they have the property they have, then it seems a regress of forms threatens. Some scholars think that Plato abandons forms (Ryle 1939a). Others think that he makes them immanent in particulars, and (thus) allows that particulars can both have some properties essentially and others accidentally (Frede 1967). Others think that Plato’s account of forms is not subject to the Third Man regress because forms and particulars do not have properties in the same way, or that forms are self-explainers (Code 1986). Finally, in the late dialogues Plato seems to distinguish some forms, for example, being, sameness, difference, as greatest kinds. These are what, in the tradition, are syncategorematic or transcendental properties had by all beings, as opposed to substantial forms such as greenness, or cat.
While most of his efforts are devoted to forms, especially in the late Philebus and Timaeus Plato develops a sophisticated, mathematical account of material particulars, including the cosmos, and perhaps even of matter. The key elements are geometrical forms, ratios and the receptacle, an item very similar to space. In the Ti., particulars are, at bottom, materially composed of triangles and are occupants of space and time.
Finally, Plato’s metaphysics also includes immaterial souls. These are primitive beings that are essentially self-movers. As such, they are ultimately responsible for all physical and psychological motion.
PAIDERASTIA (PEDERASTY)
Luc Brisson
In the Symposium as a whole, which should be associated with the Phaedrus, and particularly in the speech Socrates places in the mouth of Diotima (Smp. 198a–212e), philosophia (q.v.) is opposed to paiderastia on the level of education (209e–12a, and especially 211b–c). What does this mean? First of all, paiderastia must not be confused with what we now call ‘pederasty’. In order to understand the originality of what was called paiderastia in archaic and classical Greece, which had almost the status of an institution among the wealthy circles of Athenian society, the following five particularities should be mentioned.
(1)Paiderastia implies a relationship not between two adult males, but between an adult ‘lover’ (erastês) and his ‘beloved’ (erômenos), a paîs. In this case, paîs designates a boy in the age class that begins around the time of puberty, until the appearance of the first beard, between approximately ages 12 and 18.
(2)The appearance of fuzz on a boy’s cheeks represents the summit of his sexual attractiveness, which lasts until the growth of his first beard. In a transitional period, a young boy may play both an active and a passive role in a sexual relationship, but with different partners.
(3)Since it is limited to one period of life, and is not associated with an inclination towards one individual in particular, paiderastia is not exclusive. Adult males are expected to marry, after having played a passive role in the context of a homosexual relationship, and even while still playing an active role in them. Nevertheless, in the context of paiderastia, the erastês was often a relatively young man between twenty and thirty, who was not yet married or whose wife was very young. Moreover, in his speech (Smp. 189c–93d), Aristophanes insists on the existence of very strong, long-lasting bonds between individuals of the same sex. Agathon and Pausanias are a good example, since they remained together for more than 30 years.
(4)Even when pederastic relationships are characterized by mutual love and tenderness, an emotional and erotic asymmetry subsists, which the Greeks distinguish by speaking of the lover’s erôs and the beloved’s philia. An older man, inspired by love, pursued with his advances a younger man who, if he yielded, was led to do so by affection, gratitude and admiration, feelings united under the term philia; pleasure was not to be taken into account in his case (for a contrary view, see Dover 1989:204).
(5)The older male is qualified as an erastês, whereas the younger one is called his erômenos (the passive participle of eran) or his paidika (a neuter plural that literally means ‘what concerns young boys’). The amorous language found in Greek literature of a certain level and particularly in Plato always remains modest, but the reader should not be fooled. Such terms as hupourgein ‘perform a service’ (Smp. 184d) or charizesthai ‘accord favour’ (182a–b, 182d, 183d, 185b, 186b–c, 187d, 188c, 218c–d) must be interpreted in a strong sense: the service expected or the favour requested by the older male is ultimately equivalent to a sexual relation.
Outside of the desire for sexual satisfaction and the search for a certain affection or tenderness, of what use might paiderastia have been in ancient Greece? Whereas marriage constituted the privileged institution that enabled an adult male to transmit his ‘genetic’, economic, social and political patrimony, the relations between an adult and an adolescent can serve only to ensure the transmission of an economic, social and political patrimony. Indeed, it seems that in classical Athens, the goal of paiderastia was to facilitate the adolescent’s entry into the masculine society that ran the city economically and politically. Paiderastia thus had a social and educational role. This is the origin of all the remarks and developments on the utility (chreia) of homosexual relations that we find in Plato, particularly in the Phdr. and the Smp.
However, despite the institutionalized form assumed by paiderastia, and despite the praise received by sexual relations among men, which occupy the first place, particularly in the context of the banquet given at the home of Agathon (and described in Plato’s Smp.), this type of relation inspired resistance and censure. It is worth noting that Socrates favours avoiding homosexual coitus in Phdr. and the Athenian Stranger condemns it in Laws.
In his speech (180c–5c), Pausanias is obviously thinking of Agathon (who answers him in his speech, 194e–5a), who was first his ‘beloved’ in the context of paiderastia, when he underlines the quiet mistrust of Athenian society with regard to this practise, and even its open hostility. We find an example of this hostility in the Thesmophoriazusae (130–67), a comedy produced in 411 BCE, in which Aristophanes violently targets Agathon. The scene in which a relative of Euripides debates with Agathon constitutes a particularly violent condemnation of the homosexuality of the tragic poet, who must have been famous at the time.
By opposing paiderastia and philosophia on the level of education, the Phdr., and especially the Smp., encourage broader reflection on sexuality. Relations between the sexes are constructed as a function of social representations that vary over time and space. At the end of the fifth century BCE, certain oppositions manifest themselves in a context that is very different from our own. The opposition (active/passive) does not coincide with the polarity (man/woman), for the latter becomes confused for young men during the time of their adolescence. It does not always correspond to the contrast between adolescent and adult, for there may be interference between these terms. Finally, the couple heterosexuality/homosexuality, in so far as these terms are used with a great deal of caution, is not identical with a clear division between norm and deviance as it has been in other times and places, for homosexuality inspires both praise and blame. Indeed, the practise of paiderastia, which has almost the status of an institution in the upper classes of archaic and classical Athens never ceases to inspire a quiet mistrust that is sometimes transformed into hostility (see further Brisson 2006; Dover 1989; Halperin 1990).
PARTICIPATION
Fiona Leigh
Participation (methexis) is the relation that subsists between forms (q.v.) and things – ‘participants’ – in virtue of which things come to have as an attribute the property the form is named after. Thus participation has a causal or at least an explanatory role in Plato’s thought. Not being overly fond of technical language, Plato describes the relation by way of various terms: sharing, participating, communing and possibly even mixing (metalambanein, epikoinônein, metekhô, koinônein, mixis). So, for example, if a person or a city is just, this is because of its participation in the form justice (Republic 443e–4d, 472b, 479e–84d), if two things are a duo they share in duality itself (Phaedo 101c), if anything is beautiful it is because of sharing or partaking in the beautiful (Phd. 100d–e; Symposium 211a–b), the many large things participate in the form large (Parmenides 132a–b), and being a different thing involves a sharing in difference (Sophist 256b–e). In the Sph., at least a select few forms share other forms: Motion is the same as itself through participation in the same in relation to itself, and is different from the same because of sharing in difference in respect of the same (256a–b). So what exactly is participation?
What, according to Plato, the participation relation consists in is a vexed question for the student of Plato’s metaphysics. No character in the dialogues offers an adequate explanation of it, and in the Phd. (100d), Plato makes Socrates deliberately vague on the details. Some have even doubted that Plato himself understood it.
Broadly speaking, two interpretive trends are discernable in the secondary literature. Some see participation as reflective of or reducible to the apparent defect of sensible particulars as compared with forms; others see it as playing a role in the causal connection between forms and their participants. Sensibles are characterized in desultory terms as inferior, base and merely temporary (Phd.; Timaeus; Smp.; R.). The reader gets a strange picture of sensibles, as ‘striving’ to be like the forms in which they participate, but always falling short (e.g. Phd. 74d–5d), suggesting that they are at best approximations of them (cf. Ti. 29b–c; R. 472b–3b). They are sometimes said to possess mere ‘becoming’, being resemblances of the forms, which are more true (Ti. 50d–1c; Smp. 211a–2a), suggesting to some that they are like reflections in a mirror, or, alternatively, are copies or imitations (q.v.) of forms, as a chair may be said to imitate a craftsman’s blueprint, or a pattern (paradigm) in nature (R. bk 10 596a–7e; Prm. 132d; Ti. 29a–b; cf. Ti. 48e–9a). Such images naturally give rise to suggestions that the participation relation is one of copying, mirroring (or reflection), imitating or approximating. Note that not all, perhaps none, of these relations are necessarily identical. One way of copying something is to be an image or visual representation of it, another way is to imitate it by causing oneself to come to share a feature in common with it (typically not all features), another is to bear a likeness in a number of essential features to it, another is to be a wholesale reproduction (fair or otherwise) of it, and yet another is to roughly resemble it as one might resemble a pattern.
Several key differences exist between forms and nonforms. While forms are purely intelligible – accessible to the mind (soul) alone – nonforms are in space and time, and are enmattered or bodily (Ti. 30a–1b, 48e–9a; R. 507b–c). Such stuff is impermanent, and is characterized by opposite properties. None of the many physically beautiful things that the vulgar crowds adore is simply beautiful, says Socrates, but each is such as to also be ugly (R. 5.479a–b). If the defect of sensibles lies in their matter, perhaps participation is a relation of rough resemblance in which the resemblance is limited in exactness by the imperfection of the material. However, this does little to explain possession of a property. For example, Helen of Troy is not beautiful, but ugly, relative to the goddess Athena (cf. Hippias Major 289a–b; cf. Smp. 211a), and so is both beautiful and not beautiful (compresence of opposite characters). Perhaps the thought, on the approximation view, would be that humans are made of baser stuff than gods, and so Helen does not approach the ideal of beauty (q.v.) as closely as Athena, who herself is not perfectly beautiful, but only approximates, however closely, the beauty of the form beauty. But if beauty admits of a scale, as this view implies, then either Helen, Athena, or the rest have a precise measure of beauty, not an approximation, or else Plato thought that participation admits of degrees. On the first alternative, Plato appears to have confused being a precise measure with being a dim copy or approximation; while a problem for the second alternative is that degrees of participation do not figure prominently in the dialogues (but see R. 472b–c). Finally, if the form embodies the ideal standard, then we must ask in virtue of what it possesses the property. If it is a further form, then as Plato himself saw, the infamous ‘Third Man Argument’ threatens to undermine the explanatory value of forms (Prm. 132a–b).
Perhaps Plato characterizes participants as mere copies of forms because they belong to a different ontological category. So, they are not deficient as mere approximations of forms made from inferior stuff, but because they are different sorts of things entirely. Only forms really exist, whereas sensibles have a more tenuous reality, rolling about in the realm of ‘becoming’, not true being (R. 479d). Consider the following analogy: a reflection of a red scarf in a mirror resembles the original, really existing scarf, of which it is a copy. But since it is merely a visual image of it, only an imitation, it is incapable of, say, keeping one warm in winter. Despite handling Socrates’ talk of sensibles as shadowy reflections well, however, it is not clear that the analogy is ultimately workable. For, as the example makes clear, a reflection of a scarf is in an important sense not really a scarf at all, whereas the tallness in Simmias does seem to be a case of really being tall. Moreover, Plato himself apparently worried that an account of participation as similarity or likeness was inadequate. For, if a participant is like the relevant form, then the form is also like its participant, and it seems that this common property, in virtue of which they are alike, must in turn be explained in terms of a further form (Prm. 132d–3a). If the second form is like the original form and the participant, the regress will be infinite.
If Plato’s forms are universals (q.v. Ontology), as often thought, then the participation relation would be perhaps best thought of as an instantiation relation. The repeated characterization of sensibles as inferior could then be construed as an indication of Plato’s fondness for his conceptual innovation of forms, as compared to the mundane things of the sensible realm. But since this is hardly a philosophical reason to privilege forms, in the absence of solid textual evidence, it is an undesirable reading of Plato (but see Harte 2008).
Alternatively, one might attempt to understand participation by focusing on the causal connection between forms and their participants. A form of F is the cause of all the F-things being F, in the sense of being the thing responsible, by Plato’s lights, for them being F. No cause of something’s being F can also be the cause of its being the opposite of F, and similarly, no cause of something’s being F can be the opposite of F, which principles rule out other candidates for being the cause, such as material composition. Participation could, therefore, be construed as the causal relation that holds between forms and their participants. If so, however, it seems it will have to be one of the small classes of causal relations that is at the same time the state of affairs identified as the effect brought about by the cause. At least, participation seems to be temporally coextensive with the participant bearing the relevant property – it is not conceived of in the dialogues as a discrete act or event that happens at some time, which then ceases, leaving the participant as the property bearer at a later time. This suggestion raises several questions: Is participation then identical with, and reducible to, having a property as an attribute? Is the suggested view compatible with thinking of forms as universals, given that universals are not generally understood as causes of their instances?
PERCEPTION AND SENSATION (AISTHÊSIS, AISTHANOMAI) (SENSATION)
Timothy Chappell
One day at dawn, [Socrates] started thinking about some problem or other; he just stood outside, trying to figure it out. He couldn’t resolve it, but he wouldn’t give up. He simply stood there, glued to the same spot. By midday, many soldiers began to notice (êisthanonto) . . . (Plato, Symposium 220c)
They say that when [Babylon] was captured, three days later much of the city was still unaware of it (ouk aisthesthai). (Aristotle, Politics 1276a)
As these two quotations show, the classical Greek words for perception, aisthêsis and aisthanomai, normally have a straightforward nontechnical meaning: ‘be aware’, ‘notice’, ‘detect’ (as in Edward Lear’s ‘I perceive a large bird in this bush’). Furthermore they can have this nontechnical meaning even in the two Greek authors who, in their different ways, do most to refine specialized philosophical concepts of aisthêsis.
It is a nice question how refined their concepts are, and how closely their concepts align with any modern concept, given that, for example, Aristotle uses the same aisthêsis-vocabulary to discuss both sense-perception (de Anima 2) and moral intuition (Nicomachean Ethics 6). Modern philosophers often distinguish sensation (the physical transaction) from perception (the conveying of information by means of sensation). While Plato is keenly interested in both, and indeed has separate theories for the two (for his theory of sensation see Timaeus 45b–6c, 67c–8d; cf. Meno 76c–d; Theaetetus 155c–7c), he is undeniably hampered by having no terms to mark this and other key distinctions.
In such famous passages as Phaedo 72e–7b, Republic 475e–80a and Ti. 51d–e Plato develops a critique of aisthêsis which tightens and sharpens not just his concept of aisthêsis but also the accompanying and contrasting concepts, especially knowledge (gnôsis, epistêmê). By a simple piece of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ (see especially R. 477a1 ff.) Plato argues that the content of knowledge is ‘what is’, whereas the content of aisthêsis (or rather doxa – see below) is ‘what is and is not’. By definition, whatever I know is true (or real); so knowledge is about sure, stable realities. By contrast, whatever aisthêsis is about is unstable, ambiguous and uncertain.
Why is aisthêsis unstable, knowledge stable? Since aisthêsis constitutively depends on changeable physical processes, whereas knowledge constitutively depends on explanations (logoi). For Plato, to know something is actively to grasp a full (or approaching full) understanding of it; such an understanding will necessarily be stable if it is present at all. By contrast, to perceive something is to be affected, passively, by the physical world; being so affected is what sensation is, and there is no perception without sensation. But the physical world is itself unstable and unreliable, and its effects on us are particular and perspectival. So an epistemic state of being affected by the physical world must be a state of becoming what the physical world is – unstable and unreliable – and of becoming this at a particular time and from a particular perspective. If knowledge exists at all, knowledge will have to be an epistemic state which consists in being affected by ‘what is’ – by some reality that is not unstable in the way the physical world is. But knowledge does exist. Therefore knowledge is not of the physical world; it is a nonperspectival grasp of some realm of stable and unchanging realities beyond it. (Our apparent knowledge of mathematical truths is, perhaps, a clue to what such true knowledge might be like.)
However, there is a twist of paradox in the tale. The ultimate aim of the R.’s dialectical education is itself a sort of direct, revelatory perception, acquaintance or intuition: ‘True Being . . . is visible (theatê) only to Nous’ (Phaedrus 247c8; cp. theôrôn at Smp. 210d4). Hence we find Plato apparently denouncing this-worldly perception in almost the same breath as he exalts the perception of the forms (R. 517b1–9). Knowledge, as the Tht. insists, is not perception in any ordinary or mundane sense. And yet at the end of the philosopher’s laborious ascent, by way of reasoning and hard thought and logical work, what we find is that the ultimate knowledge is itself something so like perception in its directness, immediacy and nondiscursive simplicity that Plato never finds a better or more illuminating image to describe it by.
This line of thought is central to the R. But Plato never expresses it just thus. In particular – as noted above – the R. speaks mostly of doxa, not of aisthêsis. Usually the natural translation for doxa is ‘belief’, which seems a very different thing from ‘perception’, still more from ‘sensation’. However, the R.’s uses of doxa (see, e.g. R. 476b–d) show clearly that for Plato it is a technical term: doxa means, roughly, ‘sensation-based belief’, and that is not far at all from one possible sense of ‘perception’.
This helps us see why, in Plato’s Tht., the three would-be definitions of knowledge rejected in turn are these: (a) knowledge is aisthêsis, (b) knowledge is true doxa and (c) knowledge is true doxa with a logos. Plato is well aware of the apparent discontinuity between (a), about aisthêsis, and (b) and (c), about doxa. The Tht. does not skate over this difference; it explores it. How can the surd, unstructured happenings of mere sensation carry the sort of informational content worth dignifying with the names perception or belief – let alone the name knowledge? Can someone who thinks, as Heracleitus does according to the Tht., that there is nothing more to knowledge than the ebb and flow of such separate sensations, give any convincing account of the precondition of belief formation that we today call semantic structure? These are the questions that drive the argument of the Tht. The terrain between bare-sensation aisthêsis and informationally loaded doxa is precisely what they are designed to explore. And though he leaves his own positive doctrine implicit in the Tht., it is possible to see how Plato would answer these questions; without the kind of structure for understanding that the forms provide, he sees no route at all from aisthêsis to knowledge. Perception on its own is – for Plato as much as for his great contemporary Democritus, whom throughout his life he seems to have ignored – merely deception; where Plato and Democritus differ is on what needs to be added to perception, in order for it to be something more than deception.
The Tht. is consistent with Plato’s fundamental claim that the forms are the necessary precondition of all understanding. Nonetheless, the implicit lesson of the dialogue’s explicit argument – that not just knowledge, but belief and perception too, are necessarily structured by the forms – is that there is a way for Plato to ‘liberalise’ his view away from the hardline ‘two-worlds’ Platonism that can be read into the R. Knowledge may be the ‘highest’ and purest epistemic state, but that does not mean – Plato comes to think – that there is simply no value in doxa or aisthêsis: these epistemic states, ‘lower’ though they may be, can help us too (Philebus 58d–62d). Pace the R., the physical world is not such that the only epistemic states we can be in about it are ignorance and doxa: knowledge of it is possible too, if we come to see how the changing world approximates unchanging goodness. To explain how this can be done is, of course, the project of Plato’s greatest work of applied physical science: the Timaeus.
For further reading on Plato on perception, see Burnyeat (2000), Chappell (2005), Frede M. (2000), Modrak (2006) and Sedley (2006).
PHILOSOPHY AND THE PHILOSOPHER
Monique Dixsaut
Plato did not create the word philosophia (its coinage is ascribed by a later tradition to Pythagoras; Burkert; Dixsaut 1985:43–83), but he completely changed its meaning. In the texts that have been preserved, the only pre-Platonic occurrence of the word is to be found in the Hippocratic treatise Of Ancient Medicine, in the course of a polemic against some doctors more desirous of cosmic speculations than of true science and efficacy. The adjective philosophos (Heraclitus f. 35; D.K.; Antiphon 44a; Gorgias; Encomium of Helen 11, 13), and the verb philosophein (Herodotus I.30 and Thucydides 2.40–1) refer to any form of intellectual curiosity or exercise, not to a specific subject to which some men would devote themselves. Plato sometimes retains this meaning of philosophia as opposed to physical and specialized activities, for instance in Hippias Minor (363a), Charmides (153e), Protagoras (335d) or when he describes ‘the democratic man’ as able to engage in ‘philosophy’, at times (Republic 561d).
The departure from this loose meaning is staged in Gorgias (481c–5e): the philosophy referred to by Callicles, when he says that it is a fine thing, provided one applies oneself to it with moderation and in one’s youth, is not the philosophy Socrates has just said he is in love with, which demands constant self-examination and rational self-justification: to love philosophy is to be a philosopher through and through. Those who pursue this kind of knowledge, or wisdom (sophia), are neither wise nor ignorant (Lysis 218a; Symposium 303e–4b; Phaedrus 278d), but like Socrates they are wise enough to be aware that they are ignorant (Apology 29b). This negative wisdom is opposed to that of the sophoi, the experts, able to master either one particular material or a whole range of phenomena (cf. Aristotle, On Philosophy, f. 8 Ross), and whose sophia refers to a degree of excellence in performance which must be fêted. The philosopher aspires to no sophia of this sort. What he calls philosophy is the quest for a universal knowledge that might give birth to flawless wisdom: but as such, it seems that it can be a science belonging to the god only, or no more than a purely formal verbal passophia. According to Plato, the sophists are endowed with a wonderful power of appearing to be ‘wise on all subjects’ (panta sophoi, Sophist 233a–c, cf. scholium ad 251C), thanks to their art of controversy, but all imitators have this same ability to seem to know everything (to be passophoi, R. 598d): Prodicos (Prt. 315e), Protagoras (Theaetetus 152c), and also Homer (194e) and Hesiod (Ly. 216a), or Parmenides and Melissos (Tht. 181b). Neither conception of sophia can be ascribed to Plato: for even if his Socrates sometimes seems to share the view that calling oneself philosophos is a token of humility, when summoning the ‘divine part’ of his soul, he claims that the philosopher becomes akin to the realities to which ‘the gods themselves owe their divine nature’ (Phdr. 249c; cf. Tht. 176b).
The Phaedo is the only dialogue belonging to the first period (before the R.) in which the adjective philosophos is preceded by a definite article and becomes a substantive, this new substantive being defined in contrast with other words based on philo-: the philosopher is not obsessed with the care of his body (philosômatos), he does not crave for money (philochrêmatos), honour (philotimos), power or glory (philarkhos, philonikos), and he is finally identified with a philomathes. The latter is not specified by its object but by a kind of activity or learning, whose deep signification will be revealed by the argument of reminiscence. In order to gain what he claims he loves, ‘thought and truth’, the philosopher must ‘be dead’, that is, recall through the soul alone what is really existent and fully intelligible, the invisible ‘obscure to the eyes but to be seized by philosophical thought’ (Phd. 81b7). Contrary to a commonly accepted etymology (but missing in the Cratylus), Plato does not give as an object to the philosopher’s desire a sophia as impossible to obtain as it is ill defined. The meaning of the thing he calls ‘philosophy’ cannot amount to the sum of the two elements making up its name.
R. stresses the point: sticking to etymology leads to defining not the philosopher but the philodox, the lover of opinion. To sustain his proposal for the rule of philosopher-kings, Socrates begins by wondering if one must say of the philosopher, as must be said of all those who love something (philein ti), that he loves not this or that particular aspect of sophia, but loves the whole (R. 474b–80a): he would have a voracious appetite for all learning. Glaucon objects that on the basis of this description, all the lovers of sights and hearing would be considered philosophers, and mighty strange ones too, for undiscerning greed, particular to appetite, and indetermination, particular to sophia, characterize those who only resemble philosophers. The philosopher proper is not one who likes looking at everything new, but one who likes looking at the truth. He is not curious of the many things that participate in one idea (eidos), but he is always trying to get at what each being truly is in itself, at the permanent and intelligible entity (ousia) these things participate in. Ideas are the justification of the philosopher’s search, and the only science he wants to acquire is dialectic (Philebus 58a–e). As Parmenides asks Socrates: if, owing to the number of difficulties encountered, you give up assuming ideas, ‘what will you do with philosophy?’ (Parmenides 135c).
If the power to love the true prevails over every other kind of desire (in R. 581b–c, the highest part of the soul is called philosophos), we are dealing with a philosophical nature in which the love of truth, taken to its highest pitch, must not be called philia but erôs. It takes very little for its violence to be perverted: when he is not a philosopher, erôs is a tyrant, and the same can be said of a philosophical nature. Plato scholars (e.g. Annas 1981) generally find little or nothing to say of its definition in bk 6 (485–90), since it seems to offer a colourless model of human perfection. In fact, far from aiming at endowing the philosopher with every possible virtue, it is meant to remind us that it is only in him that virtues truly are virtues (cf. Phd. 69a–b), just as it is only in him, because truth ‘leads the chorus’, that the unity of virtues is fulfilled.
The philosophical nature is all the more endangered as it is sturdy and exceptionally gifted. A philosophic education must turn this nature towards its only fitting occupation, which is philosophy – failing at which, it will prove most dangerously harmful. From this passage (R. 491d ff.), we get a clear impression of the double-edged character of the force in human nature with which Plato is dealing (Nettleship 1929:211). The problem of the selection, education and perversion of these natures is the greatest political problem, since the philosopher is an indispensable agent when it comes to stamping a right direction on the life of the soul and of the state. His task is to recall that being a man means being able to understand oneself in all one says and does, and to remind the cities that they can only be saved if ruled by intelligence.
Making the existence of philosophy depend on the birth and preservation of philosophical natures is to make its extinction possible, which is why one must diagnose the causes for their perversion and expose the usurpers. Since there can be no philosophy without philosophers, since nothing can warrant that new philosophers will be born or that ‘the best natures’ will devote themselves to ‘the best occupation’, it follows that nothing can guarantee that philosophy will always exist. Its essence is eternal, not its existence. Philosophy is a rare plant, one which has flourished only in the West, and it is always in danger and always in need of a defence (Bloom 1968:390).
If sophists find refuge in the darkness of not being, philosophers are difficult to see because of ‘the dazzling brightness of the region where they reside’ (Sph. 254a). That is why the sophist may claim that he is the philosopher, and the statesman hold that public affairs demand a realism the philosopher is devoid of. When it comes to those three ‘kinds’, the difference between them is not to be found in a definition (that may be why Plato never wrote the dialogue of the Philosopher, alluded to in Sph. 254b), but ever again in Socrates, who is not a philosopher but the philosopher, a subject eluding the predicate. He might have been no more than a disinterested, slightly eccentric sophist, if his bite had not startled Plato awake and opened the history of Western philosophy.
PHUSIS (see Nature)
PIETY (EUSEBEIA, HOSIOS)
Mark L. McPherran
One of the central concerns of Plato’s dialogues is the true nature of the cardinal virtues, piety, justice (q.v.), wisdom, courage and moderation (q.v. Excellence). Socrates and Plato inherited the everyday Greek conception of piety, which designates those things that are in accord with the norms governing proper relations between humans and gods. What marked a fifth-century BCE Greek city or person as pious, for example, was not so much a matter of having a certain set of beliefs as it was the correct observance of ancestral tradition, especially the correct performance of sacrifices and the celebration of festivals in honour of deities, minor and major. No ancient text such as the Iliad had the status of a Bible or Koran, and there was no organized church, trained clergy or systematic set of doctrines enforced (although there were officially recognized priests and priestesses with clearly demarcated public duties).
Plato’s most sustained and famous treatment of piety is found in the Euthyphro. There Socrates interrogates the self-professed religious expert, Euthyphro, from whom he elicits five accounts of piety (‘piety’ naming the one characteristic that makes all pious actions and persons pious; Euthphr. 5c–d, 6d–e): (a) prosecuting whomever does injustice (5d–6e), (b) what is loved by the gods (6e–9d), (c) what is loved by all the gods (9e–11b), (d) the part of (generic) justice that assists the gods to produce their most beautiful product (pagkalon ergon; 11e–14b) and (e) the knowledge of prayer and sacrifice (14b–15c). Subjected to the Socratic elenchos (q.v.), Euthyphro is forced to withdraw his assent to all five proposals. However, many scholars have argued that a positive and Socratically acceptable partial conception of piety can be reconstructed on the basis of Socrates’ leading hints in the Euthphr. concerning his fourth account, and his claims to be pursuing a god-ordered mission in the Apology as he defends himself against a charge of impiety (Ap. 20e–3) (e.g. McPherran 1996; Taylor 1982; see Brickhouse and Smith 1989 on Socrates’ defence; McPherran 2003 has argued that the fifth account can also be interpreted in Socratically acceptable terms).
This ‘Socratic piety’ would be defined as ‘that part of justice that is a service of humans to gods, assisting the gods in their primary task to produce their most beautiful product’ (McPherran 1996:ch. 2). Socrates holds that we cannot have a precise or complete account of this product, but since he also holds that the gods are wholly good and do not quarrel like Homers’ gods, their chief project must be superlatively good. Next, the Socratic view that the only or most important good is virtue/wisdom (e.g. Ap. 30a–b; Euthydemus 281d–e) makes it likely that the only or most important component of the gods’ chief product is virtue or wisdom. But then, since piety as a virtue must be a craft-knowledge (q.v. Art) of how to produce goodness, our primary service to the gods – the one we are best suited to perform – would appear to be to help the gods produce goodness in the universe via the protection and improvement of the human mind/soul. Since philosophical examination of oneself and others is for Socrates the key activity that helps to achieve this goal via the improvement of consistency among our moral belief and the deflation of human presumptions to divine wisdom (e.g. Ap. 22d–3b), Socratic philosophizing is a preeminently pious activity.
This appropriation and reconception of piety as demanding of us philosophical self-examination is not wholly at odds with tradition: Socrates’ antihubristic mission is very much in line with Delphic Apollo’s insistence that humans obtain the self-knowledge that they and ‘human wisdom’ fall short of divinity. Socrates also does not appear to reject conventional religious practises in general, but only the narrowly self-interested motives underlying their common observance (cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.2.64; Ap. 10–12). This activity can also be explained as being compatible with the demands of piety reconceived as philosophizing (see McPherran 2000).
In his later, more constructive and less aporetic work, Plato moves beyond this deflationary sense of philosophical piety when he becomes more optimistic than his teacher regarding the capacity of human beings to cross the traditional gap separating the human from the divine in respect of knowledge, wisdom and power. Plato’s philosophical theology offered the unsocratic hope of an afterlife of intimate form contemplation by our souls in the realm of divinity (Phd. 79c–84b; R. 490a–b; Phdr. 247d–e). It was influenced on the one hand by Socrates’ new intellectualist conception of piety as elenctic ‘caring of the soul’ (Ap. 29d–30b) and the success of the methods of the mathematicians of his day that he took to overcome the limitations of Socrates’ elenctic method (Vlastos 1991a:ch. 4) (q.v. Method), and on the other by the aim at human-initiated divine status (especially immortality) as expressed by some of the newer, post-Hesiodic religious forms that had entered into Greece. Self-knowledge on Plato’s scheme leads not so much to an appreciation of limits, then, as to the realization that we are ourselves divinities: immortal intellects that already have within them – if only we can but recollect it – all the knowledge there is to be had (Men. 81c–d; Phd. 72e–7e; Smp. 210a–11b) (q.v. Recollection). Platonic piety is now marked by its insistence that we engage in the intellectual project of ‘becoming like god’ (e.g. Tht. 176a–7c; Smp. 209e–12b; Laws 715e–18a; see further McPherran 1996:ch. 5; Morgan 1990) (q.v. Theology; Religion).
In such a scheme, the central task of human existence becomes less a matter of assisting gods and more a matter of becoming as much like them as one can. This fact, plus the more complex psychology Plato develops in R. bk 4, may explain Plato’s decision to no longer count piety as a cardinal virtue (R. 427e–8a). For, it seems that prior to this text Plato had come to the view that there is little internal difference between the knowledge of how to do what is just towards gods (piety) and the knowledge of how to do what is just towards mortals (secular justice); as a result, piety as a form of psychic virtue seems to be nothing other than an aspect of generic psychic justice. So, although Plato continues to speak of pious actions in R., and after piety as a virtue is subsumed under the virtue of justice (and wisdom) as a whole, the phrase ‘just and pious’ is assumed to refer to generic justice.
PLEASURE (HÊDONÊ)
Dorothea Frede
Plato treats pleasure (hêdonê) as the generic name of any kind of positive state of mind (perception, emotion, experience or insight). The same is true of its counterpart pain (lupê). Depending on the context, translations vary between pleasure, delight, amusement or lust (cf. Philebus 11b). From the early and middle to the late dialogues the conception of pleasure undergoes quite some development, with a significant differentiation of the evaluation of pleasure’s role in human life (Gosling and Taylor 1984).
In the so-called early Socratic dialogues pleasure is not addressed except in passing but in later Socratic dialogues, especially, the Gorgias (493d–500d), it is associated with desire (epithumia) and explained as the compensation of a lack. This leads to a fundamental critique of pleasure: desire as such is insatiable, pleasure is necessarily mixed with pain and includes bad physical and psychological states of excitement. In addition, pleasure is experienced by both good and evil persons alike so that criteria of differentiation are needed if pleasure is to be regarded as a good at all. The Phaedo (especially 64c–6d) associates pleasure and desire with the body and blames them for all evils to humankind such as sickness, discord and war, so that true philosophers avoid such disturbances of the mind. The exception among the early dialogues is the Protagoras where Socrates in his final argument for the unity of the virtues forces the famous sophist to accept the definition of virtue as the ‘art of measuring pleasure and pain’ (351b–7e). Whether or not Plato is serious about this argument is still a matter of debate, but ‘enlightened hedonism’ of this type remains unique in his work. It is hard to see how Socrates could combine his concern for the care for one’s soul (q.v.) with the advocacy of an undifferentiated hedonism where the size of pleasures and pains is all that counts.
The dialogues of Plato’s middle period from the Republic to the Phaedrus retain an overall critical attitude towards pleasure as long as it is associated with the lowest part of the soul. Education (q.v.) through music and gymnastics is to lead to better forms of pleasure (R. 3.403d–4d), and the members of the ruling class can reach a harmonious equilibrium with respect to pleasure and pain (R. 6.462a–4d). While pleasure and knowledge are at one point presented as unsatisfactory rivals for the title of the highest good (R. 6.505c–d), in bk 9 Plato stages a competition between different kinds of pleasure and finally assigns first prize to the philosopher’s pleasures (R. 583c–5a). In that argument Plato provides an explanation of the nature of pleasure and of the difference between ‘real pleasures’ and ‘bastard pleasures.’ Between pleasure and pain there is a neutral state, free from either pleasure or pain; the motion from pain to the neutral, middle state is a mere semblance of pleasure, in contradistinction to the motion from the neutral state to that of true pleasure, which is at the same time explained as a ‘filling with what is really real’ – that is, with what is true and pure, uncontaminated by the body. The value of pleasure therefore depends on the quality of the respective ‘filling’ (R. 585a–7c). The Symposium and the Phdr. are not explicitly concerned with pleasure, but their incisive treatment of love (q.v.) for the beautiful as an incentive to the higher and better shows that Plato no longer maintains a rigid separation of soul and body (cf. Smp. 210a–12b; Phdr. 253d–6e).
The R. gives some indications concerning the nature of pleasure as a filling or motion. For example, in bk 9, the nature of the filling depends not only on the nature of the ‘filling’ (of soul vs. of body) but also on the nature of what each is being ‘filled’ with (forms vs. sensible object); but this does not lead to a proper definition (Frede 1985). This question is finally addressed and settled in the Phlb., by general consensus one of Plato’s last works. Pleasure is there presented once again as the rival of knowledge (q.v.) in a contest for the highest good in human life (Phlb. 11a–c). But this time pleasure and its different kinds are subject to a careful investigation that leads to a definition of both pleasure and pain: while pain is the disturbance or disruption of the natural equilibrium in an organism, pleasure is its restoration (31b–6e). Such disturbances and restorations can affect both body and soul, separately and in combination, and hence there is a host of different types of pleasures and pains. In addition, in his critique of pleasure Plato gives a systematic treatment of the possibility of truth and falsity that had been left in a less than satisfactory state in R. bk 9. The discussion points out four quite different types of falsehood (Phlb. 36c–50e): (a) pleasures that have a propositional content – enjoying something that is not the case; (b) overrated pleasures; (c) the confusion of pleasure with freedom from pain; and (d) pleasures inextricably mixed with pain. This distinction permits Plato to pinpoint as true and pure all those pleasures that are free from those flaws, and to justify the conclusion that the best human state consists of a mixture of knowledge and pure pleasures (59d–64b). If the Phlb. ends the long-standing tug-of-war between knowledge and pleasure in Plato’s work, it does not justify the conclusion that he should thereby be regarded as an enlightened hedonist. Pleasure, in its best form, represents only a second-rate good, because even its true and pure kinds are only the filling of an ‘unfelt lack’, and is due to the necessarily deficient status of human beings and its constant need of supplementation and replenishment in both soul and body (Harte 2004).
This clarification of the nature of pleasure and pain may be presupposed but is not explicitly addressed in Plato’s last work, the Laws, where pleasure and pain are assigned an important role in the education of the second best city’s inhabitants (Lg. 1.631a–2b). The importance of handling pleasure and pain in the right way is symbolized by the comparison of the human soul with a puppet that is controlled by pleasure and pain as if by iron strings, which in turn ought to be directed by the golden thread of reason and law (Lg. 1.644c–5d). Thus pleasure and pain remain important forces of motivation in Plato’s conception of human nature; they stand in need of careful orchestration by the means of education and legislation.
POETRY (POIÊSIS)
Elizabeth Belfiore
Socrates’ statements at the beginning of Republic bk 10 sum up the ambivalent and complex attitudes towards poetry represented in Plato’s dialogues. After claiming that mimêtic poetry is harmful to all who do not know the truth, Socrates says that he must speak about this harm ‘even though a certain affection (philia) and reverence for Homer that has possessed me from childhood opposes my speaking’ (R. 10.595b–c). Socrates later uses the stronger word erôs to refer to his love of poetry (607e7). Plato’s own intense love for the poetry his Socrates condemns is evident throughout the dialogues, in which poetry is frequently quoted, and poetic language often used.
In the R., Socrates first condemns the use of poetry like that of Homer and Hesiod to educate the young (bks 2 and 3), arguing that it misrepresents the gods as deceitful and harmful, and provides bad role models in the form of heroes who lack courage and self-control. He then claims, in a context not restricted to education (bk 10), that poetry and other forms of mimêsis (imitation, q.v.) misrepresent the truth, and appeals to an inferior part of the soul. Socrates’ ‘greatest accusation’ is that poetry corrupts even ‘the best of us’. According to Socrates, we think it right to endure our own sorrows as calmly as possible, but we do not believe that it is shameful to enjoy poetry in which someone acts in ways that we would condemn in real life. For this reason, we ‘let down our guard’ when we hear poetry, pitying and sympathizing with someone who grieves excessively. By thus feeding and strengthening the wailing part of our soul, we make it harder to restrain our own sorrows (605c–6d; Belfiore 1983). Socrates concludes that the only kinds of poetry that should be accepted into the city are ‘hymns to the gods and encomia of good people’ (607a). In Laws bk 2, the Athenian adopts this same rule when he states that the lawgiver must persuade or compel the poet to compose poems about ‘men who are self-controlled, courageous and good in all ways’ (Lg. 660a). Indeed, he says, tragic poets must not be allowed to speak in opposition to their rivals, the lawgivers, whom he calls ‘poets of the best tragedy’, because they are creators of the polity that is a mimêsis of the best life (R. 7.817a–d). In these dialogues, then, poetry is given a positive role within the city only when it conforms to rigorous ethical and religious standards. Little of traditional Greek poetry, especially that of Homer, Hesiod and the tragedians, is acceptable.
The Ion has sometimes been thought to express a more positive view of poetry, especially that of Homer. In this dialogue, the rhapsode Ion, a professional reciter of Homer’s poems, claims that he has access to more than human knowledge because he is possessed by the same divine inspiration (q.v.) under whose influence the poets themselves compose. However, the way in which Ion arrives at this claim gives us reason to doubt that Socrates himself is represented as agreeing with it. Ion first claims that he has skill (technê, q.v.) concerning chariot racing, generalship and other matters about which Homer speaks. Socrates then questions Ion, casting doubt on the truth of his claim, and suggesting that Ion may be deceiving his audience about his skill and knowledge. Socrates finally forces Ion to choose between being considered an unjust deceiver or a ‘divine man’. Only at this point does Ion say that he prefers to be considered ‘divine’, that is, divinely inspired (Ion 542a–b). Indeed, the view of the inspired poet in this dialogue is just as negative as it is in Phaedrus 248d–e, where the life of a poet is ranked only sixth in a hierarchy of nine, and in Apology 22a–c, where Socrates says that poets are ‘enthusiastic’, that is, divinely inspired, rather than wise, and that they not only know less about their own poems than anyone in their audience but also falsely believe that they are the wisest of all people in other respects as well.
Nevertheless, Plato’s own love for poetry, especially that of the poets his Socrates most strongly condemns, is apparent throughout the dialogues, which contain, for example, 117 quotations from Homer and 13 from Hesiod (Brandwood 1976). These quotations serve a variety of functions (Halliwell 2000; Vicaire 1960:76–192). Some illustrate ethical points (R. 3.390d, quoting Odyssey 20.17–18, where Odysseus restrains his anger against the maids); others demonstrate Socrates’ superior knowledge of poetry (Protagoras 338e–47a, where Socrates quotes and interprets Simonides); some serve to characterize interlocutors (e.g. the speakers in the Symposium quote poetry in support of their ideas (Belfiore, forthcoming)). The dialogues also contain many poetical passages of Plato’s own invention, and even some metrical phrases (e.g. Phdr. 241d1; and Smp. 197d1–e5; Dover 1980:124). Most of Plato’s own poetical passages are used, like the quotations, for philosophical purposes. For example, at the end of his speech containing the myth of the chariot, Socrates says that he spoke ‘in poetic words’ in order to turn Phaedrus towards a philosophical life (Phdr. 257a–b), and he states that the myth of Er might persuade his interlocutors to pursue justice and wisdom (R. 621c).
Plato’s dialogues, then, invite us to consider ways in which love for poetry can be safely indulged, even leading to philosophical insight. Not all of traditional poetry is harmful, and Plato’s own myths (q.v.) present philosophical ideas in poetic language. Moreover, by critically questioning even potentially harmful poetry, as Socrates does, we can acquire the countercharm that will allow us to listen to it without being deceived (R. 10.608a). Moreover, Socrates’ treatment of one particular tragic poet, Agathon, suggests that it may also be possible to reform the poets themselves. After Agathon gives an encomium of Eros filled with poetic quotations, Socrates subjects him to an elenchus (q.v.) that demonstrates that Agathon, like Ion, does not know what he is talking about (Smp. 199c–201c). Unlike Ion, however, who takes refuge in the unexamined claim that he is divinely inspired, Agathon readily admits his ignorance (201b11–12). Socrates responds with a punning compliment, stating that Eros lacks (or needs) ‘the good’ (agathôn), and refers to Agathon as ‘beloved’ (201c). That Agathon is willing to learn from Socrates is also apparent at the end of the dialogue, when he is eager to be praised by Socrates once again, even though he thereby risks receiving a kind of ‘praise’ that Agathon called ‘hybris’ (insolence) in an earlier encounter (175e, 223a). Significantly, Agathon is the last of the symposiasts to remain awake talking to Socrates (223d). The example of Agathon, then, suggests that a poet may be able to acquire the kind of wisdom that Socrates has, that of knowing his own lack of wisdom, if he is willing to question and examine his ideas rather than merely attempting to give pleasure to an ignorant audience. His poems will then convey this kind of wisdom, as well as giving pleasure by means of poetic language and meter. Indeed, Plato’s dialogues show that if poetry is used philosophically, that is, subjected to examination, it can contribute to the search for wisdom.
POLIS (see City)
POLITICS AND THE FIGURE OF THE POLITICUS
Melissa Lane
Politicus, or ‘statesman’, is the Latinized form of the Greek politikos, a term which ‘may well . . . be a Platonic innovation’ (Rowe 1995:1). Certainly Plato is the first ancient Athenian author to make the politikos central to his account of politics. To appreciate the significance of Plato’s formulation of this figure, we must begin by observing how different it was from prevailing figures in Athenian politics. Athenians at the time spoke of their political leaders primarily as the rhêtores kai stratêgoi, ‘orators and generals’, so naming those men who regularly swayed the Assembly or were elected annually as military leaders (Hansen 1991:266). In the fifth century, these two circles tended to overlap, with Pericles, for example, owing his influence both to his prowess in swaying Assembly deliberations and to his regular reelection as a general. If Athenians wanted to speak of these men in another way, they called them dêmagôgoi, which is best translated not by the modern pejorative term ‘demagogues’ but simply as ‘political leaders’ (see Finley 1985:69 for the neutral use, though elsewhere he accepts a pejorative use). Notice that ‘orators and generals’ is a description of a plurality, a small group. Political leadership in Athens was understood as consisting in a small group of sometime rivals, sometime collaborators. If the Athenians sought the image of a singular political leader elevated in kind above all others, they found this in the historical figure of the lawgiver (nomothetês) Solon, who like Lycurgus in Sparta had established fundamental laws for his city. Yet, having done so, these lawgivers did not take part in its daily political life: Solon voluntarily left Athens for 10 years, while Lycurgus left Sparta never to return.
With the legendary lawgiver on the one hand, and the rivalling groups of orators and generals on the other, the Athenians would have found the conception of a ‘statesman’ who was unique, yet who played a part in ordinary political affairs, to be alien. Yet this was the figure of the politikos whom Plato developed, in a direct challenge to the norms of the Athenian democracy. Plato did this in at least two ways. The first draws on his discussion in the Gorgias, which both criticizes the leading fifth-century orators and generals and proposes Socrates as a rival to them; the second, on the Euthydemus and the Plt., in which the notion of a politikê technê (‘political art’ or ‘political craft’) and of the figure of the politikos defined by his knowledge of that art or science (epistêmê) are developed respectively. In refuting the aggressive and ambitious Callicles in the Grg., Socrates undertakes an examination of the admired fifth-century orators and generals who had succeeded in winning the power in the city which Callicles argues one should seek. In line with the amateur character of all Athenian political leaders, as democratic citizens who achieve a temporary and mainly informal influence among their peers, he begins by considering simply whether Pericles, Cimon, Miltiades and Themistocles were ‘good citizens’ (Grg. 515d). The argument against their being so hinges on their having failed to make the Athenians virtuous, a failure demonstrated in the censures and rebukes which each of them suffered at least once at the hands of the people. Socrates then generalizes this point to propose by contrast a ‘true political craft’ (hôs alêthôs politikê technê; 521c7). Such an art would consist in making speeches aiming not at what is pleasant but at what is best (521d8–10). The standard of the good (q.v.) as the aim of the true statesman links the fundamental orientation of this account to the standard of the good as the aim of politics developed in the Republic, even though that dialogue does not refer to its (plural) philosopher-rulers by the singular term politikos.
A striking feature of the Grg. is Socrates’ reference to himself within it. The proposed account of the ‘true political art’ quoted above is actually embedded in a Socratic self-diagnosis: ‘I believe that I’m one of a few Athenians – so as not to say I’m the only one, but the only one among our contemporaries – to take up (epicheirein) the true political craft and practise the true politics (prattein ta politika)’ (521c6–8). The verb epicheirein has the connotation of trying to do something rather than necessarily succeeding at it. In other words, Socrates sees himself as alone among his contemporaries in adopting the correct orientation for politics, in aiming at the good rather than the pleasant, but he does not here claim to have the knowledge or skill necessary to succeed in doing so.
The idea that the politikê technê must consist in full knowledge, rather than intention alone, is underlined in other dialogues, most notably the Euthd. There, between battles with a pair of shameless sophists, Socrates discusses with the young Clinias knowledge as the only art which can make a man happy and fortunate (Euthd. 277d–82e). What kind of knowledge is that? Socrates first dismisses the art of speechwriting (an identification which the Grg. reference to ‘speeches’ might unwisely suggest) or that of generalship: in other words, with the very arts exercised by the Athenian orators and generals. Instead, it is the ‘statesman’s art’, also described as the ‘kingly art’ which makes the citizens it governs ‘wise and good’ (292b4, 292c4–5).
Although the Euthd. ends without resolving exactly what ‘wise and good’ here means, or how the statesman’s art can cultivate these virtues in the citizens, the idea of a kingly art which defines the figure of the statesman is the central topic of the Plt. There, a stranger from Elea leads a discussion which eventually distinguishes the statesman from his closest rivals: identified as the orators, the generals and the jurors (these last exercising an office which any male Athenian citizen could occupy). Statecraft – now articulated as the distinctive knowledge of the politikos, rather than simply a generic ‘political art’ – is not to be identified with the knowledge of any of the practical arts, but rather as controlling the exercise of those forms of knowledge (Plt. 305d1–2). In particular, its role is to distinguish the ‘right time’ from the ‘wrong time’ to ‘begin and set in motion the most important things in cities’. The statesman’s knowledge is essentially temporal (Plt. 305d2–4; Lane 1998).
The Eleatic stranger goes on to define statecraft even more broadly as the art ‘that controls all of these [the arts of oratory, generalship, and judging], and the laws, and cares for every aspect of things in the city, weaving everything together in the most correct way’ (Plt. 305e2–6). Here, he draws on his earlier use of weaving as a model for statecraft, and will go on to suggest that the statesman’s peculiar task is to weave together two rival groups of citizens, characterized by opposing tendencies to misidentify the correct time for initiating action. By binding together these two groups through appropriate intermarriages and shared opinions, the statesman can engender in them the ability to identify the right time for action and so embody his political art in the polity as a whole (305e–11c).
It remains a question whether the statesman must remain present in the city and what his function in doing so would be. The Eleatic stranger earlier compares the statesman to an athletics trainer who issues written instructions to his charges to cover his periodic absences. Certainly, the statesman’s function is extraconstitutional, in that he does not occupy any of the ordinary offices or magistracies, but exercises his art at one remove, shaping the conditions in which the citizens exercise the magistracies (and so connecting to the political structure of the Laws, another dialogue which does not speak of the figure of the politikos). Plato’s figure of the politikos embodies – in certain dialogues – his fundamental claim which remains consistent across the dialogues as a whole: that politics must be based on the rule of knowledge, aiming at the good.
REALITY (see Appearance and reality)
REASON
Fred D. Miller, Jr.
The idea of reason is fundamental throughout Plato’s philosophy. His terms logos, nous, dianoia, phronêsis and related words often correspond to ‘reason’ as understood by modern philosophers.
Socrates is depicted as the champion of reason. Rather than accepting other people’s opinions, Socrates professes to listen only to the argument (logos) that seems best to him on reflection (Crito 46b). He would rather disagree with the majority than to contradict himself, even though he is only one person. Making no claim to wisdom he is grateful to anyone who can refute him because this will only bring him closer to the truth (Gorgias 482c, 506a–c). In his quest for wisdom Socrates employs the method of elenchus (q.v.). In Meno and Phaedo he supplements it with the hypothetical method and theory of recollection (q.v.). The main focus of the present article will be on the account of reason in Republic and later dialogues.
Throughout Plato’s dialogues reasoning (logismos) and thought (dianoia) are ascribed to the soul (q.v.) as opposed to the body. For example, in Phd. the soul reasons (logizetai) best about true reality when it is unimpeded by bodily perceptions and desires (Phd. 64c–7e). In R., however, reasoning belongs to the soul’s rational faculty (logistikon), which is distinguished from the spirited and appetitive ‘parts’ of the soul (R. bk 4.435e–41c). This tripartite psychology is present in other dialogues: in Phaedrus 246a reason is compared to a charioteer guiding a winged soul-chariot; in Timaeus 69c–71e the rational soul is located in the head while the spirited and appetitive souls are consigned to the chest and abdomen; in Laws 1.644e–5a in the comparison of a human beings with a ‘puppet of the gods’ reasoning (logismos) is a ‘golden and holy’ cord which pulls us towards certain actions in opposition to other cords.
In Plato’s epistemology (q.v.) thought (dianoia) involves two powers: knowledge (epistêmê) by which one knows a form such as the beautiful itself, and opinion (doxa) by which one opines about perceptible objects such as beautiful sights and sounds (R. bk 5.476d; Ti. 27d–8a). Knowledge has superior epistemic status (i.e. infallibility) because its objects are more intelligible due to their higher ontological status: the objects of knowledge are eternal and unvarying, while objects of opinion are perishable and mutable. Light is also shed on the different modes of reason by the metaphor of the divided line (q.v.) in R. bk 6.509d–11e. Opinion is subdivided into belief (pistis) concerning visible objects like animals and plants, and imagination (eikasia), which concerns images (e.g. reflections) of these visible objects. Knowledge also has two subdivisions: intelligence (noêsis), which is concerned with the forms and ultimately the form of the good, and discursive thought (dianoia in a narrow sense). With discursive thought the soul uses perceptible objects as images of the forms and starts from unexamined hypotheses to derive conclusions, as in the case of geometry or arithmetic. With intelligence the soul eschews images and derives first principles from hypotheses using forms themselves.
Reason (logos) itself grasps the intelligible object by the power of dialectic, treating these hypotheses not as first principles but really as hypotheses, in order to go up to what is non-hypothetical and reach the principle of everything. After grasping the principle, reason, reversing itself and holding on to what follows from it, in this way descends to a conclusion making use of nothing visible at all, but, instead, of forms themselves, through them and into them, and it ends in forms. (R. bk 6.511b; cf. R. bk 7.533c–d)
Intelligence thus has two stages: ascent to a first principle through dialectic (q.v.), and descent from principle to conclusion. This leaves open important questions. For example, can Plato’s sharp distinction between knowledge and belief be defended without positing a two world ontology? (for contrasting interpretations, see Cherniss 1936 and Fine 1990) Can reason achieve genuine knowledge independently of perception? Is the distinction between reason and perception all that clear since reason is required to make judgements about perceptible objects (Tht. 186c–d; see Burnyeat 1990:52–65 and Cooper 1970)? Further, even though logos can be translated as ‘speech’ and ‘account’ as well as ‘reason’, how closely are the three notions connected for Plato? Does knowledge always require giving an account? Men. 98a states that belief falls short of knowledge unless we can give an account, but Tht. 210a finds fault with the definition of knowledge as true belief with an account (see Taylor 2008). Again, Sph. 263e describes thought (dianoia) as silent discourse (dialogos), but Ep. 7.343a complains of the weakness of words (logoi) and declares that nobody with intelligence (nous) will be so bold as to place his thoughts in them, especially unalterable written symbols. Must the deliverances of reason have the form of propositional knowledge (q.v.)?
In Plato’s psychology and normative theory the rational faculty opposes the other psychic faculties, for example, when someone wants to drink yet is unwilling to do so, because he reasons that it would be harmful (R. bk 4.436a–9d). It does not merely deliberate about how to satisfy one’s appetites, but has its own desires for knowledge of the truth and its own pleasures taken in learning (R. bk 9.580a–1c). The rational part ought to rule, ‘since it is really wise and exercises foresight on behalf of the whole soul’ (441e). The rule of reason is the basis for the four cardinal virtues (442b–3e). Again, questions arise (see Annas 1981): Is the rational part a sort of agent or homunculus or is it merely a nexus of capacities? And is reason in fact the ‘natural ruler’, or is Hume right to rejoin that ‘reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions?’
The rule of reason also has political import. Like the soul the city has a tripartite structure, with guardian, auxiliary and ruling classes. The guardians should be guided by reason; indeed, they should be philosopher-rulers: ‘unless political power and philosophy coincide, there will be no respite for cities from evils’ (R. bk 5.473c–d). Conceding the impracticality of philosopher-rule, in Politicus and Lg. the linchpin of rational rule becomes the statesman or legislator: ‘opposing the greatest desires and having no human ally, all alone he will follow reason (logos) alone’ (Lg. 8.835c). The rule of reason implies the rule of law: ‘reason (logos), striving to become law’, commands the citizens to avoid the desires that drag them down (Lg. 8.835e). This dialogue notes the linguistic similarity between nomos (law) and nous (intelligence). But this again raises questions (see Miller 2005). In particular, granting the need for rationality in politics, is the rule of reason compatible with the practises of democracy?
Plato suggests that out of all the human faculties reason has the greatest claim to immortality. At R. bk 10.611b–2a, the pure state of the soul is compared to the sea god Glaucus whose primary nature cannot be easily made out because he is so mutilated by waves and encrusted by shells, stones and so forth. The soul’s true nature is distinguished by its love of philosophy, the hallmark of the rational faculty (cf. R. bk 9.581b). More explicitly Ti. 69c–70b (cf. Ti. 42e) describes the rational soul alone as ‘immortal’, the other ‘mortal’ souls being created later.
Plato also explores the role of reason on the cosmic scale, in the myth of Ti. the god (demiurge) who created the perceptible universe, wanting to make it as like himself as possible (Ti. 30b). If the cosmos (world order) does not exhibit perfect order it is because it resulted from ‘the conjunction of necessity and intelligence’ (48a). Similarly Lg. 10.893b–9b argues that the heavenly motions are due to immortal self-moving souls, and the motions are orderly if the souls are intelligent. Orderly cosmic motion involves continuous revolution around a central point, a physical motion which most closely resembles the cyclical motion of intelligence (nous) or understanding (phronêsis) itself (Lg. 10.898a; Ti. 34a).
Although Plato’s radical claims on behalf of reason were challenged by his successors, starting with Aristotle, they continued to have a profound influence, notably on early modern rationalism (q.v.).
RECOLLECTION (ANAMNÊSIS)
Dorothea Frede
Given the importance that is attributed in the secondary literature to the notion that Plato explains learning as the recollection (anamnêsis) of prenatal knowledge that needs to be retrieved, because it has been covered up at the moment of the soul’s embodiment, newcomers to Plato will be surprised to learn that explicit discussion of this doctrine is confined to two of Plato’s works, the Meno and the Phaedo (with a brief reminder in Phaedrus 249c). When recollection is referred to elsewhere (mostly in verbal form, but occasionally as a noun, Philebus 34b–c), it means just what corresponding terms mean in English, that is, reminders of ordinary experience, most of all concerning previous agreements in the discussion.
In the Men. recollection is introduced as Socrates’ solution to Meno’s ‘paradox of learning:’ How one is to search for something one does not know at all, for even if one came across it, one would not recognize it as the thing one did not know (Men. 80d). Socrates does not directly challenge the paradox but resorts to the mythical explanation of ‘wise men and women, priests and priestesses’ that the soul (q.v.) is immortal, has undergone many deaths and rebirths and has therefore ‘seen all things’ so that it needs only to recollect what has once been known (81a–e). To illustrate how such recollection works Socrates conducts an experiment. A slave without training in geometry manages, thanks to careful questioning and a drawing in the sand that makes use of Pythagoras’ theorem, to solve the problem of how to double the area of a given square (82b–5b). As critics never tire of pointing out, the experiment proves only that with the help of suggestive questions and a drawing a layperson can be made to recognize certain basic geometrical truths (Scott 2006:99–112). In addition, it presupposes a Socrates who not only possesses the art of questioning but also knows the problem’s solution beforehand. Against this it should be objected that Plato himself actually claims no more than that Socrates’ questioning has stirred up opinions ‘like in a dream’ that only with further practise will eventually turn into knowledge (Men. 85c–d). It is unclear whether Plato wants to limit such ‘recollectable’ knowledge to mathematical truths. Nor is it clear to what extent he wants to support the myth of successive births and deaths, for in his subsequent distinction of true opinion and knowledge (q.v.) he remarks that true opinions are elusive goods ‘until one ties them down by an account of the reason why. And that is recollection, as we previously agreed (98a)’ (Scott 2006:182–5). Plato may therefore limit recollection to the soul’s innate capacity to comprehend nonempirical truths, like those of mathematics (q.v.), that will first emerge as true opinions and through further reflection turn into knowledge proper. In addition, mathematical geniuses can and do ‘find’ such truths without outside help, so that the most gifted among us seem to be ‘born’ with the requisite knowledge.
Whether or not Plato saw the limitation of his account in the Men., the explanation of recollection in Phd. (after a reference back to the model in the Men.; Phd. 72e–3b) takes a different turn. Instead of a recollection of mathematical theorems prompted by suggestive questions, recollection is now triggered by sense-perceptions and concerns single objects, the objects’ intelligible concepts or forms (q.v.). Their sensible reminders need not be like them: just as in everyday life both things that are like and unlike can cause the recollection of something that is absent. The point of such recollection is explained by simple examples such as sticks and stones and their seeming equality and inequality (74a–5c). The point, in a nutshell, is that merely looking at two sticks and stones does not provide certainty that they are really equal to one another; sometimes they appear so, sometimes they do not. With the equal itself there is no such ambiguity, it never appears unequal, and hence it is not possible that the knowledge of the equal itself is derived from experience of sensible objects in this life, but humans have an innate knowledge of the equal or equality. In contradistinction to the form their earthly representatives ‘are eager to be like it (the equal itself), but are merely like it’ and always fall short of it. If such knowledge cannot be caused by experience of deficient objects it must have been acquired before birth and exists in a latent form that is subsequently recalled by an encounter with imperfect earthly specimens. This argument lets Plato conclude that the forms, as perfect beings, must really exist and with ‘equal necessity’ that our souls must have existed before birth (75c–6e). There is no determination of the types of things that have forms, but enumerations show that they are of quite different sorts: there is the equal as well as the greater and smaller, the beautiful itself (q.v. Beauty), the good itself (q.v.), the just (q.v. Justice), the pious (q.v. Piety) and ‘all those things which we mark with the seal of ‘what it itself is’ (auto ho estin), both when we are putting questions and answering them’ (75c–d). Earlier in the Phd. Socrates had added health, strength and tallness to his catalogue of virtues (65d–e); thus, forms are not confined to concepts of moral or mathematical perfection but include physical properties, as well as relative terms.
In the Republic, the central work of Plato’s middle years, recollection is not resorted to, and this is no accident; for the careful design of higher education that takes 15 years to complete seems to replace the notion that humans are born with the requisite knowledge. The senses in the R. do not provoke recollection, but instead conflicting impressions act as incentives to the higher learning that is ultimately crowned by dialectic (q.v.), the enigmatic discipline that is the hallmark of the philosopher-kings and -queens. The only dialogue that mentions recollection in the sense presupposed in the Men. and the Phd. is the Phdr. (249c). But that reference serves as a mediator between the mythical depiction of the soul’s travel to a ‘superheavenly’ place in the wake of the gods and the subsequent demythologized explanation of the dialectical method of collection and division, the uncovering of the generic unity of the objects of a given field and the subsequent division into its different species. If there is a place for recollection in Plato’s later work, it must consist in the ability to discover the relevant unities at the different levels of universality that is sometimes addressed as a ‘divine gift’ (Phdr. 266b; Phlb. 16c).
REFUTATION (see Elenchus)
RHETORIC (RHETORIKÊ)
Marina McCoy
Plato’s Gorgias succinctly defines rhetoric as the ‘art of persuasion’ (Grg. 452e), but in several Platonic dialogues, the question as to rhetoric’s scope and value is a topic of considerable debate. To understand the nuances behind the Platonic understanding of rhetoric, it is helpful to look at both the cultural context for rhetoric’s practise and the philosophical issues that Plato raises regarding rhetoric’s definition and value. The Greek term for rhetoric, rhetorikê, is derived from the word rhetôr, or speaker. In democratic Athens, the democracy consisted of an assembly at which any Greek citizen could both speak on matters of legislation and vote. Those who were known for speaking regularly and with influence were known as ‘rhetors’. Thus, the term from its inception has a political as well as an oratorical significance. In his dialogues, Plato examines not only the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy but also between rhetoric and politics, and whether rhetoric might have a corrupting influence on politicians.
Some commentators have suggested that Plato may have coined the term rhetorikê, as the word appears in no extant works prior to the Platonic dialogues (Schiappa 1994), with the exception of Alcidamas. Not only Plato, but also intellectuals such as the sophists, Isocrates (q.v.) and Alcidamas wrote about the value of speech in political, forensic and private arenas. But the Platonic dialogues most forcefully and directly undertake the examination of rhetoric’s value and its relation to philosophy and sophistry.
In Plato’s Grg. Socrates sets out one of the strongest critiques of rhetoric in the dialogues, raising at least two important questions in talking to Gorgias: whether rhetoric is a technê (art); and whether rhetoricians teach justice as part of that art (Roochnik 1998). Socrates implies that Gorgias is careless about whether his students are made more just or unjust by the course of his teaching. Socrates also argues that rhetoric is not a technê, but a mere ‘knack’ (Grg. 463b). Just as a cook might entice children with sweets, while a physician recommends healthy food, the rhetorician appeals to his audience with the aim of gratifying them, instead of speaking about what is best (464–5e). Socrates describes rhetoric as the ‘counterpart of cookery in the soul’ (465e). Later parts of the Grg. associate the practise of rhetoric in politics with the corruption of justice, as with the character of Callicles, who recommends the life of unbridled appetites as the best.
Plato’s Phaedrus, on the other hand, presents the possibility of a philosophical rhetoric in contrast to that of sophistic oratory. After critiquing the orator Lysias’ paradoxical speech on love, Socrates offers a myth in defence of love that surpasses Lysias’ speech in style and content, suggesting the legitimacy of a mythological mode of speaking as a way to present philosophical ideas. Socrates then describes a positive form of rhetoric that uses a method of collection and division (q.v. Method) that draws together what one wishes to explain into a common category, and then divides it again according to its ‘natural joints’ (Phdr. 265d–e). Ideally, a speaker’s discourse should be well ordered, like a ‘living being’ (264c). Later, the Phdr. takes on the question as to whether the spoken or written word is more rhetorically and philosophically valuable. On the one hand, Socrates suggests that written speech cannot address its audience with attention to their specific needs, and can easily be misunderstood when it is ‘orphaned’ with its ‘parent’ unable to defend it. On the other hand, this critique of writing takes place within the context of a written dialogue, leading some commentators to suggest that Plato may have understood the dialogue form as overcoming some of the limitations of writing (Annas 2002; Gonzalez 1995b; Griswold 1998).
Subsequently, some commentators have taken up the question of how dialogue itself functions as a rhetorical practise (Blondell 2002; Gordon 1999; Michelini 2003; Scott 2007). We also find that many Platonic dialogues feature Socrates using well known rhetorical techniques, often with the apparent aim of upsetting his interlocutor’s conventional views, or as an enticement to practise philosophy (Gonzalez 1995b; McCoy 2007). Plato’s critique of rhetoric is also closely linked to his criticism of poetry in works such as the Ion and Republic (Griswold 2009). As with the rhetoricians, the poets often represent and imitate reality in ways that are opposed to a philosophical orientation to the world (Rosen 1988). Again, this picture is complicated by Plato’s own practise of writing dialogues that themselves frequently use myths, images and diverse forms of argument that overlap with the practise of rhetoricians and poets. Indeed, one might even suggest that the Platonic ‘voice’ of the dialogues is found not only in Socrates’ claims about rhetoric, but also in the ideas of his opponents, who raise important objections to Socrates’ practise, such as whether it is politically expedient (Grg. 486a–c).
Perhaps one way to reconcile the difficulty is to suggest that Plato’s polemic is against those who use rhetoric to flatter and to manipulate, while the use of persuasive and beautiful language to question, to arouse discomfort about our own views and to entice us into further inquiry allows philosophy and rhetoric to go hand-in-hand. While sophistic rhetoric seeks only to gratify its audience, philosophical rhetoric seeks to lead the soul to further inquiry and reflection, and to the good itself. By including both advocates and critics of rhetoric in the dialogues, Plato encourages his readers to seek to understand more deeply the question of how one ought to live one’s life.
SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Andrea Tschemplik
Concern for self-knowledge recurs in Plato’s writings, although no single dialogue deals exclusively with it and it is often introduced indirectly (Annas 1985).
The ancient Delphic inscription ‘Know Thyself’ (gnôthi s’auton) was widely understood as a reminder to know one’s limits as a human being; humans, after all, are not gods. It then comes as no surprise that Socrates proclaims the limits of his own knowledge at the end of his life: ‘when I do not know, neither do I think I know’ (Apology 21d). This awareness of one’s ignorance can be understood as a kind of self-knowledge, and the Ap. shows that such knowledge also informs a way of living. Self-knowledge can be an ethical as well as an epistemological quest. The Charmides illustrates the difficulties of seeing self-knowledge strictly as a problem of knowledge, not involving the good. Alcibiades I on the other hand analyses self-knowledge as the activity of caring for the soul. In the Phaedrus we see the most complex formulation, where the erotic exchanges between lover and beloved ultimately lead to recognition of the self in the other.
If the knowledge of ignorance is our guide to understanding self-knowledge, then all the conversations that end in an impasse, the aporetic dialogues, can be viewed as guideposts on the way. The interlocutor does not always acknowledge his debt to Socrates, however, for guiding him to that precipice; some respond to the experience of aporia with an arrogant shrug (Meno) others by running away (Euthyphro). One notable exception is Theaetetus, who is specifically told by Socrates, the midwife, that his philosophical mission has been accomplished, once Theaetetus recognizes that he does not know what he previously thought (Tschemplik 2008). The Theaetetus is doubly puzzling because knowing that one does not know what knowledge is has paradoxical implications.
The Alc. 1 states most directly what to make of the Delphic Oracle’s pronouncement (Alc. 1 129a, 132c). Throughout the dialogue Socrates discusses the things which we should care for and be concerned about (epimeleîsthai) before we enter the public realm and care for others. He guides Alcibiades (127–31) towards the understanding that care for the soul, above all else, is a fundamental expression of self-knowledge (for an interesting interpretation of this point, see Foucault 1988:23–6). In addition, Socrates points to the need for a mirror (Alc. 1 132c–3c) to be able to inspect oneself, offering the analogy of the pupil of the eye, in which one can see a reflection of the self. He applies the analogy to the soul, concluding that the soul must look to the most divine region of another soul, that is, knowledge and prudence (to eidenai te kai phrôneîn), to come to know herself. Socrates identifies this construction of self-knowledge as soundmindedness or moderation (sôphrosynê). Alcibiades pledges to become Socrates’ attendant in pursuit of becoming virtuous.
The Chrm. ostensibly focuses on learning the nature of soundmindedness; it provides another approach to self-knowledge. In the first part of the dialogue Socrates converses with Charmides and, after momentarily losing himself (Chrm. 155d) when overcome by Charmides’ beauty, offers a lengthy and exhaustive genealogical account (157e–8b) of Charmides’ provenance, as if knowing one’s ancestors is a possible way of knowing oneself. In other dialogues, too, Socrates introduces parentage as an important indicator of the nature of his interlocutor, for example, in the Tht. he recognizes Theaetetus through his knowledge of his father; in addition, Socrates reveals who he is with reference to his mother; and in the La., Laches says that he trusts Socrates because, among other reasons, he knew his father (La. 181a–b); whereas the character of the children of famous fathers is precisely at issue in this dialogue. Socrates provides another way of gaining self-knowledge through introspection (Chrm. 159a), when he insists that Charmides should look within himself to find out whether he possesses soundmindedness. But neither genealogy nor self-inspection lead to a satisfactory answer, and Charmides hands over the discussion to his cousin Critias, who equates soundmindedness with self-knowledge (165a). What follows is a complex examination of various ways self-knowledge can be construed, working through to the formulation that it is the knowledge of itself and of all other knowledges as well as the knowledge of ignorance (166e). Self-knowledge thus understood is the ability to discern what one knows and does not know and to be able to judge the same in others. Socrates calls into question the usefulness of the knowledge of knowledge, since it appears that it has no content: In this case I know that the shoemaker knows how to make shoes, but I myself do not know how to make shoes. The obvious question is why Critias, who will later be a leader of the Thirty Tyrants, offers this particular construction of self-knowledge as the definition of soundmindedness (Stern 1999). Clearly, the concern for the care of the soul evident in the Alc. I has been left aside; instead we have an epistemological account of self-knowledge.
In the Phdr. Socrates raises the importance of self-knowledge and connects it with his need for the polis and the interlocutors that a polis provides. Phaedrus seduced Socrates to take a walk in the countryside by promising him an account of Lysias’ speech. When Phaedrus wonders whether Socrates believes in the mythological or the scientific accounts of various natural phenomena, Socrates responds that until he has obeyed the Delphic inscription (Phdr. 229e–30a) and comes to know himself, it makes no sense to investigate these other matters. He makes explicit that he cannot fulfil the injunction of self-knowledge by communing with nature; instead he requires other human beings to help him examine whether he is simple and divine or monstrous and typhonic. As the dialogue unfolds we are presented with different accounts of erôs and in Socrates’ second speech, the palinode, self-knowledge is addressed again. After having presented the soul in the metaphor of the charioteer and two horses, Socrates characterizes the erotic encounter between the lover and the beloved (255c–6c) in terms that had already been used in the Alc. I:
Then the boy is in love, but has no idea what he loves. He does not understand, and cannot explain, what has happened to him. It is as if he had caught an eye disease from someone else, but could not identify the cause; he does not realize that he is seeing himself in the lover as in a mirror. (255d)
The Phdr. offers an erotic encounter as a way to self-knowledge: Once each of the lovers recognize himself in the other through the recollection of the god they both followed, they can exchange philosophical speeches and live a life of virtue and friendship. The discussion of writing and logos in the second half of the dialogue can also be linked with the theme of self-knowledge, since we reveal ourselves to another and come to know ourselves through dialogue (Griswold 1986). That at least is Socrates’ hope.
At the end of his life, as depicted in Plato’s Ap., Socrates displays the same commitment to the task of self-knowledge. He opens his defence (Ap. 17a) with a caveat about the power of speeches because his accusers had spoken so eloquently that they almost caused him to forget himself (epelathomên). In response, he offers to tell the truth about himself, including an appeal to Apollo, the god at Delphi, who is responsible for Socrates’ conclusion that human wisdom is worth little or nothing (23b), that it amounts to awareness of his ignorance (21d). Socrates also took it upon himself to persuade his fellow citizens that care of the soul should be everyone’s primary concern (30a–b), so that they can live the best possible life. Because he has taken care of his soul, as he tried to persuade Alcibiades to do, Socrates faces death without any fear.
The greatest obstacle to self-knowledge and the most dangerous activity we can engage in is lying to or deceiving ourselves about who we are. Another way to approach the question of self-knowledge is by examining Socrates’ discussion of self-deceit and self-ignorance in the Republic (382a) and Philebus (49a–50a).
SENSATION (see Perception and sensation)
SOPHISTS
Marina McCoy
In the Platonic dialogues, the term ‘sophist’ refers to any number of intellectuals who travelled from city to city and offered to teach the youth of the city a variety of topics ranging from rhetoric (q.v.) to politics, linguistics or even natural philosophy.
‘Sophist’, or sophistês, had a broad range of meanings in the Greek world. From the fifth century onwards, ‘sophist’ meant a ‘wise person’ as its root, sophia (wisdom), indicates (Kerferd 1981:24). Wise men such as Thales or Solon, as well as many poets, were thought to be ‘sophists’ because they possessed political or moral wisdom. Gradually, however, the term came to be more ambiguous, and often meant someone who had pretensions to wisdom, rather than genuine wisdom. This transition took place around the time of Plato’s writing. Not only Plato, but also other authors, such as Alcidamas and Isocrates (q.v.), criticized those with a fundamentally different understanding of the ‘good life’ by naming their opponents as sophists. Isocrates (q.v.), for example, in his ‘Against the Sophists’, speaks of the sophists as those who enjoy disputation for its own sake, and who waste their time proving themselves to be clever at argument in useless topics instead of applying themselves to significant political problems (Mirhady and Too 2000). Alcidamas, in contrast, calls those who spend all their time writing, instead of learning how to speak well, by the term ‘so-called sophists’ (Alcidamas 1, in Muir 2000). The term ‘sophist’, we find, is often used to contrast some better, different practise or person.
Plato’s criticism of the sophists is varied and complex. In some dialogues (e.g. Gorgias; Protagoras), he confronts the views of specific sophists. In others, such as the Sophist, the topic of the sophist’s identity is explored more abstractly and linked to philosophical problems of metaphysics and the nature of being. The Republic considers the sophist primarily in terms of the difficulties with persuasive rhetoric in democracy; there, the ‘many’ are called the ‘biggest sophists’ (R. 492a). However, a few brief themes recur in the dialogues.
Plato’s dialogues frequently use the sophists as a foil, or a contrast to philosophy (q.v.). Perhaps this distinction was significant because Socrates seems to have been tried and executed partly on suspicion of being a sophist; Aristophanes’ Clouds portrays Socrates as a sophist as well (though Dover 1968 disputes its accuracy). Plato, in his Apology (Defence) of Socrates, carefully distinguishes Socrates from the sophists. While the sophists taught students for money, Socrates claims that he never accepted money and had not students, but only followers. While the sophists claim to know, Socrates claims that his greatest wisdom is not thinking he knows what he does not know (Ap. 21d).
Plato’s Grg. begins with a conversation between Socrates and Gorgias, who claimed that he could speak persuasively on any topic (for a fee). Socrates questions Gorgias, asking whether Gorgias cares for his students if he does not teach them justice as part of the study of rhetoric. He also suggests that Gorgias’ students might become unjust as a result of studying with Gorgias, if their rhetorical skill is used for unjust purposes. Later, the Grg. contrasts sophistry to a legitimate political art that seeks the good of the city.
Some of the sophists also seem to have written about topics that today would be considered within the realm of philosophy (Kerferd 1981). For example, Protagoras wrote works with titles such as Truth, Antilogic and On the Gods. While these works do not survive, fragments passed down to authors such as Sextus Empiricus indicate an interest in intellectual problems. Protagoras’ best known statement is ‘Man is the measure of all things: of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not’. In the Theaetetus, Socrates uses this idea to explore and to further define a view of knowledge as perceptual relativism. Although it is rejected as philosophically inadequate, Protagoras here is not merely a rhetorician, but rather an intellectual concerned with articulating a particular intellectual doctrine. In the Prt. we find a different view of the sophist, one that pokes fun at an overly majestic self-presentation and an intellectual understanding of the good that does not seem coherent when pressed. Hippias and Prodicus (though less) are also mocked for their intellectual deficiencies and lack of humility.
Plato even uses the concept of sophistry as an entryway into difficult metaphysical issues. In the Sph., the Stranger begins by attempting to define the sophist, whom Socrates says is not easy to separate from the philosopher and the statesman (Sph. 216c–d). However, by the dialogue’s end, the main focus of the discussion is on the nature of non-being, a topic that arose in the course of understanding image-making and dissembling. Again, Plato features the sophist as much as an entryway into understanding philosophy (and later in the Politicus, politics) as for the purposes of rejecting sophistic discourse.
While it is tempting to seek a single central difference between sophists and philosophers, a deeper examination at times shows some overlap between them (Zuckert 2000). For example, Plato’s Ap. features Socrates using some methods of rhetorical argumentation familiar in the courtroom by that time (McCoy 2007). Plato’s dialogues often raise important critical questions for philosophers, such as whether rhetoric might have a political value. For example, Gorgias points out that he is more effective at getting medical patients to undergo treatment than his brother, a doctor, is. Such dialogues between sophists and Socrates raise questions about the value of rhetoric that are not fully answered within the dialogue itself. Instead, the term ‘sophist’ is used both to criticize those intellectuals who stood in opposition to Socratic and Platonic goals, and to challenge Plato’s audience to reflect on the value of rhetoric and its relation to philosophy.
SOUL (PSYCHÊ)
T. M. Robinson
In a well known lecture John Burnet called ‘the care of the soul’ the core of Socrates’ teaching (Burnet 1916:235 ff.), and it was undoubtedly that of Plato as well. But what exactly they meant by soul is less easy to describe (for bibliographies on soul in Plato, see Robinson 1995:166–76 and Wagner 2001:363–9). That it is distinct from the body is beyond doubt, but its relationship to what we would call the person is less clear. At Charmides 156e7–8 the body is an integral part of personhood; at Phaedo 115c and elsewhere it is simply the soul which is the person. Sometimes this is refined to suggest that the ‘person’ who is the soul is such in two senses: the person who exists for a while on earth, and is characterized by reason and impulse, and the person who survives physical death and lives on everlastingly, who seems to consist simply of reason. The matter is complicated further by talk in the various myths, where the person who survives death is spoken of in a way suggesting that she/he continues to be characterized by both reason and impulse, and differs from the person who once lived on earth only by having cast off materiality.
If the soul is the person, how does it relate to the body? At times it is described as what one might call an ‘inner person’, like a body in a tomb, or a prisoner in a prison (Phd. 82e3), or an oyster in a shell (Phaedrus 250c6). At other times, it is described more positively as the ‘possessor’ of a body, which it ‘uses’ and ‘controls’ (Gorgias 465d1). Either way, the doctrine seems to be one of numerical dualism (in contrast with what one might call the ‘mitigated monism’ of the Chrm.); soul and body seem to be distinct substances (Grg. 464b3), such that their numerical addition would apparently add up to two, though soul is clearly stated to be the more important and valuable of the two (Protagoras 313a1–c3). They are also in a tense, if not actively inimical, relationship with each other, and operate almost as independent persons, with the body possessing desires of its own that can run counter to the good of the soul if allowed free rein (Phd. 66b6 ff.). Each can also be ‘sick’ or ‘healthy’; the appropriate food the soul needs for health is mathêmata (‘pieces of knowledge’) (Prt. 313c7), which needs to be implanted in it by reputable sources, not by sophists.
The reference to ‘pieces of knowledge’ points, crucially, to the fact that soul is thought of as being in its most important manifestation an intellectual principle. So much so that, as we have seen, it is on occasion apparently equated with reason (see Phd. 67c2–3, dianoia). It is, however, that whereby we are moral agents too, such that we/our soul can be characterized by such terms as ‘righteous’ and ‘depraved’ (Grg. 313a3, a4). The ‘health’ of the soul will consist of a right balance between reason and impulse within it. If reason is in control, the soul will manifest the virtues ‘temperance’ and ‘justice’; if folly is in control, and impulse allowed free rein, the soul will be a sick one, ‘intemperate and unjust and unholy’ (505b2–4, c7–d3).
In the Phd. significant efforts are made to prove that the soul survives our bodily death and lives on everlastingly. But, disconcertingly, several senses of the word soul that are not easily reconcilable are used in the dialogue, and no attempt is made to reconcile them, rendering what are already a set of dubious proofs of immortality even more so. The most important sense is that of soul as being the whole person, the true or genuine self (Phd. 115d8–e4, R. 469d6–9); as such it effectively duplicates in its actions what most people take a person (= a soul/mind and body combined in some way) to be doing (see especially 94b7 ff.). Though, even this notion is not a little obfuscated by talk which apparently distinguishes a soul and the person who possesses that soul (66b5–7, 67e6–8). But the soul is also, for purposes of various attempts at proving immortality, seen as a life-principle or life-carrier (69e–72d, 102a ff.), and, as we have seen, as reason too. In one passage it is furthermore clearly thought of as being indestructible because it is immaterial (80b1 ff.), whereas in another it is apparently quasi-physical in nature (81c4 ff.).
This somewhat confusing situation is clarified in important ways in the R. Moral conflict is now affirmed to be conflict within the soul rather than between soul and body, and the ‘bodily’ desires (for food, drink and sex) are now affirmed to be part of the soul itself (the body being simply their instrument), and fully acceptable to the degree that they are controlled by reason. Such reason is now described as the controlling element in a soul which is not bipartite but tripartite. The soul consists, like its analogue, the state of a ruling part (reason), a soldier/police part (‘spiritedness’, thymos) and a desiderative part. The goodness of the soul like the justice of the state consists of a balance between all three parts, such that each plays the role appropriate to it and only the role appropriate to it.
This view of soul as tripartite is repeated in detail in the Timaeus, though now there is added to it the remarkable view that the universe itself, being a living thing, also possesses a soul. Differently from human soul, however, this soul is simply rational; there are no two ‘lower’ parts to it. And a major clarification of the doctrine of immortality comes with the affirmation that the universe’s soul and the (rational) human soul are everlasting (i.e. with a beginning in time but without an end), all of them having been formed by a divine fashioner (the Demiurge) at a point in time which was the beginning of time. In the same dialogue we are also introduced to the view that there is a difference between male and female souls, the female having an inbuilt tendency towards immoral conduct (kakia) that the male lacks. This is little noticed by commentators, and would be disconcerting if it reflected Plato’s own thinking.
In the Phdr., we find an apparent reference to a tripartite soul in the famous myth of the charioteer. The first statement in that same dialogue, however, of soul’s being immortal because it is a ‘source of motion/change’ and itself everlastingly ‘self-moving/changing’ suggests that Plato may now be moving towards a different vision of its nature; certainly its supposed tripartition never appears again with clarity in any dialogue after the Phdr.
The Philebus repeats the notion (seen in detail in the Ti.) that soul depends for its existence upon an intelligence that performs the task of ‘fashioning’ and ‘making’ things (Phlb. 27b1, 26e6), reaffirming that all soul is of its nature contingent, with the exception, perhaps, of the soul of the Demiurge if the Demiurge is to be understood as a reality and as something more than simply intelligence.
In the Laws, Plato repeats the Phdr. doctrine that soul is the source of movement/change and forever self-moving/self-changing, while still being of its nature contingent, but (influenced possibly by the view of Aristotle) he seems to have come round to the view that the world we know is sempiternal, not everlasting, so that soul’s self-moving/self-changing nature will be such across sempiternity (i.e. with neither temporal beginning nor end) rather than being characterized by everlastingness once it has been formed. Apart from this, the Lg. is a work in which he returns to the bipartite vision of soul that was prominent in early dialogues; only the disiecta membra (pace Saunders 1962:37–55) of the theory of tripartition seem now to remain. And till the end his basic psycho-physical dualism remains a problem for him; in this, his last work, he is still unclear as to whether the soul of the sun, for example, carries it from within, pushes it from without, or guides it along its path ‘by virtue of possessing some other prodigious and wonderful powers’ (Lg. 898e8–9a4).
Two paths, however, towards a possible mitigation of the problem posed by psycho-physical dualism which are mentioned in other dialogues, but ultimately not taken, are worth mentioning. Early on, in the Chrm., he had looked with interest if not, in the final analysis, conviction at the possibility that the body too, not just the soul, was integral to the concept of a person. And his view, in the Ti. (35a), that the soul has in its very structure something of both the form world and the world of matter suggests that, at one time at any rate in his lifetime of research into the nature of the soul, he might have believed that the gap between soul and body might possibly be bridged if it could be shown that the soul was not as close to being wholly immaterial as he had believed it to be when he wrote the Phd.
THE SUN SIMILE
Nicholas D. Smith
At 504e4–6 in the Republic, Glaucon asks Socrates to say what the ‘most important subject’ will be in the future ruler’s studies. This subject, declares Socrates, is the form of the good (R. 505a2), for it is ‘by their relation to it that just things and the others become good and useful’ (505a3–4, trans. Grube and Reeve). But Socrates then goes on immediately to insist that ‘we have no adequate knowledge of it’ (505a5–6). He criticizes ‘the majority’ who identify the good with pleasure, on the ground that there are bad pleasures (505c7–8), and also the ‘more sophisticated’ who claim that it is knowledge, on the ground that when pressed to say what sort of knowledge it might be, they can only answer that it is ‘knowledge of the good’ (505b8–10). Glaucon then challenges Socrates to state what he thinks the good is (506b2–4), and though Socrates first chastises him for seeking just another opinion on the subject (506b5–d1), when Glaucon persists in his request (506d2–5), Socrates carefully stipulates that he will not even attempt to articulate a theory of the good, but is willing instead to ‘tell you about what is apparently an offspring of the good and most like it’ (506e3–4).
So begins the first of what have been called the great ‘similes of light’ – the sun and divided line (in that order) at the end of R. bk 6, and the cave at the beginning of R. bk 7. Simply put, the simile of the sun compares the relative positions and roles of the good, in its domain, to that of the sun, in the sensible world. Socrates begins by reminding Glaucon of the distinction (introduced at the end of R. bk 5) between forms and particulars (507b2–10). Socrates then asks how we see visible things, and Glaucon answers that it is by sight (507c1–2). But unlike other varieties of perception, Socrates continues, sight requires some additional ‘third kind of thing’ in order to occur: light, without which even those with good eyesight cannot see (507d11–e2). The sun, they agree, is the ‘cause and controller’ of light (508a4–8). These observations provide the groundwork for the simile to the good, according to which, ‘What the good itself is in the intelligible realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things’ (508c1–2).
In brief, then, the details of the simile are these:
|
realm: |
Being |
becoming |
|
highest entity and cause: |
the good |
the sun |
|
applicable power: |
knowledge |
vision |
|
medium required for power to operate: |
truth |
light |
|
objects effected: |
forms |
visible particulars |
|
organ by which power operates: |
mind |
eye(s) |
|
defective condition: |
relative absence of truth |
relative absence of light |
|
results of defective condition: |
opinion |
poor eyesight |
Several features of this simile have created interpretive discussion and controversy. First, a vital element of the simile is the comparison of truth (alêtheia) to light (phôs). But this entails that truth cannot be two-valued, as it is in sentential logic, but must come in degrees. Some translators (e.g. Shorey 1935) have tried to remediate this puzzling feature by translating ‘alêtheia’ as ‘truth and reality’, but modern readers may find degrees of reality no less puzzling than degrees of truth. In a famous essay, Gregory Vlastos (1981), noting that the application of ‘alêtheia’ here is not to propositions, but to entities, proposed conceiving of alêtheia as more or less like the conception of truth at work in expressions such as ‘true friend’ or ‘real friend’ where there are plainly also people who qualify as friends in some lesser way. But as Vlastos carefully notes, this requires (but also facilitates) what has come to be known as the ‘predicative’ reading of Plato’s use of the verb ‘to be’ (einai), since neither existence nor sentential truth (as the ‘existential’ and ‘veridical’ interpretations of ‘einai’, respectively, would have it; see Smith 2000) can make sense of degrees of being. An entity, accordingly, may be said to be more or less F, and would thus have the appropriate degree of alêtheia (as an F-thing).
Also unfamiliar to modern readers is Plato’s comparison of knowledge to eyesight as a ‘power’ (see R. 508b6), though this conception was also explicitly at work in the epistemology provided at the end of R. bk 5, by which the philosopher was distinguished from the nonphilosopher. Contemporary epistemology conceives of knowledge not as a cognitive power, but rather as the state that may – in the best cases, at any rate – be produced as a result of the successful or proper use of our cognitive powers. Various interpretations have been offered for how we may compare Platonic to contemporary epistemology, but this subject continues to be controversial among scholars (see Smith 2000).
Finally, there has been some discussion of Plato’s startling claim that the good in some way ‘transcends’ (Shorey 1937:107), ‘exceeds’ (Bloom 1968:189), ‘surpasses’ (Ferrari 2000:216), or is ‘beyond’ (White 1979:180) or ‘superior to’ (Grube and Reeve) being (at R. 509b9, translating Plato’s ‘epekeina’). Some earlier interpretations held that we cannot even attribute being to the form of the good, but now most scholars maintain that the language of transcendence here simply emphasizes the causal primacy of the good, relative to the rest of ‘what is’, in the same way that the sun is claimed to be the ultimate source of causation in its realm, while still being (very visibly!) a part of that realm.
THEOLOGY
Harold Tarrant
Later Platonism (q.v. Academy), from the time of Plutarch, seems to have regarded Plato as a supreme theologian, who postulated a limited number of distinct divine powers – a very small number of gods in authors such as Alcinous (Didascalicus 10 etc.) and Numenius, but rather a large one in Proclus’ great Platonic Theology, which extended to six books. Proclus assembled this theology primarily from the Parmenides and Timaeus, and secondarily from a range of passages, many myths among them, from other works. Theology was a huge issue in late antiquity, and in Platonism this was especially so because ‘assimilation to god as far as possible’ had become entrenched as the very goal of human life. Furthermore, the struggle for or against Christianity necessarily involved matters of theology, and the protagonists vied for the authority of Plato by offering rival interpretations, particularly of the demiurge in the Ti. If Plato believed in a father figure creating the world at a given point, attended by a host of lesser supernatural beings who acted for him in the physical world, then it was clearly easier for Christians to admire him and to point to him as a predecessor.
However, to consider Plato as a theologian may seem unnatural today. His leading speaker is frequently indifferent to the identity of the god of which he speaks, and sometimes even to whether he uses the singular (god) or plural (gods), regularly leading readers to wonder whether he is a polytheist or monotheist. This is not unnatural. His ‘Socrates’ is clearly attracted to the basic Anaxagorean idea of a controlling intelligent power, single but wide ranging in its operation (Phaedo 97b–8b; Cratylus 400a). Intelligence was assumed to lead always in the same direction. Any Platonic god will behave in accordance with intelligence, and Plato seems to have considered that this would eliminate fundamental disagreement among the members of a pantheon. For this reason Plato rejects the kind of god depicted in Hesiod and Homer in Republic bk 2. Where intelligence rules, as most obviously perhaps at Philebus 28d–30e, no real divisions need be postulated – except perhaps a division between intelligence itself and soul, both integral to the concept of ‘Zeus’ as cause at 30d.
It is therefore natural that Plato must reject any notion of a universe controlled by two gods of opposing intent (Politicus 270a). The tendency of the world to slip backwards at times must therefore be explained in terms of the temporary relinquishing of divine control. In this dialogue the controlling god is therefore compared with a helmsman, who occasionally takes a rest from his duties at the rudder.
At the end of Plato’s life there seems to have been a major step towards astral theology, where not only an intelligent cosmic motive power, or soul, is postulated (as at Ti. 35a and Laws 10.896d–7c) but also unerringly intelligent souls of the heavenly bodies. Perfect intelligence that is not subject to decay is not unnaturally held to be the sign of divinity. This kind of astral theology, which involves the earth too being treated as a god, is present at Ti. 38c–40d, but it reaches its climax only with the Epinomis, and it continues in the work of later Platonists.
As for the gods of mythology, Ti. 40d–1a seems very reluctant to say much about them, regarding the subject as difficult, and, like Phaedrus 229c–30a, an unnecessary distraction. It is therefore best to go along with tradition. Cra. 395e–410d gives etymologies for very many gods and godlike entities, etymologies that also attempt to have the names explain their divine function. However, the whole passage, in which Socrates is said to have been inspired by the rather ambiguous figure of Euthyphro (Euthyphr. 396d–e), while not to be dismissed as mere trivia, seems to undercut itself regularly enough to make it unclear how seriously it is all meant. One should be similarly cautious of Plato’s willingness to employ the traditional gods in some of his myths (Gorgias 523a–4a; Protagoras 320c–3a), since it was natural for him to compose them mainly from traditional materials.
Much of the discussion relating to Plato’s theology has concentrated on trying to reconcile the evidence of different dialogues, particularly regarding the supreme divinity. Is it the demiurge of the Ti. for instance? Or the idea of the good from R. bk 6? Is the idea of the good closely related to the One (q.v.) as discussed in Prm.? And if so, how are they related to the demiurge, assuming his portrait is to be taken seriously? The problem lies with those brought up under the influence of modern world religions that make salvation depend on worshipping the right god and believing in the right creed. For Plato the most important thing in the political context was belief in gods, and in gods who have some concern for matters of this world, as Lg. bk 10 demonstrates. At a more personal level, happiness depends on getting our inner selves in tune with the divine by raising our own souls to the highest level of rationality that is attainable (Theaetetus 176a–c; R. 613a–b; Ti. 90a–d). This is the process of assimilation to god, central to later Platonism, but never explored at length or established by dialectical argument in Plato himself.
VIRTUE (see Excellence)
VISION
Michail Maiatsky
Plato’s interest in vision and the visual is multifaceted, and complex. Visual words and images are frequent in the dialogues along with many direct and indirect discussions of physiological, intellectual and social vision. The increased emphasis in recent scholarship on the importance of visuality in Plato is a part of a ‘scopic turn’, the effect of which was to ground interpretations of the history of western European philosophy and metaphysics in its entirety in certain optical premises. On this view, the Ancient Greeks, as the founders of the European thinking tradition, were said to be ocular people in contrast to the verbal/acoustic Jews. A particular reading of Plato played a key role – both positive and negative – in this. Studies published in the last decade have, in a sense, replayed debates of the early twentieth century, when a hyperrationalizing neo-Kantian interpretation of Plato gave way to a reaction, for example, by the Platonists of the ‘George-Kreis’, as well as by Julius Stenzel (1883–1935), Bruno Snell (1896–1986) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Today, scholars disagree about Platonic visuality: some believe that for Plato, the most authentic cognition is dialectic (q.v.), and thus the cognition/vision comparison is merely a figure of speech; others draw various serious conclusions from Plato’s multiple and extensive use of visual motifs. Some (e.g. Press 1995) even use the term ‘vision’ to define the polyphonic and dialogical character of Plato’s philosophy as a whole.
Platonic visuality poses a number of problems. Though historians of science consider him an important and comprehensive source, physiological representations (e.g. of vision as two opposite streams, one from an object and one from the eye meeting halfway, Timaeus 45a–6c, 67d) merely attest that Plato was well informed about the science of his time (Hippocrates of Chios, Democritus and even Empedocles). The study of optics, which drew on the fields of geometry, physics or ophthalmology, actually developed later on. Thus, Plato tended to treat it as the subject of a ‘likely story’ (eikos logos) and part of a wider ensemble, which could be called scopics.
Plato’s scopics involves optics, the psychology of visual perception, theories of light, colour and optical illusions, theories of the image and of the sun (which in the Republic is a metaphysical being), together with studies of mimêsis (imitation; q.v.) and sêmeiôsis (the relation between signs and things signified). Social visibility is also important for Plato as attested by comments on the psychology of observation, testimony, ocular witnessing and judgement (Laches passim, Symposium 194bc, 218d; R. 442bc, 537c), the problem of (in)visibility of virtue and justice (Meno 72cd; Phaedo 65d; Phaedrus 254bc; R. 577a, 368c–9a, 402de, 445bc, 501b, 611bd), the aesthetics of theatre (etymologically linked to ‘theory’) and performance in general (Laws 659b, 701a), as well as the theory of beauty (Phdr. 249d–50d). Statements related to this broad scopic interest belong to different but closely related categories, among which one can distinguish: (a) visual situations: visual exchanges between participants of the dialogues, condensation of the visual lexicon and word games, mise-en-scènes implying observation, performance and the visual aspect; (b) myths: of the cave (R. bk. 7), of the Ring of Gyges (R. 359c sq., 612b), of the charioteer and his horses (Phdr. 246b sq.), of the Demiurg and his paradigm (Ti.); and (c) statements or doctrines that raise various philosophical questions linked to vision:
(1)The main problem of interpretation lies in the tension between what might be considered Plato’s ‘doctrine’ and his language. In order to show the importance of the dialectical grasp of the invisible, he frequently uses visual vocabulary and images; but the analogy between vision and knowledge often encountered in his work seems at odds with the invisible character of objects of genuine science. This tension culminates in the designation of invisible paradigms with words such as idea and eidos (q.v. forms) derived from the verb idein (the meaning of which, however, was ‘to know’, before narrowing to ‘to see’). The traditional expression ‘theory of ideas’ turns out to be an oxymoron, meaning the contemplation of the invisible.
(2)Plato expressed the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible through the opposition of two types of vision (e.g. the two visions of the soul, Phd. 65–79; R. 523–4), although corporeal vision can impede or on the contrary favour ‘real’ vision (the intellect looking upwards, Tht. 174a) by the invisible soul. This problem is connected with a Platonic imperative of knowing the similar by the similar, since the invisible object can be ‘seen’ only by an invisible ‘seer’, that is, soul.
(3)The relationship between cognition and recognition (Philebus 38cd; R. 376ac, 484cd; Tht. 189b sq.) is both interesting and important. One can attribute to Plato a certain opsodicy (coined after Leibniz’s theodicy; cf. its platonic antecedent in R. 617e), whereas vision is summoned to the trial that will reveal its participation in the creation of illusions and distractions from what is true, and justify it partially.
(4)The problem of illumination or sudden knowledge (Epistles 7 341cd, 344b; Smp. 210e), implying that the dialectical process climaxes in a vision-like revelation of the truth.
(5)The problem of the relation of ‘being’ to ‘seeming’ on the ethical and political level (Apology 21c, 41b; Hippias Major 294d; Lysis 217cd; R. 360e–1d, 362a, 365c) as well as on the epistemological in terms of the opposition between truth and opinion (Tht. 188a and passim; R. 475d, 479e–80a, 527de).
(6)Discussions of the participation of the eye in vision (Tht. 184c sq.) are inserted in philosophical reflections on the soul, on the role of mind (nous), on the question of its unity and its relation to sensation or perception (aisthêsis; q.v.). The mind itself becomes a supervisor of all active sensation, taking on the function of the inner eye, or the eye of the soul.
(7)The relationship of eyesight with the other senses, for example, the competition between the senses (Ti. 45b–7b). Eyesight is sometimes considered as one of the senses (Tht. 163d), at others, it is representative of all the other senses, a model sense. Primarily, however (Phd. 79a; Ti. 30cd), it features in asymmetric oppositions such as the ‘sensible’ versus ‘invisible’, or the ‘thinkable’ versus ‘visible’. Plato’s rational ethics (q.v.) and moral epistemology (q.v.) suggest that one should prefer the invisible to the visible, and that this preference is precisely what distinguishes the philosopher from any other person. Plato was the first to compare and clearly distinguish eyesight and thought. He created the vocabulary of visual metaphors, which he deployed as a pedagogical strategy for selecting and educating people towards philosophy and the pursuit of truth. Whereas for those starting out on their ascent towards philosophy, the visual operated as a metaphorical tool enabling them to ‘see’ the truth, for Academy initiates vested with the eye of reason (e.g. R. 533de), the metaphor contained a different message: it is not a ‘physiological’ vision at all.
WEAKNESS OF WILL (see Akrasia)
WOMEN
Angela Hobbs
The significance of women in Plato can be gleaned from four main sources: explicit statements about the capabilities of women, casual remarks about women, female characters, both real and fictional, and the use of imagery involving female functions and traditional female activities.
At Meno 73a–c Socrates counters Meno’s traditional belief (Men. 71e) that a man’s virtue is very different from that of a woman by arguing that all humans are good in the same way. The spheres in which men and women operate, however, may still be different: Socrates does not commit himself. Republic bk 5 addresses this issue: at R. 456b we are told that the nature (physis) of women is ‘akin’ or (somewhat confusingly) ‘the same’ as the nature of men. The only difference is that the female bears and the male begets (454e) and this difference is not relevant when considering what jobs each can do. In consequence, the more able women are capable of being trained to be guardians, either as military auxiliaries or (540c) philosopher-queens. These guardian women are to live in camp communes with their male counterparts, and their eugenically bred children are to be taken away at birth and raised in nurseries, thus releasing them for military and political duties.
These proposals have provoked heated debate. Is it really necessary to abolish the family to allow women to take part in political and military life? Is Socrates only allowing women education and power on condition that they become parodies of men, hunting, wrestling and going to war? Or does this view say more about the prejudices of the modern critic than of Socrates (or Plato)? It is certainly true that Socrates is not interested in the ‘rights’ of women, qua women, or in enabling individual women to fulfil their potential; his concern, just as with the male citizens, is to harness their abilities and energies for the overall good of the state. For these reasons, and to avoid anachronism, it may be inappropriate to describe his agenda as ‘feminist’; we may also note that the possibility of female guardians depends on the domestic support of women from the producer class.
Elsewhere in the R., however, women are casually disparaged, such as at 469d where plundering a corpse is said to be a mark of ‘feminine small-mindedness’. Some of the apparent anomalies can be dissolved if we consider that Plato distinguishes between women as he currently perceives them in Athens, ill-educated and confined and women as they could be if properly trained. But this distinction, though important, does not explain away the fact that Socrates sometimes appears to forget that there will be female guardians too: at 395d, for instance, trainee guardians are forbidden from taking the parts of women when acting or reciting ‘because they are men’. But who are to be the role models for future philosopher-queens? The Platonic corpus is notably short of female ideals, although Alcestis is praised for sacrificing her life for her husband Admetus at Symposium 179b–c. Even in R. bk 5 women and children are said to be held in common by the guardians (R. 461e), and at 455d Socrates claims that in general the class of men surpasses the class of women in everything. There are also a number of references (e.g. 451e) to women being weaker than men, and although Socrates probably only has physical weakness in mind, it is just possible that he intends intellectual inferiority as well.
Similar tensions apply to the Laws. On one hand, at Lg. 805a the Athenian Stranger says it is foolish for men and women not to share a common education and thus enable the state to double its achievements, and in consequence women in the Lg. take part in military activities up to fifty and may hold political office after forty. Yet, at 781b a woman’s natural capacity for virtue is said to be inferior to a man’s, and at 781a women are said to be ‘secretive and crafty’ owing to their weakness. The Timaeus is even more problematic. At Ti. 42a the male sex is said to be superior (kreitton: this may just imply physical strength, but could also connote moral superiority), while at 90e–1a we hear that men who lived cowardly and unjust lives were reincarnated as women. In 91c the womb is spoken of as an internal creature, desirous of child-making; if this desire is thwarted it becomes ill and wanders through the body, creating havoc. For those who want to reconcile the Ti. with the more progressive views expressed elsewhere, the best option is to emphasize that it is Timaeus, not Socrates, who makes these claims.
In three dialogues Socrates claims to have received wise instruction from women, although they never appear in person and in each instance Socrates’ tone is difficult to gauge. The most notable is Diotima in the Smp., a priestess who instructs Socrates in erôs and to whom is given a key speech. Yet she is also called a ‘perfect sophist’ (Smp. 208c) – a highly ambivalent term in Plato’s hands – and is credited only with delaying the arrival of the plague in Athens; she could not avert it altogether. Similar ambiguities apply to Aspasia, whom Socrates claims in the Menexenus to have trained him, Pericles and many others in the art of rhetoric, and to whom are attributed both Pericles’ funeral speech and another recounted by Socrates. It is difficult to assess the level of irony here: certainly Menexenus is sceptical that a mere woman could have performed such feats (Mx. 249d), but this may say more about him than about Plato’s view of Aspasia. Finally, at Men. 81a Socrates says that he learnt of reincarnation and the doctrine of recollection from certain wise priests and priestesses, though he later (Men. 86b) expresses uncertainty on these teachings.
Actual women are sometimes present in the dialogues, but none speaks apart from Xanthippe, Socrates’ wife, who laments his impending death at Phaedo 60a. However, Socrates immediately banishes her; her cries would presumably disturb their enquiries on the immortality of the soul. Similarly, at Smp. 176e the aulos-girl is sent away so that the men can discuss erôs without distraction; it is notable that when Alcibiades arrives escorted by an aulos-girl at Alc. 212c–d, this is the point at which orderly discussion disintegrates.
But while women are largely absent, imagery drawn from female bodily functions and traditional female activities is not. Diotima claims at Smp. 206c that all humans are pregnant in both body and soul, and that falling in love with a beautiful person or object enables us to give birth; while at Theaetetus 148e–51d Socrates refers to himself as a midwife to other men’s thoughts. In the Politicus, true statesmanship is said to be the expertise which correctly weaves together opposing human characteristics and character types (Plt. 305e–11c). There is keen debate as to whether such imagery elevates or denigrates actual women. Whatever the answer, the use of ‘female’ imagery needs to be considered together with Plato’s depiction of philosophy in terms of ‘male’ imagery drawn from war, hunting and athletics (though, as the female guardians show, these activities need not be exclusively the provenance of men).
If Plato’s views on women are complex, this may partly be because he sees the ultimate human goal as ascension to the realm of the nongendered forms. Nevertheless, it is clear that he thinks the state will benefit if some women at any rate are educated – a belief he supported (if Diogenes Laertius 3.4 is to be believed) by allowing at least two women to attend the Academy (q.v.).
WRITING (TOPIC)
David Blank
Athens in the late fifth and fourth centuries was home to a public enthusiastic for both oratory and instruction generally. Speech writers (logographoi; q.v. Isocrates) composed political and forensic orations for others to give, and some of those who gave their own speeches or lectures also wrote manuals of arts such as rhetoric, as well as books on scientific and philosophical subjects. Plato’s Socrates, in contrast, insists that the way to do philosophy is through a dialectical question-and-answer conversation in a discourse (logos) ‘written with knowledge in the learner’s soul’ (Phaedrus 276a5) and guided by one who can divide reality at the joints, a ‘dialectician’ (266c). While a rhetorical speech can be attractive, stimulating, entertaining and persuasive, its author may not be truly knowledgeable and able to ‘aid’ (boêthein) his discourse by answering questions and expanding upon it. The same holds for written discourse, and one criticism of those who make speeches is that, when questioned, they are as silent as books or keep sounding the same note, like a bell (Protagoras 329a).
The Phdr. expands on this critique (Phdr. 275d4). Written words seem to be alive and to speak from understanding, yet when questioned, only repeat the same thing. This dialogue contains Plato’s only extended discussion of writing (274b–8b); in it he has Socrates put some of writing’s disadvantages in the mouth of Thamus, an ancient King of Upper Egypt: it induces forgetfulness; it gives the reader both the impression he has knowledge, and the boorishness that comes with that impression. Socrates not only accepts these strictures, he adds that it is folly to believe that written instructions for an art – rhetoric, say – can actually teach, and not merely remind those who already know what they say. One who actually knows what is just, fine and good, however, will instruct a pupil personally; he will take this kind of instruction seriously; he will view writing as an amusement, storing up reminders for his old age and for his successors. Like writing, lecturing does not permit genuine, productive instruction (didachê). Further, a written discourse reaches those who do not understand it and so have no business with it, and when it is attacked it cannot defend itself without the aid of its father, who wrote it.
The helplessness of written discourse is prominent in the main body of the dialogue, when Phaedrus reads aloud to Socrates a speech he admires written by Lysias, a logographos. Socrates conjectures that Phaedrus has secured the speech in a book roll, so that he could practise his own version of it; but instead he is pushed by Socrates to read the original – whereupon Socrates gives his own, better speech on the same subject, and adds both a ‘palinode’ in which the opposite point of view is maintained, and a critique of Lysias’ speech (264b). Clearly, in the absence of its father Socrates is free to handle the speech roughly, although Lysias would perhaps not have been able to aid it, even had he been present. The same may hold of Protagoras’ book Truth, which in the Theaetetus finds various defenders, including even an imagined Protagoras redivivus, who briefly pops his head out of the earth, only to dash off again (Tht. 171d) – while in fact no one comes successfully to its aid.
Written discourses are subjected to interpretation and criticism in other Platonic dialogues too. Protagoras (Prt. 339a) cites an ode of Simonides in order to point out a contradiction in it: Socrates defends it, but by a probably specious interpretation of its language. In the Phaedo Socrates recounts (Phd. 97c–d) how, impressed by a reading from a book of Anaxagoras, he bought it, but was disappointed when he learned that Anaxagoras did not actually explain how ‘mind’ made everything for the best.
In addition to its portrayal of the unsuccessful defence of Protagoras’ book, the Tht. is the only dialogue to call attention to the process of recording a dialectical conversation in writing. Euclides has called on his memory of what Socrates told him and also asked Socrates himself to fill in the gaps in his memory, in order to write down a conversation Socrates had had with the young Theaetetus. Decades later, when Terpsion wants to hear the conversation, Euclides has his slave read it aloud (Tht. 143b–c). The book is therefore read in the presence of its author; but far from being its ‘father’, or even a participant in the original conversation, Euclides was merely an amanuensis and, beyond his introductory statement, he does not intervene in its telling in any way. The real authorship of the dialogue belongs to others. This reading of the conversation from a book roll, then, is like Antiphon’s telling of what he heard from Pythodorus about the conversation between Socrates, Aristotle, Zeno and Parmenides (Parmenides 126a–7a) or Apollodorus’ narrative of the symposium at Agathon’s house, which he heard from Aristodemus, who was there, and checked with Socrates (Symposium 172a–3e). The Phd., in contrast, is a first-person recollection of Socrates’ last hours by Phaedo, who also intervenes at a crucial moment, when his listener, Echecrates, has interrupted his narrative, dismayed like the participants themselves at the fate of some of Socrates’ arguments (Phd. 88c–9a). Phaedo’s intervention, like Socrates’ intervention at this point in the conversation, respects the audience’s reactions, as recommended for didactic conversation in the Phdr.
Zeno’s book, read at the beginning of the conversation reported in the Prm., is the only book defended in a Platonic dialogue by its author: when Socrates begins to question Zeno about his motive for writing it, he explains he intended to support Parmenides’ famous argument (Prm. 128c6), but that it was written out of youthful ambition and stolen by someone else before he could decide whether or not to publish it – perhaps an indication that he is disowning his work; and in fact later it is Parmenides who comes to the aid of his own thesis. In a model of the superiority of personal instruction over writing, he carefully takes Socrates through his challenges to the theory of forms, and then, by questioning the youngest person present, through a very challenging set of eight deductions, a process he qualifies as ‘training’ (135d7).
In the pseudo-Platonic Ep. 7 there is a critique, partially overlapping that in Phdr., of any attempt to write about the subjects that occupy Plato. The author argues (Ep. 341b–5c) that writing can be of little use about these serious matters, viz. the highest and first things of nature, which can only be grasped after a lengthy practise of the philosophical life and once their names, definitions and qualities have been tested between teacher and apt pupil in question and answer.